Every business owner and marketer wants to increase their website traffic from search engines. And for this, they use an SEO strategy. SEO is a continuous process of increasing website visibility in search engine results, ranking keywords, and increasing traffic.
There are various things involved in optimizing a website for search engines such as:
- Keyword research: Research and selection of keywords based on the business, products, and services.
- On-Page Optimization: Optimization of the page/post for both users and search engines.
- Off-Page SEO: Guest posting on other websites, blogs, social media marketing, and promotion through influencers.
- Technical Optimization: Testing and optimization of a website for speed, making it mobile-friendly and improving user experience.
- Content Creation: Creation of useful and relevant content that cover and contain the needs and desires of the target audience.
- Local SEO: Getting in front of local customers, local search terms area and city wise in google.
- Website SEO Auditing: On-Page and Technical Audit of the website. What needs to be done correctly?
- Link building: Connection and communication with other websites and businesses.
- Learning: Learning, staying up to date with the latest SEO trends, and improving SEO skills and practices.
- Consulting: Discussion and consulting regarding your website and SEO performance with the online marketing expert and freelancer.
- SEO Tools: Use of high-quality SEO tools in keyword research, optimization, content creation, publishing, marketing, and data analysis.
- Website Data Analytics: Analysis of user behaviors on the website and creation of new SEO strategies.
So thus, you can see in the above points that business owners and marketers have to go through a lot of SEO processes to optimize their websites. Therefore, the possibility of mistakes while doing this SEO is very high, especially for those who do not know much about SEO and are new. Even though there are people who have been doing blogging and marketing for 3 to 4 years but still they are not confident about SEO.
And another big reason for this is the lack of good education about SEO. Most of the information about SEO on the internet will either be tricks or SEO courses and tools. That is why it becomes very difficult to believe in the right information for those who are new and want to do the SEO on their website.
I have passed through these things for the last 10 years. I have also done SEO for my website and clients. I have taken the traffic of my blog from 0 to 8000 visitors a day. Although less so nowadays. But even today many of my keywords rank in the top 5 in Google and Bing. And some are bringing 20 to 25 people to the website every day for the last 7 to 8 years.
I have made many mistakes while doing SEO of websites, using different methods to increase traffic such as publishing more, changing designs, hosting changes, and hiring SEO experts. But by learning from those mistakes, I have moved forward. It is natural to make mistakes while doing SEO, but we have to move forward by learning from our mistakes and taking inspiration from our website and business goals. This is the only formula to succeed in business using SEO.
Now you can know below one by one about those common SEO mistakes and solutions that I and various business owners and marketers go through. Knowing about them, you will be saved from spending thousands of rupees and years of hard work in SEO. I have spent more than 9 years learning them. And I do not want you to make these mistakes while doing SEO on your website.
Top 11 Common SEO mistakes and the way to fix them:
There are lots of ongoing SEO mistakes that small business owners, marketers, and bloggers are making in order to increase their website traffic. Including me as well. Mistakes are part of SEO. But if you know them in advance that make big difference in the optimization of your website for people and search engine.
1. Focus on the content
Do not focus too much on SEO, instead focus on content. If your content is good then the search engine will be forced to show your website on top. No matter if it’s technically 100% correct or not! Good content answers internet users’ questions, understands their pain points, and gives them direction and solutions. And creating SEO-friendly and technically correct websites these days is not difficult.
How to create great content?
Understand the pain and suffering of your target audience, readers, and customers in the present times and also predict the future. If you understand this, then you will not even need to do keyword research. But you do, and then create such content that people come out of their sorrows and problems. They are looking for ways to achieve their business, professional and personal desires. If your content shows the path, then no search engine, or AI tool in the world will be able to stop it from showing on search results or sending readers to it.
For more tips here you can learn to create helpful,
2. Instability in branding and user experience
It’s important to focus on improving the website page load speed, mobile friendliness, accessibility, and user experience. But don’t make too many changes in a short amount of time. It’s a mistake because search engines, bots, and even people will not be able to remember your website, branding, layout, and user experience.
Making changing the website structure, colors, buttons, and fonts too often and too soon is not good for SEO. Readers, new and old, will get upset and take you for granted.
This will increase the bounce rate, lower down average session duration, and decrease the traffic and visitors’ trust.
When and how to make changes to improve website design, business branding, and user experience?
Make changes in business branding after 2 to 3 years and that too if you are not getting good results.
And whenever you create a website, especially if it is in WordPress, then choose a great theme only once. There are thousands of themes in WordPress, but this does not mean that you keep changing them again and again. Try the same theme for at least 6 months to 1 year. Yes, it must be responsive, fast, and modern.
