If you’re just starting out on your SEO journey, then you may be getting overwhelmed with all the dos and don’ts associated with it. After all, even those who have been doing SEO for years can get confused with all the regular updates and changes rolled out by search engines. Since SEO is a dynamic field, it means it can get complicated. As such, it’s important to make sure that you’re doing it in the right way.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid in SEO:
1. Not Understanding Your Target Audience
If you want to yield good results from your SEO campaign, you need to know your audience at a granular level. Many marketers think that they already understand their audience without even doing proper research. Meanwhile, consumers expect to get instant results to their queries and immediate responses from businesses. As a result, there’s a wide communication gap between the organisation and its intended audience.
Digital marketers can rely on historical data for great SEO insights. Even so, understanding customers is still the better holistic approach to marketing. In this case, you must learn about the market in which your consumers buy and study the macro trends. Several Google keyword planning tools can help you map your SEO strategy.
2. Not Learning What Converts Through Analytics
One of the most common misconceptions about SEO is that it is all about traffic. In reality, it is only genuinely successful with conversion. You can easily get caught up in monitoring the phrases that send you the most traffic, and when you can’t rank for those competitive keywords, you get bummed. In several instances, lower-traffic phrases can bring better conversion rates. Since they’re more specific, they appear on the first page and even drive quite a few sales.
The only way to find out what converts is by tracking the keywords. An analytics package will allow you to set up conversion tracking for the keywords you want to use. You can compare their performance to identify what’s generating results. In this way, you can focus on results-driven efforts and optimise your site more efficiently.
3. Leaving Content and Keyword Gaps
Another common SEO mistake is leaving gaps in your content and keyword strategies. When you commit this error, you miss some of the best online marketing opportunities for your business. The ‘gaps’ could be keywords that your competitors are targeting. If you neglect them, you’re not putting your foot forward in terms of ranking. Over time, with those gaps left unfilled, your competitors will build higher authority.
The best way to identify gaps in your keyword and content strategies is by using a tool like SEMrush. With this service, you can monitor what your top competitors are doing. You can adopt their strategies and use them as part of your aggressive marketing campaign. Another technique is using Ahrefs or Moz’s Open Site Explorer to discover which of your competitor’s pages get many links. You can go through these pages to acquire new content ideas.
4. Launching an SEO Campaign Without a Roadmap and Plan
You can brag all you want about knowing your target audience, but that would be useless if you’re taking random marketing actions. There’s a reason why many businesses struggle to develop or execute their strategies. A recent Clutch survey revealed that merely 36% of small businesses had an SEO plan in place. Having an SEO roadmap is crucial for generating traffic and converting that into sales. So, if you don’t have a blueprint for marketing success, you should start building one now.
To develop an SEO plan, you need to assess and understand your competitors. Learn about their keywords, rankings, content, and performance. Moreover, there should be a digital alignment within the team, and everyone should be assigned roles for recurring tasks and updates. You should also take advantage of available platforms and tools that will support your strategy and workflow.
In Conclusion
Any business looking to gain a competitive edge online will need search engine optimisation. However, no matter how much we sugar-coat it, digital marketing is a complex process. As we’ve mentioned, even the best people in the field can commit SEO mistakes. After all, Google regularly rolls out algorithm updates that shake the search engine results significantly.
If you don’t want to make the SEO mistakes we mentioned in this article, we’d recommend using the digital marketing services of Lollipop Digital. We have a team of seasoned Google Ads specialists, PPC managers, developers, email marketing professionals, graphic designers and content writers. We take a holistic approach to developing SEO roadmaps for our customers. What’s more, we learn about your audience and consumers at a granular level. So, you can trust that we’ll treat your business as if it were our own.
To get a free website analysis, get in touch with Lollipop Digital today!
