With the advent of online marketing took a completely new turn. It won’t be wrong to say that businesses which are investing in online marketing faster became more successful than businesses that didn’t. Everything that used to be on papers, newspapers, billboards, flexes, etc. has now shifted to the internet. You now have online banner ads that act like billboards. You have affiliate programs that work like referrals and websites are much better than newspaper ads.
If you want to make your business an international entity you could not rely on throwing pamphlets in people’s homes or handing handbills over. You need to invest in various digital marketing programs for that purpose. In most cases, you don’t even have to spend any money to market your business, product or service. Most of the time is spent on improving your image and reputation. In all of this, SEO serves as the blood and fuel of all online marketing because search engines results are the places where the money lies. SEO has evolved greatly in last 6-7 years and Google must be given credit for that.
Google has been updating its algorithms with some strict rules and keeping SEO professionals on their toes. Panda, Hummingbird, and Penguin are all the different names given to updates done in the search algorithms by Google. This made SEO serious business and while doing it properly could bring you to the top search engine results, any clumsy actions could have you catapulted out of the search engine results.
If you are an aspiring search engine optimization professional, a company looking for a sound SEO strategy or a business currently deploying SEO strategies in its only marketing, here are the 5 deadly mistakes to avoid.
Ignoring the Mobile Users:
We already knew that mobile searches on Google have surpassed the desktop searches. If you are still ignoring the mobile users while creating an SEO strategy for your business, then believe me you are going to lose a bunch of sales. Generally, people consider page speed optimization is the only factor to target the mobile users, but this is not the end of the world. If you have a separate mobile website, then you need to take care of following points while targeting the mobile users:
- Present short and catchy web pages content to the mobile users
- Plan separate header and Meta tags (Not keywords focused) to target the mobile users
- Use short contact forms on the mobile website.
- Avoid ads in the content
Not Mastering the Keywords
Knowing your business-related keywords is one thing and mastering them is another. Being a master in keyword research, you should have understanding, which keywords will help to get sales and which keywords will work for brand awareness. You can’t mix both of them, so make a separate list of sales related keywords and brand awareness keywords. Use tools like Keywords planner, Semrush, Google Trends, Google etc to find out the best keywords for your business. Master the keywords or simply hire the masters of keywords for the job.
Focusing on Links Quantity
There was a time when the quantity of building links was more important than the quality. If we talk about the present day, Google has cracked down severely on low quality and spammy links and other links which were trying to manipulate Google’s ranking in many ways. So what can we do? Well, the key to link-building success is to generate natural quality links. Focus on earning the links by sharing the good quality and engaging content. Guest blogging, infographics, explainer videos, and broken link building methods etc. are easy and best ways of earning the natural backlinks.
Not Structuring Website Properly
Has it happened to you at any point in time that you watched a great movie with great acting, dialogues and material but you thought that it could have been made better or some scenes were unnecessary? This is the same with your website. How your website is structured is extremely important for your SEO strategies. The structure of your website should be extremely smooth and spiders from search engines should be able to move from one page to another and the pages deep in the layers of your website easily. But the question is, how can you make your website structure user-friendly? Here are the few easy and effective ways:
- Make your website URL structure neat and clean
- Use of breadcrumbs
- Do internal linking in the content
- Use HTML and XML sitemaps
- Use the structure data markups on your website
Not Going Social
If you are still a businessman who thinks, social networking websites aren’t meant for your business then you need a big renovation of your thoughts. Social media is either a friend or enemy of businesses today. It has the power to take your business to new heights and make it an international entity within months or bring you down on the ground within a week. Share your stuff online. Be creative with your content. Share your business-related content, not as business content but stuff that would make the masses smile and talk about your content.
Source: Entrepreneur