One of the most disheartening things for a content marketer is when they put days or even weeks of their hard work and time into preparing content but yet it doesn’t rank in the search engine. Believe me, this has happened to me too and it is not a very good feeling, to say the least. We always create content so that it reaches our target audiences for those who are looking for it. But it is the common SEO mistakes that we regularly make is what that is letting our days/weeks of hard work of creating content go in vain.
Sometimes even the simplest SEO mistake could prove to be costly for your digital marketing strategy. It even makes the whole marketing plan surrounding your content go to total waste. So today we will be discussing some of the top SEO mistakes that you need to avoid in order to keep your digital marketing strategy intact.
Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2022
01. Using Un-optimized or Wrong Keyword
One of the very common SEO mistakes is selecting or using the wrong keywords within the content. In many cases, the content isn’t used in agreement with the selected keywords. As the search engine ranking is done based on whether the keywords are being used in the content enough times in relation to the selected keywords. Therefore there is every chance that your content will receive poor ranking in terms of search engine.
So the early you introduce the keyword phrase in the content, the better chance it will have to rank higher. As long as you can introduce it organically, it is generally a good idea to use it in the first paragraph of your content.
And this slight modification could encourage the search engine bots to rank your content in the top rank. But make sure not to forcefully overuse your keyword either as it is known as keyword stuffing which is also really bad for your content’s SEO.
02. Content Being Mobile Unfriendly
The recent statement by Google back in 2018 suggest that by default they will be using Mobile-First Indexing. So therefore it has become certain that web content that is not mobile-friendly will find it a hard time to get a higher rank in search engines. And you can test whether your site is at least mobile-friendly or not by using Google’s mobile-friendly test.
With more mobile users surfing the internet every day, Google is now bound to prefer websites that load faster and are mobile optimized compare to those that aren’t.
So it is highly essential that websites are optimized and are made mobile friendly. Not just for mobile, Google will rank your competitor’s content higher than you if you do not focus on speed optimization of your website too.
03. Writing Very Ordinary Content
It is obvious that people that are searching online are all looking for informative and quality content that matches their queries. But still, we come across websites that write very poorly written content for the readers. Irrelevant content with ordinary writings standard does no benefits to your search engine. Therefore, it is highly essential that you make sure your websites always have standard content for the site visitors.
Content with organized wordings & sentences, with no grammatical errors and at least 300 words is known as quality content. short, indescriptive, low readability or irrelevant content lets Google believe that you do not have sufficient knowledge about that particular topic.
As Google always has the best interest in serving its users so therefore if your content is below standard or irrelevant one then this would indicate to them that your content might not be the best-searched result to match the searcher’s query.
04. Publishing Plagiarized or Non-original Content
This SEO mistake also falls in the category of the quality of the content. Usage of duplicate content has been widely used all the time. But nowadays it is heavily penalized in the form of degrading your site’s SEO ranks. It is now considered spam to have copied or plagiarized content on any website. And now Google checks this matter quite seriously while determining your content’s ranking in search engines.
So always try to create original content putting your own ideas explaining it in your own words. If you are accepting guest content make sure to check it via an online plagiarism checker for its originality. Otherwise, you might just get castigated by Google without your notice.
Put efforts into generating plagiarism-free original content maintaining a good standard of English rather than copy-pasting from here and there altering the words. This would ensure that your website gets a below-par ranking in different search engines.
05. Not Focusing on Long-Tail Keywords
Most content writers focus on short & precise keywords while writing any content. They feel long-tail keywords would bring in less traffic. But in reality, using long-tail keywords can be a great idea to improve your site’s SEO value. As it often has less difficulty level and so it becomes easier to rank in the search engines.
Even though these type of keywords has a lower search volume yet they are very specific to your business. Therefore it has a much better conversion chance as it caters to a particular set of your customers.
More importantly, long keyword phrases are precise enough to draw your target customers. Moreover, it even lays a positive impact on your overall conversion rate.
06. Targeting High Traffic Keywords Only
In the most common scenario, the very first thing that an expert writer does is research for a relevant keyword. And the mistake that they do while doing so is that they only go for high volume keywords as they feel this would bring more traffic to their site. It might help in optimizing the content in the search engines if you have a powerful domain authorized website but not the best way to rank if you have a relatively new website.
As keywords with higher volume are extremely competitive hence it is probably going to be next to impossible to rank with them. But luckily your competitors are almost certain to miss on the less popular keywords. So you can always find those low competition keywords and use them.
