Ranking high on Google and appearing on its first page is not as easy as it once was.
While SEO surely helps with gaining organic traction to your website, building trust and credibility, best practices are constantly being updated. So, if your team of creative marketing writers are not staying updated with the latest trends and are still making these SEO mistakes that are committed by many bloggers and businesses, it may probably take more than 6-9 months for you to notice any growth.
We are not saying that it is impossible to rank highly on Google, but what we will be sharing with you are SEO mistakes you must avoid at all times.
1. Irrelevant Keywords
As good as it sounds to build a portfolio with a high quantity of quality keywords, remember that you are not a search engine. Focus on the core foundation and objective of your business and produce creative contents from quality keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Don’t get pulled by growing trends with massive volumes if it is not going to help convert your readers, the prospects, into potential customers or subscribers.
Keep in mind that if people are engaging with your content, they have a specific query that you should be specialising in. While you would love to have a large volume of visitors, it is worth more to have them continuously re-engaging with you over time, and that starts with you avoiding irrelevant keywords that are not within your expertise.
2. Beware of Dates in Your URL
Look up at your URL address and ask yourself that if you see a URL address with a date that isn’t recent, would you even consider clicking on it? If your answer is no, it is probably the same reason that potential prospects may not be clicking on yours too, if you had placed dates in your URL.
SEO expert, Neil Patel, said that once you place a date to your URL, prepare to notice a sharp decline in organic traffic. It is not that old content is bad, because even old content may be still relevant to many and has proven results of increase over the years. The thing is that nobody wants to read “old content” if you told them it is old. Everybody wants “new”, and for as long as there isn’t a date placed in your URL, chances are that your “old content” would be seen as relevant today.
3. Forgetting SEO Auditing
You may be an amazing writer with a valuable skill of knowing exactly how you want your readers to feel when they read your content, but if you have not conducted an SEO audit, how would you identify reasons for not getting better results?
Ask yourself when was the last time an SEO audit was conducted and get on it. Even SEO guru, Nathan Gotch, says that better decisions can be made once you have the right intel on what is holding your SEO performance back, allowing you to zoom in on what brings maximum impact.
4. Undefined Site Structure
When you visit a website, the experience you expect to have should be nothing short of easy. If you have not mapped out a strong site structure, your visitors may not have a good user experience, and that could affect how you would rank on Google.
By working out a strong site structure, not only would it help Google to index your page quicker, but it would also establish a level of authority for you. Why would you want a high level of web authority? Well let me put it to you this way; the higher you rank, you do not need as many backlinks - which we all know can be quite challenging to get.
Conclusion
SEO is going to continue progressing, and we mean that by the time you read this, there may already be newer updates. However, having said that, these are great tips to get you started on your assessment of SEO mistakes to avoid doing with your business for the coming 2021.
While we continue to discover and simplify more SEO mistakes to avoid for 2021, check out other useful tips and guides on our blog panel.
