The content marketing strategy of any business is heavily dependent on website optimization for search engines. Even with the marketing environment changing virtually every day, SEO retains its position as the prime tool for marketers to attract visitors to their online media and funnel them to a sales conversion situation. Because SEO techniques are constantly evolving with the development of search engine technology and the changing preferences of users, it can become quite a task to stay on top of effective SEO techniques. As a result, many businesses end up doing SEO the wrong way and hurting their marketing efforts. Some common SEO mistakes to watch out for:
Selection of Wrong Keywords
One of the most critical aspects of website rankings is keywords for which the website should aspire to have a high rank. While an enormous amount of research is done on the identification of the most pertinent keywords, most often the preference of search engines for long tail keywords that users commonly use is overlooked. While undoubtedly it is important for the business to define its products and services in a particular way, it is more important to understand what words your potential customers could use to define them. Often, it may happen that a particular description that may be accurate from the business’s point of view may mean something completely different to the user, or could be too general to mean anything. This sort of a situation could have you strategizing keywords that are completely irrelevant. To avoid this, it is vital that you undertake research with a number of tools like Google Trends, Google AdWords, Moz Keyword Explorer, etc.
Keyword Stuffing
SEO newcomers may be inclined to think that more the occurrence of the identified keywords in the content, the better the discoverability by search engines and better the ranking. In real life, nothing could be further from the truth as such overuse of keywords is interpreted negatively by search engines, and they actually impose penalties that drive your rankings down the page. Further, keyword stuffing, as the practice is known as, makes the content reading extremely artificial and ends up irritating the target audience who perceive it easily as an effort to manipulate them without adding to their knowledge base. Content managers involved in social media marketing in Mumbai report that the Latent Semantic Indexing, a semantic search technique employed by Google is able to recognize the subject of the content by itself and does not require keywords to be inserted a number of times.
Irrelevant Content That Has Nothing to Do With the Keywords
Many content managers are under the impression that Google looks out only for the target keywords and ignores the rest of the content in which it is embedded and as a result, include content that has nothing to do with the target keywords. However, the advanced algorithms of Google ensure that only content that is relevant to the user’s query is served up on the results page on a priority basis. This means that only content that is relevant is considered by Google for rankings. Since low-quality content serves no purpose and can hurt your rankings, it is necessary that only superior and original content that is relevant to your keywords are hosted.
Publishing Plagiarized Content
Since there is no point is serving to users content that is already present on some other site, Google’s algorithms are also very sensitive to non-original content and award penalties to sites that are found to be publishing duplicate content. To achieve consistently superior page rankings, it is a worthwhile investment to create content that is fresh, original, and relevant to the subject covered by the website.
Not Making the Site Mobile-Friendly
The end-result of SEO is to improve the quality of the user experience. In today’s world when a majority of internet searches are being conducted on mobile devices, it is vital that the website is optimized for the smaller screen. If this is not done, you will have a situation where all the mobile users would skip visiting your site because they are not able to easily read the site contents. In fact, Google’s Mobilegeddon update has enabled it to recognize sites that are mobile-friendly and promote them in the SERPs.
Conclusion
SEO is a vital part of content marketing strategy, and while you can find a lot of advice online on how to get optimum results, knowing the most common SEO mistakes will enable you to be on the alert and avoid them right from the very start.
Author bio: Gary Meyers is the chief of content strategy at GingerDomain.com, a leading name in online and social media marketing. Gary writes regularly on SEO trending issues and also writes a column on SEO advice for small businesses.
