The purpose of website SEO services is to make sure your website is recognized and ranked highly by Google in their search engine results pages (SERPs). The idea is to attract those searching for your product, service, or area of expertise. It takes a custom SEO strategy to succeed.
But with the growing focus on putting the user first, there is a push to make the search process a more intuitive and helpful experience. That makes website optimization not as simple as it used to be — and the advice of a website SEO services expert more valuable than ever before.
Avoid 6 common mistakes that hurt your SEO
A good website SEO services provider will deliver a custom strategy to ensure success and help you avoid these mistakes that will hurt your SEO rankings and visibility.
1. Picking keywords you want instead of the keywords your audience uses
Search engines are getting better and better at showing search results based on what users are really looking for. So, it doesn’t make much sense to dictate which keywords you want to optimize for based only on your instinct and what you think users want. On the other hand, just because a term has a lot of search volume does not necessarily mean it is the right term for you or for your customers.
A website SEO services expert can tap into analyses of huge amounts of data to recommend pertinent keywords that will match what your target audience is looking for and help you rank highly in their searches. This in turn will help you deliver the experience that your customers and prospects want to have.
Keep in mind that you’ll get the best results if your SEO data and strategy are informed by insightful buyer persona research that tells you exactly what your buyers are searching for. Learn more about how this works.
2. Failing to create your own quality content
Offering a lot of content is a great way to boost SEO and the value of your website in the “eyes” of search engines. However, any website SEO services company in the know will tell you: The content has to be high quality; quantity alone does not cut it anymore.
For the best optimization, website SEO services experts advise that it is worth putting in the extra time and effort to:
- Understand your audience
- Create content your users really want and need
- Make sure that content is regularly refreshed and unique across your site
Remember, duplicating material is not the way to boost content and rank highly with Google. Of course, you never want to deliberately copy other people’s content — but you might be duplicating your own content without even realizing it. For example, you might be copying text verbatim to create meta descriptions. Or, you might be duplicating the same product descriptions in multiple places on your site.
3. Over-optimizing for keywords
Keyword optimization used to be simple: the more times a keyword was used, the higher the content would rank. But with the emphasis now on the user experience, using a keyword repeatedly is looked at by today’s smart search engines in a whole new way.
In fact, as any good website SEO services provider knows, so-called keyword stuffing is simply bad SEO. It makes the content seem forced and can actually stand in the way of reader comprehension. And nothing kills a good user experience quite like being hit with the topic again and again and . . .
Instead, to maximize optimization, keywords should be “sprinkled” throughout the content in a more natural way. There are a lot of different opinions about what the ideal keyword density — the percentage of keywords compared with the total number of words on a page — should be. A website SEO services expert can recommend the best keyword density for your needs.
In addition, content length trumps keyword density when it comes to optimization. A savvy website SEO services provider knows that offering a lot of helpful content, even if it reduces your keyword density, makes for a better user experience.
4. Not considering the impact of mobile
Think about how you use your smartphone. If you’re like most people, you often search on-the-go, looking for something local that you need right now. Perhaps you ask Siri or Google for advice multiple times every day.
The emphasis on mobility has changed the experience that search engines need to deliver to users. It is an area where a website SEO services company can help you ensure that the experience is:
- Accessible and readable on a screen that is small
- Responsive rather than intrusive
- Content-rich so that visitors don’t bounce off the page — that is, exit the site without looking for more information
- More “conversational” or based on questions, so it will rank in more searches
5. Intruding on the user experience with pop-up content
In 2017, Google released an update that was designed to improve the mobile user experience by reducing what is called interstitial intrusive ads. In short, Google made it so sites rank lower if they use content that:
- Pops up automatically, without any action by the user
- Covers the main content
- Requires users to dismiss it before they can access the main content
- Requires the user to scroll down “below the fold” to find the main content
- Annoys or otherwise bugs readers
According to Google, anything that falls into the “intrusive pop-up” category is bad SEO. And THAT can have a huge impact on optimization and how well your website will rank.
6. Including too many links — and maybe even buying them
Once upon a time, buying links was a pretty common strategy in website SEO services for helping to boost website rankings. However, these days Google has been honed so that it places more value on the quality of links rather than the quantity.
In fact, today having too many outgoing links on a website sends the signal that the site might be spam. Having backlinks from other sites that have too many links can negatively affect your site’s ranking, too.
Website SEO services can help you avoid a lot of “spammy” links and backlinks in favor of higher quality links — internal, external, or both.
6 other ways website SEO services can help you optimize
A website SEO services company can provide keyword research, perform SEO audits, create a sitemap, and make other recommendations to help your website meet the needs of your business AND your customers.
For example, website SEO services can help you:
- Optimize your site speed so users don’t get frustrated and bail out before you have a chance to meet their needs
- Improve your SERP ranking by making sure your site is secured with SSL certificate encryption
- Add schema markup (HTML tags) to your pages, to deliver more information for users and boost your site rankings in SERPs
- Find ways to continuously add new content and make your website more dynamic
- Make sure your site is mobile user-friendly — and ranks high, accordingly — with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open-source coding
- Optimize your content for local searches (if you have a brick and mortar business)
Clearly, SEO is an ongoing exercise, not something you can do once and forget. A website SEO services expert will work closely with you to deliver maximum value for your website optimization efforts. That means making sure you are continually using good SEO practices that will boost your SERP success and put your customers, and their web experience, first.
Want to know more about how SEO works? Read this helpful article: SEO Basics Laid Out For Non-Marketers.