Despite the masses of folklore and legend surrounding the subject, there’s no real magic to Organic SEO. I often hesitate to mention the work “Rankings” in my posts, or with clients for that matter because rankings are the result of leveraging a great user experience, content and the correct keyword strategy and are not the main focal metric of success, traffic and conversions are the targets. It may take time, hard work and something special to get to the top of the tree in a hyper-competitive niche, but in most cases, you can deliver excellent results by getting the basics right – and this means avoiding these common mistakes.
Quick Links
Poor Internal Linking
Your internal linking strategy serves two purposes. First, it needs to provide a clear structure for the user so that they can find what they’re looking for. Second, it needs to guide search engine spiders through your entire site without barriers or minefields, while also giving prominence to your most important pages.
Getting this balance wrong is one of the most common SEO problems. Don’t sacrifice usability in the name of deep indexing or cause problems for spiders with good-looking but hard-to-crawl navigation.
Low-Quality Content
There’s no doubt that content is necessary to rank as discussed in one of my previous posts titled “Content Marketing What You Give Is What You Get” I went into depth about the keystone importance of content marketing to SEO and how no amount of Great SEO can magically drive as much evergreen traffic as blogging or content marketing. The problem comes when it’s assumed that large amounts of so-so content are better than a few outstanding pieces. Better content acquires natural links, pleases visitors, and establishes quality signals for the search engines. Low-quality content dilutes your site theme, alienates visitors, and makes it hard for search engines to distinguish your site from thousands of others.
Wrong Metrics & Goals
Picking the right Organic SEO company and following the right metrics is essential if not critical to the success of any SEO campaign and its longevity here are the 12 most important SEO metrics to monitor.
It is important to understand there are so many metrics to follow and each campaign is unique and the biggest professional tip I can give you is if you hear “Rankings” or “Page one Rankings” as part of the initial discovery with your SEO provider…Run!
You must be informed and understand these metrics because the biggest failure a great SEO provider can do is misalign and over promise a client or having a client abandon SEO before it matures simply because they are just too busy to understand or simply don’t care and just looking at the bottom line, dollar in dollar out. When SEO is done right, it will be evergreen, the investment of proper On page optimization, keyword strategy, content, and the user experience is something that will last forever so always budget for a campaign for 6 months to a year to start seeing a return on investment. I’ll be blunt if you are expecting to see a significant rise in sales or conversions under that time frame, save your money or invest in pay per click there are no quick fixes or quick short gains in SEO anymore point.
Why? because there is soo much misinformation out there people often believe SEO is about doing some small segment of optimization such as keyword optimization for rankings and ignore such critical components to online success such as the user experience and technical On page SEO. Could a car run on 3 wheels? SEO takes time and a multi-front strategy, never forget that Organic SEO isn’t ultimately about rankings, it’s all about traffic, conversions, and profit. Clinching the top spot on your favorite term is good for the ego, but not necessarily for business. Measure what matters at every stage.
Poor Keyword Research
It’s not always the most obvious keywords in an industry which are the best ones to optimize for and you never know about the unicorns of keywords that may be or that attracting traffic to your site. The trophy phrases can be far more competitive than their potential rewards deserve, while many less popular keywords convert beautifully. Choosing keywords with the right balance of effort and reward is key to successful SEO.
Ignoring Local SEO
It may be the World Wide Web, but ignoring local SEO is to leave money on the table. Even online, many people have a loyalty to local businesses, regardless of whether you have a physical presence in the area. A local presence is a great foundation to national exposure and a trust-building factor for potential business. Also, optimizing for local search opens up new opportunities such as local listings, map entries, and customer reviews, which will also boost your exposure nationally. Every business should invest in some type of local SEO or should be part of their online marketing strategy. Try to Use These SEO Techniques To Dominate Local Search.
Unchecked Site Sprawl
Over time, any successful website will grow in both size and features if it isn’t already a monster already don’t ignore the importance of this crucial part of SEO, being organized is key. However, it’s easy to let this lead to a sprawling, disorganized mess and in most cases, the initial stages of SEO are all about cleaning house.
Make a habit of carrying out regular audits to check for broken links, duplicate content, unoptimized pages, and anything else that could be dragging your SEO efforts down. SEO audits should be done bi-monthly and are part of the ongoing routine of professional Organic SEO providers if you are wondering what they are doing with their time on your project this is a big one.
Not Building Links
Awesome content may attract natural links, but this alone isn’t likely to provide enough juice to rank in competitive sectors. No matter what the Google gods may try to tell you, actively building links is an iron-clad essential and the rules to the game have changed in the past few years.
Link building can extremely time consuming and requires manual outreach in most cases, just because you put great content out there doesn’t mean someone will link to it. And contrary to what you may think quality links trump quantity for now and for the future of search engine optimization. This is an extremely important question to ask your SEO provider on how they are building their links, any purchased links are black hat SEO and will lead to a manual penalty and get your site deindexed from search results. Tread lightly, backlinks are not easy to acquire and take time.
Not Linking Out
In some ways, outbound links are just as important as inbound ones – after all, they’re just two sides of the same coin. Linking out to high-quality sites is a natural activity that search algorithms reward especially when it comes to relevancy. Unfortunately, too many SEO’s are afraid to do so out of misguided fears of leaking ranking juice, or of giving their competitors a boost.
Tactics Over Strategy
Lastly, there always seems to be some new craze sweeping the SEO world, although it’s often an older technique given a new spin and an impressive name. Flipping from fashionable tactic to fashionable tactic won’t often lead to success. And if you’re not careful, you can even harm your rank by chasing risky methods. For long-term results, you need to develop a consistent strategy and stay focused. SEO is a marathon, not a race.
Outside of the hyper-competitive areas, successful SEO is as much about avoiding mistakes as it is working any obscure magic. Get the basics in place and pay attention to detail, and the traffic and profit will follow.
The Wrap Up And Final Thoughts
Every business can benefit from SEO from small businesses to large. The more you know as a client or service provider can clear the smoke and help identify the right strategy for every type of niche and business. The foundation of online success is avoiding the mistakes that others make and constantly seek to improve your online presence and above all the quality and experience of your website to site visitors. By understanding the basics SEO errors that will tank your ranks you will ready for battle and always win.
My approach to search engine optimization is called Organic SEO and most people call me the “Authority Detective.”
What I do is investigate your entire visitor and search engine experience and find opportunities for quick wins with a verifiable return on investment.
My process is to investigate your competition and your website and site visitor’s experience, identify friction points within site structure that is hindering conversions and deeper indexing of your content. The strategy is executed on-page optimization and content marketing strategies that create a solid foundation for organic traffic and content marketing and increased social metrics.
My experience started 25 years ago with corporate marketing, in-depth psychological consumer-based market research, branding, and product design; working with major companies such as Ford, Pepsi, RJ Reynolds, and Tommy Hilfiger. For the past 10 years, I have applied my background of consumer psychology and branding and WordPress design to online presence management and Organic SEO.
My SEO services are all in house, hand-done, zero outsourcing, zero paid links getting you the long-lasting results and ROI you need to establish your online presence, gain traffic organically, and brand your online presence or business.
Are you looking to solidify your brand name and promote your business? getting the more exposure and increase your rankings safely and organically, getting found is a process, not a project.
