5 common SEO mistakes – If, after all your efforts, you’re just not ranking for your focus keywords… you may be making one of the common mistakes people make when undertaking the complicated task of SEO. Let’s take a look at some common SEO mistakes and how you can fix them.
Forgetting about site speed
When undertaking SEO, many of us are so focussed on keywords and how they rank, that we completely forget about other important aspects such as site loading speed. Google now has a page experience ranking factor and, you guessed it… site speed is a factor!
Google recommends that a page should load in under 2 seconds. Any longer and you risk losing customers to competitors’ websites.
A quick way to improve your site speed is to optimise your images. A lot of websites have high-resolution, large images that can drastically slow down loading times. Resizing your images can declutter your site, and make the loading time a lot quicker!
Another quick tip (if you’re using WordPress) is to look at what plugins are activated. Are you using all of them? Perhaps it might be time for a spring clean or look at alternative plugins that can do the job of more than one to keep the clutter down to a minimum.
Not optimising the meta description
Metadata is what appears on search engine result pages (SERPs) when a website comes up for certain search terms. It includes the title of your page and its meta description. The page title is still an important ranking factor for Google, so you have to make sure it’s optimised for every page.
Our tip is to add your keyword to the title where possible and make sure your page title isn’t too long or else it will be cut off.
The meta description is not a ranking factor, but it does play an important part in your click-through rate (CTR). CTR gives insight into how likely potential visitors are to click on your site in the SERPs. If you optimise your meta descriptions with a clear and attractive message, it becomes easier for them to see if the information they are looking for is on your page.
Trying to rank for the wrong keywords
If you want to climb the Google ranks, you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest SEO mistakes is site owners optimising their pages for generic keywords. If you are a small business that wants to rank for ‘rental car’ for example, you’re aiming too high. Try to start somewhere more specific, perhaps location-based – so you’re not competing with every single car rental company out there!
The longer and more specific your keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking. Of course, this also means the search volume is lower (fewer people searching) but you can make up for this by optimising a lot of pages on your site for different keywords. This means your site will gain traffic for all keywords combined, which is a lot more than you’ll get for just focusing your entire site on one keyword or phrase.
Not writing engaging content
Another common SEO mistake that’s easy to fix is having great content on every page of your site. The copy needs to be engaging, full of keywords and at least 300 words long. This is because Google needs enough copy to crawl to find out what your page is about, and whether you can provide the answer people are looking for. Think about it, you can’t expect Google to see you as an expert on a topic when you’ve only written a sentence about it!
With this in mind, it’s important to remember that you’re not writing content, especially for Google. You need to write with your visitors in mind, with quality, informative content that’s easy to read.
The most common SEO mistake… not thinking ahead
With technology advancing faster every day, it’s so important to keep up to date. If you haven’t already got a mobile-friendly website… why not?! Over half of all web searches come from a mobile device, and if your site doesn’t work or looks awful, you’re going to lose customers quickly.
In 2018, Google switched to mobile-first indexing. This means that Google now looks at the mobile version of your site to see how high you should rank. If the desktop version of your site works brilliantly, but the mobile version isn’t so great… This will negatively affect your SEO score.
A great way to test if your site is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. This gives you an indication of how easily visitors can use your page on mobile devices. Alongside this, the best advice we can give is to actually check your site on your own mobile. Go through each page, click every button and make notes on what needs improvements.
Do you need help fixing your SEO mistakes?
If you could use a helping hand fixing your SEO mistakes, then please get in touch with our team here at Electron!
SEO can be a complicated beast to get right. We simplify our offering to cover all aspects that see your site ranking in search engines. Depending on your current situation we tailor the correct offering needed for results in your niche. Learn more about what we can do for you by clicking here.
Please give us a call on 07496 or email us at ash@electrondigital.co.uk
