7 Common SEO Mistakes in 2021 and How You Can Fix Them

Every day, the market for SEO services and opportunities increases.

SEO has evolved from a solid profession to a major sales source in recent years as customers get to find your business online.

SEO has been not only incorporated into content marketing practices but broader digital marketing strategies.

Search engines optimize their algorithms on a daily basis and customers’ behavior changes, so marketers must be on top of that to stay competitive in the market.

Staying up to date with many changes and optimization techniques can be a challenging task, but in this case “some is better than none” as “fixing” past incorrect techniques can be really time-consuming.

Below I’ve chosen 7 general SEO mistakes I’ve seen from clients and some fixing tips to help you.

1. Not Knowing Your Target Audience

For any marketing strategy, knowing your targeted audience is not only fundamental, it’s crucial for the success of your campaign.

Most people believe they know their audience, but they actually just don’t. One of the most common mistakes when selecting keywords is misunderstanding search engines’ and users’ intent for long-tail keywords.

This is not only important for SEO but also extremely valuable if you’re running PPC campaigns, for example.

TIPS:

• What are the major trends in your market?
• Create a detailed buyer persona.
• Understanding the consumers’ behavior (how do they search online?)
• Look for insights to help you plan a well-structured strategy (for example Google Trends)

2. Overusing and Not Using Internal Links

Here I see two different approaches “it’s all or nothing”.

The extreme use of internal links, stuffing every possible internal link in one paragraph ending up with more links than text.

The other extreme is “what? internal link? what’s it?”.

If not using any internal links you miss the opportunity of giving visibility to other relevant content and building additional traction to other pages.

Yes, add your internal links but ensure it’s relevant to your content, natural, and adds value to your visitor.

TIPS:

• Add internal links strategically, maybe dividing them into topics, categories, etc.
• Have a good balance of internal links on your page.
• Don’t add internal links for the sake of adding them.
• Audit your internal links — ensure they’re working, the pages are not slow, etc.

3. External Links

External links are also important for your website to rank well. Today, quality external links are much more important than quantity.

Remember that anchor texts are also important here as it signals to bots and users what your link is about. The famous “click here” is just a waste of an SEO opportunity. It’s also important if another website is linking to you.

Having so many “click here” links on your page can be seen as spammy, we don’t want that.

If you’re being linked, does it contain a “nofollow” attribute? Are they linking to an HTTP page on an HTTPS site? It may affect your ranking score

TIPS:

• Use tools to check your backlinks frequently, if necessary contact the webmaster of other sites.
• Check your external links frequently. Sometimes they might just stop working.
• Create quality content to be naturally linked to.
• Buying links is usually a bad idea.

4. Not Crawlable Site

In simple terms, if a website is not crawlable (scanner bots), search engines like Google won’t be able to understand your site and index it how it deserves to be indexed.

This is a common mistake for new websites or small business owners because they simply don’t know what it is or how to do it.

In addition to crawling issues is the unexistence of the sitemaps.xml in the robots.txt — so Google can misunderstand the structure of your website to provide the best results for users’ search queries.

TIPS:

• Audit for 4xx errors.
• Ensure you have the correct pages in sitemap.xml
• Watch out for “nofollow” attribute in internal links.
• Have a sitemap.xml if you don’t have it yet.
• Have a link to your sitemap.xml in your robots.txt

5. Forgetting Title Tags, and Meta Descriptions

For a digital marketer, it sounds like “is it possible?” Yes, it is.

Optimizing your content for search engines is not only researching your keyword and having your content ready. Don’t skip the title tag and meta description, they’re fundamental for your SEO.

These elements are important for search engines when crawling your page and skipping them would be a waste of potential.

TIPS:

• Add your keyword on the Title Tag (up to 60 characters).
• Add your keyword on the Meta Tag.
• Add your keyword on images Alt Tag (Google can’t see image ‘yet’)
• Write a unique Title Tag to avoid duplicate content being ranked — don’t confuse Google
• Be natural in your descriptions.

6. Slow Loading Speed and Bad Experience

The user experience is also taken into consideration by Google when it comes to ranking a website higher than others and speed is a key factor, especially after the “Core Update 2020” focused on the mobile experience.

If your website is not mobile-friendly or has a high loading speed it may have its ranking affected on search engines as well as users exiting your page even before it’s fully loaded.

TIPS:

• Prioritize your site’s speed to avoid users bouncing.
• Have a mobile-friendly site.
• Take a look at Google Speed and see how fast your website loads.

7. Failing to Plan

Creating random content and aiming at everything is not a good start. Building a roadmap is important as it gives you a clear direction to achieve your business goals.

If you still don’t have a roadmap for the success of your campaign it’s about time to create one.

Take a look at where your site is today and where you want it to be so that you can plan your tactics and type of content that will resonate with your audience.

This article was originally posted on iStamm.com