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It’s natural to want your website to appear on the first Google page to attract more traffic and get more quality leads. Here’s where the SEO planning strategy starts. But sometimes it may seem that despite the efforts and substantial investments, things are not working as expected. Usually, the answer hides behind the mishaps during implementation.
A foolproof way to get out of this situation would be to hire a specialist or an agency to delegate this stream to a professional. If that’s what you are planning to do, make sure to document all the responsibilities by signing a contract. You can search for an SEO contract template online or draft your own one.
But it will never hurt to know what things are better to avoid when building a working optimization strategy the right way whether you do it on your own or with a professional. So here we go with the top 5 mistakes that may hurt your SEO results:
Neglecting mobile traffic
Developing a website, owners are mostly oriented on the desktop audience, while mobile optimization deserves as much attention, as mobile traffic is now more than 51% from overall, leaving the desktop behind. No surprise here, as people take their phones everywhere surfing the net, communicating, and shopping. So ignoring making the page mobile-friendly through using Google AMP to take fewer resources for mobile pages to load, and not adapting the interface may play a bad trick, as you will lose traffic.
Meta tags issues
Meta tags make it possible for search engines to analyze your content and article structures and match them with the search phrases and keywords to help potential visitors to see your page in the search results. The most common meta tags issues include not dividing a page into logically divided parts with <h> tags, and duplicated tags (i.e. creating the same title for several pages on the website). Missing <h1> tag, or creating several such tags (the title tag should be 1 per page) is also one of the most popular mistakes. Such misconfigurations make it hard for crawlers to fetch the page structure, duplicated tags that deteriorate the page performance.
Duplicated content
Speaking of duplicated content, it’s a major issue not only for tags but for the articles. Duplicated content has a damaging impact on SEO as it creates confusion for search engines, which may top up not the original but the website with higher domain authority. Moreover, there’s a high chance of being removed from the Google index, if there are many cases of duplicated content on the page.
Overlooking search intent
The search intent defines what a user looks for when they type a keyword be it an informational guide, entertaining content, or a product page when it’s possible to make a purchase right away. So placing commercial keywords like “best”, “cheapest” in the informational articles and vice versa, putting “what is”, “the meaning of” and alike in the commercial article may not have the desired effect, thus no positive positions shifts.
Technical SEO
Focusing on the keywords may drag your attention away from the loading speed site and architecture. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, the chances are high that a person will not wait until it’s opened increasing the bounce rate for the page. And search engines will not rank pages with a low speed high on the list. So make sure to take care of internal optimization by caching static content, enabling a CDN, and optimizing the media files so that they consume fewer resources and time to load.
Some of these mistakes will result in poor website rankings in the best-case scenario while others post a Google sanctions threat in the worst one. A careful approach to the ranking growth strategy for the website and regular trend monitoring combined with delegating the SEO tasks to a skilled professional may help you to get the desired results faster with no issues on the way.
