1. Faster is better
The first common SEO mistake is site speed. The faster your site, the more Google likes it. Google has page experience ranking factor rolling out, so speed is important. There’s a very useful tool from Google itself to check your site speed: Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool gives you an overview of what aspects you can improve on to boost the speed of a particular page.
A quick win and a recommendation we frequently give is to optimize your images. Resizing your images or saving with a bit less resolution can speed up the loading time.
2. The wrong keywords
Torank in Google you must be sure you are using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes we frequently encounter is that site owners optimize their pages for generic keywords. If you are a relatively small business that wants to rank for ‘lawyer’, you’re aiming too high. Try to imagine what will be entered into a search engine - it is usually more than one word. A search phrase are long tail keywords. You could, for example, add the area in which your company is located to the keyword.
The longer and more specific the keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for this keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword is lower. But you can overcome this by optimizing many pages with different long tail keywords. Your site will gain traffic for all of these keywords combined.
3. Not inviting people to click
Metadata is what appears on search engine result pages (SERPs) when a website is displayed. The result 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 optimized for every page. We also suggest adding your keyword to the title if that’s possible, but be sure your title isn’t too long and get 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 some insight into how likely potential visitors are to click on your site in the SERPs. If you optimize your meta descriptions with a clear and attractive message on what people can find on your site, it becomes easier for them to see if the information they’re looking for is on that page.
4. Poor Content
We regularly write about writing stellar content on this blog, but we still see a lot of people struggling with content. Google needs enough text to find out what your page is about and whether you can provide the answer people are looking for. You can’t expect Google doesn't know if you are an expert on a certain topic if you have only two sentences on a page.
But, the search engine is not your audience. You need to write for your visitors and not just for Google. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and provide the best answers possible. Writing quality content is the way to go. Writing quality content means writing original content that shows your expertise. And not just stuff keywords into your text. Your text has to be easy to read for people.
5. Failing to Engage People
Once visitors land on your site, the next goal is to keep them on your site. You don’t want your visitors immediately bouncing back to Google once they have read something on your page. This is why you need to encourage visitors to click through your site. The best way to do this is to create a call-to-action (CTA), which usually is a button that offers an action to your visitor.
Another way to keep people on your website is by adding relevant internal links to other pages on your website. This is actually also an important part of SEO and should be part of your marketing efforts. By adding internal links, your site visitors and Google will know what pages are related to each other and can be interesting when they’re looking for information on a certain topic. So make sure to spend time on your internal linking to create a great site structure that keeps people on your website!