And whenever you want to change the layout of the website, buttons, text, etc. or install new plugins, do it at night or when there is less traffic on the website.
If you do all this then your time, money and mental energy will be saved. And you can spend this time writing good content and marketing the business.
3. Do not make the website slow with more features and appearances
Today, there are thousands of plugins and extensions that allow you to add tons of features to your website without you knowing to code. But this does not mean that you keep adding things to your website to look big or impress people. Add only what is necessary to it. Otherwise, it will become slow.
Many people make this mistake while creating a website, as a result of which the loading speed of the website’s pages slows down. This not only affects the ranking of current posts or keywords but also prevents new opportunities of getting more traffic.
How to avoid slowing down your website?
- Use lightweight, well design, responsive, high-quality themes and plugins.
- Use only those plugins, add-ons, and extensions in a website that are necessary and good. An important and good is the only thing that either increases traffic or user experience. Because all the people who are coming to your website should see and get what they have come for. Now whether it is your product, blog post or something else.
4. Do not change the host of the website too many times
Use good hosting even if you have to pay a little extra money. Do not use cheap hosting. Cheap hosting looks cheap initially but turns out to be expensive later. Because when the website will be slow, the server response rate will be low, redirection speed will be low then you will think about new hosting. And changing hosting, again and again, will cost time and money. And this has a negative effect on SEO, links etc. Especially when you’re already getting 1000 visitors per day.
Please read this post: How does migrating WordPress Hosting make difference in SEO
5. Be confident about your abilities and strengths
Not believing in yourself and your work is the biggest mistake bloggers, business owners and marketers make.
If you’re trying to increase traffic to your business website or blog by writing new content based on relevant and trending keywords then you must be confident about your ability and writing skills. If not, you have to improve your writing and communication skills.
Many bloggers, and content marketers who choose blog post writing to get new and more traffic to their websites, often neglect themself in writing on competitive keywords. It’s because they think or they are taught to think that writing on competitive keywords is not good for beginners because the search engines will not rank it.
It can be correct because search engines also use various ranking factors.
But the most profitable keywords are competitive. It doesn’t mean the new bloggers, content writers, and marketers can’t compete. But because they are taught or trained to focus on low-competition keywords. In which monthly search volumes are also below 100 or 1K.
Writing on these keywords is not bad for a business, but then getting traffic to the blog or website in a quick time is not possible with this theory. You might get targeted customers 1 or 2 per day, but then you need also need a 100% conversion rate.
And those trying to earn money through Google AdSense and monetization need more traffic to get high-quality ads, high CPC, and good ctr. And this is only in competitive keywords.
But due to this confusion and overload of information regarding earning money from a blog, traffic, and keywords beginner bloggers, marketers, and small business owners changes their track or give up blogging or writing new blog posts.
So, my suggestion is that do not worry about competitive keywords, high CPC, and or even monthly search volume if you want to increase the chances of earning, traffic increment, and success online.
Instead, if you are well-versed in any subject, then even if there is a lot of competition in the keywords of that subject, definitely write about it with confidence.
When you write on a subject in which you’re already good and competitive then you will get traffic and if it’s written well and solve problems or help others to achieve their business or personal or professional goals, then you will also get advertising and revenue. And this type of post also gets more shares and backlinks.
6. Optimize the website based on user behavior
Do not optimize the website only to please the search engine websites, but also take care of the likes and dislikes of the people.
Search engines such as Google and Bing will keep updating their algorithm and website ranking factors. You need to stay updated and aware of it. But make sure this does not impact the mission of your website and business.
To make your website and algorithms or AI proof you must analyze the current user behavior of your website. Notice the page and posts getting more or less traffic. Examine the decrease in specific posts and pages through google analytics and manually as well. If you see that a specific category is clicked then highlight that in the main area. If you see that the bounce rate is high then check or change the featured images, and add or replace internal posts links.
These kinds of practices are important. It’s because, in the end, every search engine or even after 10 years will also analyze user behaviors and user experience. Read here: Want to make a good website? 7 things that matter to users most
That’s why it’s important that website content, font size, images, menus, colors, landing pages, and links all of these things are optimized based on user behaviors. In one sentence SEO is nothing but the optimization of the website according to the needs and wants of the people.
7. Get people to join you with social media or email subscriptions
The biggest mistake is not treating a blog as a business and business as a brand. No matter how small or new is your business, blog or website. Treat it like a brand. Behave and work like a brand. The way you believe about your website, content, and business other will follow it. If you think negatively about your content or website then when you act with this mindset your actions and thinking become limited and narrow. This is not good to grow any type of business.