In this case, you can use one of the better-known keyword research tools like SEMrush. which will tell you exactly how competitive a particular keyword is along with suggesting high to low traffic keywords. You need to analyze them closely and choose a keyword something in between popular and not too popular.
07. Skipping Meta Description & Title/Image Tags
One might think that simply adding a target keyword successfully is the only step to optimize their content. But elements of SEO’s like meta description and title tags in content should not be neglected. Being careless to add title tags and meta description means missing a huge potential for your content. The search engine considers these factors while ranking your website. And so when it is done carefully, there is every chance to improve the performance of your content.
Many marketers tend to forget to use these factors to let the search engine know what their website is all about. You might think creating content is sufficient but without addressing the meta description and title/image tag the search engine will be unable to understand your content’s context.
Just like title tags, image tags are also forgotten by many content writers or marketers. It is as essential if not more as it shows how you are targeting your articles while searching for pictures related to your content title.
08. Using Too Short or Not Using Headings Properly
Heading should always convey a full message of what the paragraph or content is about. Writing confusing short heading is difficult for search engine bots to determine what the content is about. So it should always be more than a few words but not too long yet long enough to convey its full thought.
Also just like the title tag mentioned above, the H1 heading tag is also very important for the Google crawler to interpret what the content is about. A common mistake that a content writer makes is using more than one H1 heading tag in the same content. This sometimes gets the search engine bot confused about the real heading of the content.
Not just H1 heading tags or using short confusing headings, using too few headings in the content also could lead your content to rank lower. As an SEO expert, you would want to grab all probable searchers available online. Therefore you are required to target various searched topics creating distinct headings. This, along with optimizing the SEO of your content would also enable your potential customer to have a better idea of what they are reading about.
09. Poor Use of External & Internal Links
In order to make the best from SEO, it is really essential to include quality external links in the content. More than the number of external links, it is the quality of it that matters the most. This is why don’t add external links from any site just for the sake of adding it. Always make sure your external links are from a relevant, high-ranked website with a higher Domain Authority (DA). More so, it is always useful to have backlinks from sites that have linked to yours. In the future, this may bring back a notable amount of traffic as well.
As for having your own internal links, you should have a note of the content that is relevant and lead to similar posts within your published content. As an addition, this will verify as valuable providing clarity. Moreover, you should not include any internal links that are not comparable in relation to the subject of the posts.
Another critical thing to keep in mind is that, just like keywords, stuffing up excessive links in a single content could lead to hampering the rank of your site. So it is always advisable to go after quality links rather than forcefully adding too many of them.
10. Not Utilizing The Right SEO & Analytical Tool
You can only know whether your content marketing practice and SEO optimization going in the right direction or not by tracking their progress. For the right kind of tracking, you need to utilize the right tool as well. Many marketers would simply want to overlook the importance of using a solid SEO and Analytical tool.
You can use SEO or keyword optimization tools like SEMrush and Google keyword tools. This will give you a clear idea about the queries that your target audiences are making into online search engines. This will enable you to create content based on that enabling you to reach more of your potential clients.
Moreover, it is absolutely crucial from a site optimization point of view to set up a regular analytics review session. This can be performed successfully using popular Google suites like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This will effortlessly allow getting an overview by letting you measure the overall performance of your website. Not just that, you will also be able to notice how all your optimization is performing for different types of content. Based on that, you can compare and adjust the digital & content marketing strategies that you are applying.
So that’s it. These were the biggest SEO mistakes that many of us commonly make. And we would require to avoid them if we want to achieve a good rank in our search engines.
Rectify SEO Mistakes to Rank Your Content Better
So if you are still making these SEO mistakes, then it high time you correct them before it gets out of your hand and costs you in your digital marketing budget. In order to achieve your marketing goals, there is no alternative to the right application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. And if you keep on making these common SEO blunders then the work gets even harder. But thankfully now you know what needs to be done to avoid these SEO blunders.
There are hundreds of SEO tips and tricks that Google searches generate for users. But often those techniques are difficult to implement. So therefore you need to identify what method of SEO you need to carry on. And apply your digital marketing strategy to get positive results always.
In many cases, one can easily find out how effective their SEO optimization was by tracking them. In this case, as mentioned earlier, there are tools like Google Analytics and Google webmaster. These tools enable the users to fix their common SEO mistakes letting them understand its performance analysis. Moreover, this helps determines which strategies of content/digital marketing are proving to be most beneficial for them.
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