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Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is essential to optimise your website for better search engine rankings. Making mistakes or treating it as a one-time task can quickly throw your website out of the search results. Here are ten mistakes that you should avoid if you are struggling to appear on the first page of Google.
Avoiding Off-Site SEO
Many businesses still live by the rule of only doing on-site SEO and expecting the best results. While frequently optimising your website for best rankings is right, you cannot overlook the importance of off-site SEO and the benefits it has to offer.
Off-site SEO strategies are one of the major components to rank your website on search engines. This includes doing activities such as building quality links to your website, offering content to other websites that point back to your sites and pages.
Not Managing ‘Google My Business’ Listing
You might have noticed how Google is increasingly focusing on “near me” searches, which is a major opportunity for businesses of any size to get more customers. Hence, it’s crucial to claim or manage your Google My Business listing on a regular basis. Provide as much information as you can and answer frequently asked questions that customers might have.
Ignoring Page Titles
Even though it is a common SEO practice to add Title titles and description on pages and articles, people still miss out on many pages which generally have more visitors than the other ones. For example, keeping “Home” as the title of their homepage and not adding any descriptions.
Although simple, these mistakes might be costing your website significant ranking loss. This is especially common for businesses who recently started working on their online stores or websites. Don’t overlook page titles and meta descriptions; ensure that you have added these to each page of your website.
Old URL on New Design
Another common mistake that can impact your website’s SEO performance is leaving the old URLs when building a new design. If you leave these URLs as it is, Google won’t know where to redirect the traffic, which can significantly impact your website’s traffic. Ensure that you are updating the URLs whenever you revamp your website.
Irregular Website Audits
Website audits are necessary to understand your website’s performance from a search engine and the client’s point of view. They can provide crucial information such as user-friendliness of your site’s navigation, ease of access, and loading time on mobile and desktop searches.
When you are not running regular website audits, it is easy to miss crucial information to improve your website. Therefore, ensure that you include audits as a standard practice in your SEO strategies in 2021.
Text on Images
Although it might look attractive to have an image with important text, the search engines cannot read what’s written on them. Therefore, you must include the necessary information within the content as well. Since search engines look for text using their algorithms, you might miss out on indexing opportunities if you only include them on the images.
Old Content
Most businesses either do not have a website, or they tend not to update the content in their blogs. For first time visitors, old content can be off-putting and might drive them away instead of getting them interested.
Always update the content on a regular basis, or ensure that it is up to date with recent queries and relevant search terms of your website visitors. Include keywords that are relevant to your products and services in the content. Fresh quality content ensures more conversions for your business.
Purchasing Backlinks
Often, brands and companies purchase backlinks for their website, in the pursuit to outrank their competitors, and it’s more common than you would expect. It’s crucial to understand that buying backlinks can negatively affect your website since most of these links are from flagged sites that Google does not value.
Each backlink should be earned genuinely from a high authority website that gets a decent amount of regular traffic every month. Avoid the practice of buying links if you want to rank higher on search engines. Your ranks might jump in the beginning, but they’ll drop soon after.
Not Following Trends
SEO is a world of ever-changing trends, which requires professionals and businesses themselves up to date at all times. If you always stick with the same SEO tactics and expect different results, your business will start falling behind on rankings.
Follow the latest trends and understand how you can benefit from any recent changes and updates on search engines, so users can find your website using any digital channel.
Building Content for Algorithms
Another common but major mistake businesses often make by building website content to cope with each search engine algorithm. Following such practices will only lead to ending up in a never-ending process of trying to impress search engines.
Instead, build content with a long-term strategy that will help you stay ahead of the curve even when search engines introduce new changes.
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