It’s important that people remember your business website and blog. And they will keep coming back to this. But for this, you have to give them options to remember you. The easiest is to invite them to like your social media pages, YouTube channel, Pinterest, and all of that you use as a business.
An email subscription is the best option for businesses, bloggers, marketers and e-commerce website owners. Email marketing is more personalized and gives you chance to create and publish personalized content.
But for that, you do not produce or publish any content that you also do not like. So that whenever you publish new blog posts or updates people will come to check out that. You can also call this off-page SEO practice. And it’s so important to present and behave like a brand. And think, if one-day search engines stop sending traffic to your website or stop listing websites in search results then how you will survive as a business?
That’s why create and invest your time in creating multiple sources of traffic. So that people come to your website even without the use of search engines. Or people just find or type the website name your website name on search engines.
8. Publishing a lot of content with the aim of earning more traffic and revenue
If every blog post you write meets the quality criteria set by you, then only publish it. Now if you publish a post once a week or 10 times there is no problem. More content will increase both traffic and income without any doubt.
But only if the posts published by you are good and necessary for the target audience to read. Otherwise, just in the greed of traffic and more revenue, you can put as many posts as you want, instead of increasing the traffic that will decrease.
To solve this problem, think of blog posts like a product. Make it so capable and useful that people are forced to bookmark it.
Whenever you write, think that people are waiting for your new post. The content you publish should be transformative in the lives and businesses of people. Otherwise, there is no use in blogging and doing business just for money.
If you want to earn money, then there are many other ways such as a job, and freelancing than blogging and business. But whatever you do or wherever you work or whatever website you create it needs high-quality content, user experience, and design. It’s an investment in the future through hard work that pay you for a long time.
So, my suggestion is that when writing a blog post, write like you’re creating a product. So that when you publish, you will not hesitate to promote it confidently and aggressively.
9. Make your page and posts content rich
If people have to read only text, then they can use AI chatbots. But people come to blogs and websites so that people get the text as well as multimedia content which makes it easier to understand the subject. AI chatbots cannot do this work at the moment.
People need your knowledge. People want to learn from your experience. They expect from you that they will get a solution by visiting your website. So do not forget to add to use elements like images, videos, diagrams, tables etc. in your blog post and website pages. Not just use the multimedia content but also optimize it with relevant keywords and also make them responsive as well.
10. Website Traffic Analysis and Changing SEO Strategy each day
Beginners make the mistake of looking at website traffic again and again in a day. They want to see an increment in website traffic The thinking is good, but will the traffic increase by seeing it? Or by taking necessary action to increase it.
Monitoring and analyzing website traffic is a good and necessary thing. But what is the point of looking at it, again and again, every day and changing your SEO strategy?
Therefore, do not waste time repeatedly watching your website traffic in Google Analytics, on the contrary, improve your old blog posts or create new content.
You can fix a day for data Analysis once a month or at least 15 days of a gap. And only then improve your SEO strategy or make small changes. But changing every day will reduce the traffic instead of increasing it. Because your website will not rank on any single keyword for a long time. This not only causes instability in the data, but also the search engine does not understand what you want.
Use the same or one SEO strategy for at least 3 months before you change it.
11. Create an SEO activity logbook
Whenever you make changes to your website, update keywords, change color or add new links to it and do any work related to SEO, then do it carefully. Do not start working on it as soon as the idea of SEO comes suddenly. This happens many times when you will get some new information related to SEO.
But the problem comes when doing something new affects the existing organic website traffic. And then it is not easy to understand that if the website traffic is decreasing then why is it happening? And in the same way, when traffic, and conversions increase or revenue increases, then you will know what was the reason for the success. So that you can repeat the success and do more of those tasks which increase both traffic and revenue.
The best option to fix the problem of losing ideas of success or reasons behind failure is to create an SEO logbook. You can do it manually in Microsoft Word or in Excel as Well.
In this log book if you do anything on your website, then note down that date/time, work, and activity. So whenever you see the data of traffic increment or traffic decrement in google Analytics or in any other SEO tool you can compare that through SEO activity log books.
So whenever traffic increases and when it decreases, you will be able to find the reason. And it’s highly possible that you can triple your website traffic and revenue because of just noticing and analyzing the practice or experiments.
So, friends, I hope the above-mentioned mistakes and fixes will help you to learn and improve your SEO skills. If you need any consultancy related to SEO, please let me know. I will try to cover that in upcoming posts or update this post.
Thanks for your visit.