SEO has gotten a bad rap among business owners and marketers alike. It shouldn’t be that way! Often times, what is difficult, takes some time to see results and has a degree of technicality associated with it, is discarded in favor of faster or easier opportunities for results. I get it! You need leads now. While this sentiment must be appreciated by the marketer and business owner, don’t forget that there is a long game to sales as well. If people can’t find you online, or your digital presence doesn’t reflect your business guarantee, you will lose out on customers and revenue. Here is part 2 of our discussion on mistakes business owners make when running SEO campaigns.
- Mistake 1 – Tags, Tags, Tags!
According to SEMrush a leader in SEO and SEM research, tagging is one of the biggest areas that websites can lose out on organic traffic. Here is a short compiled list of the most common errors SEMrush has found that business owners can make:
Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
Two or more pages with the same titles and descriptions make it difficult for search engines to properly determine relevance and, in turn, rankings.
Missing H1 tags
H1 tags help search engines determine the topic of your content. If they are missing, there will be gaps in Google’s understanding of your website.
Missing meta descriptions
Well-written meta descriptions help Google understand relevance and encourage users to click on your result. If they are missing, click-through rates can fall.
Missing ALT attributes
ALT attributes provide search engines and visually impaired people with descriptions of the images in your content. Without them, relevance is lost and engagement can suffer.
Duplicate H1 tags and title tags
When H1 tags and title tags are the same on any given page, it can look over-optimized and it can mean opportunities to rank for other relevant keywords have been missed.
- Mistake 2 – Improperly Setup or Missing Site Map
This is a huge part of developing your website and is often overlooked or not updated when you build out new pages or offerings on your website. Without a proper site map the Google crawler that is looking for key information, heading and title tags for your pages will not be able to read your site and gauge whether it’s worthwhile to show your content in search. This is huge! If your site map is not structured properly you could be missing out on that added traffic or someone seeing your blog article when they search for a relevant topic. I recommend having an expert review your site map and make changes. You’ll want to continue to revisit the site map every so often as you update your site as well.
- Mistake 3 – Not Addressing Site Speed and Optimization Issues
This is huge! Many times, business owners don’t know that their site is slow or don’t know how to speed it up. Many factors contribute to slow site speed including, image size, poorly designed pages, security issues, poor readability and navigation. Many improvements to improve your SEO can be done quickly and will have major impact on your scores. Making sure your site security is compatible with newer updates and compressing scripts and images on your site will reap you huge gains in your SEO. It’s important to think about the overall readability of your site and layout your content so that the flow and journey tells your user what they need to know almost instantly. While many parts of SEO are highly technical, improving your website is one of the best ways to impact your scores in the immediacy.
If you’re ready for help with SEO or a website refresh, reach out to me at john@bluecomet.media. I look forward to helping you reach your target customers more effectively in the digital space!
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