Search engines like Google can be your best friend or your worst enemy. As a small business owner, you’re likely tempted daily to run ads on Google promoting your business.
Google rakes in more than $150 billion in ad revenue each year from unsuspecting business owners who don’t know how to optimize their ad campaigns.
If you’re looking to bolster your marketing efforts, you should instead focus on SEO. With SEO, you don’t have to pay money for every visitor to your website.
Plus, SEO mistakes are easier to avoid than Google Ad mistakes. And they’re less costly, too.
Keep reading below to learn why SEO is so important when it comes to business ownership and how to avoid the most common mistakes when getting started.
Not Knowing All Your Keywords
Many people jump into SEO without doing an appropriate amount of keyword research. This is arguably the most important step.
And it’s not just the main keywords. You want to know all of the keyword variations they are using, including misspellings, as well as the long-tail keywords. All of these are important to your SEO campaign.
Not Having Optimized Pages
Only pages that are properly optimized are going to rank well in search engines. To be optimized means to be well written. Whether they are service pages, product pages, blog posts, or landing pages, they need to be structured well.
You need to use a page title and break up content with various headers (H1, H2, H3, etc). You need to keep paragraphs short and sweet to make your content scannable.
You need to insert relevant, high-quality imagery. And you need to write content that answers the user’s question better than your competitors do.
Don’t overload a webpage with keywords. You can’t trick the search engines these days. It’s very easy for them to filter out low-quality content.
Not Blogging Consistently
The sites that consistently rank the highest are those that publish content regularly. Blogging should be a top priority and you should aim to publish at least one article per week.
Write articles based on secondary keywords that are relevant to your industry. Within the content, link to your most important web pages.
Skipping Small Details
There are many types of SEO factors that determine your success or failure to rank well. Most people focus on writing content based on their keywords and getting backlinks to that content.
And while those are extremely important, there are other small details that are easy to overlook. If you really want your web pages to rank well, you need to ensure every detail is optimized.
This means including the main keyword in the title tag of each page. It means including the keyword in your meta description. You should also ensure each image file is named, and the alt-text is filled out, with keywords related to your brand or industry.
These small steps have a small impact. But they add up and can either help or hurt your rankings, depending on how much effort you put into them.
It’s Easy to Avoid These Common SEO Mistakes
SEO is a lot of work. If it were easy, everyone would be at the top of the search pages.
But only those who understand this innovative marketing process, create quality content, and avoid basic SEO mistakes will rank high.
Looking for more marketing tips and tricks like this? Head to our blog now to keep reading.
