Is your business converting customers by ranking on the first results page of Google, Yahoo or Bing? Do you know the reason why you are unable to reach your target audience efficiently? Search engine optimisation is not as easy as it may sound.
Even after weeks and months of hard work and robust SEO strategies, you may be unable to get your company to rank on the top of search engine results. Do you know why this is happening? What are the pain points in your strategy? We have all been there at some point in time and mistakes help us grow more than anything else.
Read ahead to discover what mistakes people are making around the world while dealing with the SEO offered by their company, and these companies are pushing their business into the grounds one day at a time:
- Ignoring the analytics
The website traffic is increasing notably, but still, the sales are not growing proportionately. Why does this happen? Is your SEO strategy aimed at bringing traffic to the website only, or is it also encouraging conversions? Most experts make the mistake of focusing on highly competitive keywords/phrases, which are directing most of the traffic towards the business; however, they are not conversion-efficient. The purpose is not only to generate awareness but also to enhance sales. Some low-traffic phrases are more conversion-friendly than many high-traffic keywords. So, your strategy should include a proportionate blend of both these aspects to ensure desirable results. Moreover, the only way to know if your keywords are increasing conversions or not is analytics. You must set up an analytics package to compare results among the many keywords relevant to your industry, and accordingly, optimise your content to maximise outputs.
- Not focusing on the local search
What do you know about the search habits of the people in your neighbourhood? If your business is concentrated on a specific region, then you must know everything about them in local search. Using phrases which are designed for the global market may not deliver promising results to your business; however, some local phrases can turn up the sales if used correctly. Region-specific keywords for landing pages, page titles and meta description will help the local audience get informed about your products and services, and including your contact information and address will take care of the call-to-action. You can even implement a map on your site to drive customers to your business. You must go through the SEO packages that agencies are offering in your area thoroughly to make sure that all the aspects mentioned above are included in them.
- Adding keywords to your Google My Business Listing name
Keywords can change the reach of any business; however, stuffing keywords everywhere will only lead to spamming and violation of various search engine guidelines. Most people are not aware of the Google My Business Guidelines, which state that a business is not allowed to include a keyword in the name of their business on the My Business Listing (which is not a part of the company’s legal name). If a business tries to act over smart, then it will be considered a direct violation and will face the consequences. Don’t do it no matter how tempting it is; don’t be a spammer!
- Slow site load time
Do you like it when you click on a website, and it takes ages to load completely? Similarly, you must keep a track on the load time of your business site to make sure that none of your customers is facing the same issues. No one waits for more than a couple of seconds for a website to load entirely, and if your website takes more time, then you are losing many potential customers every day. The Google metrics don’t show the load time of a website, so you may have to use other tools to identify the loading time. There are several reasons for a website to load slowly, such as development issues, server problems and others.
- Creating a poor internal link structure
If your sole focus is on creating and uploading excellent optimised content on your website, then you may not utilise it entirely because initially, when a website loads, it is bound to encounter internal linking errors. E.g. duplicate pages and 404 error pop-ups. Internal linking plays a significant role in SEO strategy and UX; however, many developers often overlook such errors; messing up the expected impact of the SEO strategy.
Expert tip: internal links can help in leading traffic to conversion pages, providing additional content for users to read, organising web pages and communicating the essential pages to search engine programs. Make sure that no webpage on your site is more than two clicks away from the home page or CTA pages; so, reassess your website architecture to remove errors right away.
It is never too late to push your business to new limits, and effective SEO strategies can make it possible. If you can avoid most of the mistakes mentioned above and stay true to your SEO plans, the results may appear slow initially, but will gain speed if you stay consistent.
All the best for all the future opportunities!
