SEO Mistakes to Avoid: 7 Common Pitfalls hat Can Hurt Your Ranking

SEO Mistakes to Avoid: 7 Common Pitfalls hat Can Hurt Your Ranking 

When companies begin marketing, they immediately feel they should be doing search engine optimization marketing. They often do not know where to start. SEO can be confusing. Everyone claims to get you on the No. 1 spot on Google results. Videos and articles tell you what you must do to ensure you get the ranking. Some will tell you that SEO is not worth the money or that it doesn’t work. Here are seven common SEO mistakes you want to avoid.

1. Quitting – Like all marketing, results take time to happen. So many small business owners will do SEO marketing for a few months. Then, they will quit before they realize a return on their investment. This is the wrong thing to do. To be most effective, SEO marketing takes about one year of constant monitoring and working the system before you realize results. There are times when SEO will work quickly, but those are rare. Therefore, you want to make sure you are doing it over a long time. The longer you ensure you are getting ranking, the more likely you will find the people who will buy from you. With all marketing, you, as the business owner and brand, have to build up trust before someone will pull the trigger to buy.

2. Doing It Incorrectly – Often, marketing companies will throw out jargon to business owners who do not understand what they mean. This leads to confusion on the business owners’ parts and incorrect SEO management. Before you start, make sure you understand all the jargon. Read articles and watch videos on how to manage your SEO the best way possible. To begin, SEO comes in two forms. Companies have to do both on-page SEO and off-page SEO. Doing one over the other is usually not enough to build brand recognition and improve your rankings in Google. On-page SEO involves ensuring that titles, tags and descriptions on your website are proper. For example, if you have a page about widget sales, but the title on the page is services, this will be ranked lower by Google. The title should be widget repair. The titles, tags and descriptions are things that the person visiting your page do not see, but Google and other search engines do. Off-page SEO is ensuring people can click on your page from somewhere else. For example, they visit your Facebook profile and click on your website link. Doing SEO correctly means you have to do both on-page and off-page. You have to know how to both of those or hire someone else to do it for you.

3. Picking the Wrong Keywords – Before you begin your marketing, you have to know what keywords people type to find similar companies in your industry. You have to do your research to pick the right keywords. Otherwise, if you focus on the wrong keywords, you will not have people find you. Keywords should reflect your business well, be found on your website naturally and not forced, and be used regularly by your ideal client or customer. On the other hand, you want to avoid common ones that might be hard to rank or limit the number of people who find your company. For example, if you are an author who offers leadership coaching, you want to make sure leadership coaching is a keyword you use on your website and in your marketing. In some cases, you can pick keywords that analytics say are being used for your industry, but they are different from what your competitors use. In the example previously mentioned, an uncommon keyword that would yield more results to your page might be church leadership coaching. In that case, only church leaders would want to use your services, which is what your real target market is.

4. Thinking It’s Free – While there are marketing techniques that you can do that are free or low-cost, for the most part, you have to spend money on marketing. The same is true for SEO marketing. Do not expect to get results if you don’t spend money. At the very least, you will have to buy software to help with titles, meta tags, descriptions and keyword research. Most likely, you will have to buy ads and pay marketing companies to help you with SEO procedures. Companies who fail to get the results they envision are those who fail to spend money on making sure SEO is done correctly.

5. Not Doing Anything Else – Like all marketing, SEO is most effective when it is combined with other marketing, such as print marketing or advertising. Many business owners believe that if they focus only on their SEO, they will achieve successful outcomes. This is not the case. Look at the large corporations. Do they focus solely on digital marketing or do they do digital marketing, print marketing, television advertising, radio advertising, ads on cell phones and e-mail marketing. You have to do the same. You have to use SEO in conjunction with other marketing.

6. Doing It Themselves – The saying is “do what you do best and farm out the rest.” This applies to SEO marketing. If you make widgets, you should focus on coming up with the best design of widgets you can and leave the marketing of those widgets to a marketing partner. Marketing companies do marketing best, so use one. They will ensure the SEO is done correctly, the right keywords are used and monitor the progress. You should let them do what they are meant to do. It will leave you time for other tasks.

7. Being Unrealistic in Results – When you hire a marketing company, you have to be realistic in expectations of results. The marketing company can’t guarantee you will increase sales. The marketing company can help you get noticed and build brand awareness. Converting prospects into sales is what you are supposed to do as the company owner or sales representative. Your marketing team can lead potential clients and customers to your website, but it can’t make them buy from you.