Every business wants to appear first in search results. However, very few businesses know how to do it. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a massive industry that is worth more than 80 billion, according to Forbes.
To get yourself to the first page for your target keyword, you need a good strategy that is flexible enough to incorporate changes in the future. If you are not getting the results you want, have a look at these costly SEO mistakes and see if you are committing them.
1. Not Satisfying a Search Intent
Content should be created with a search intent in mind.
For example, when a user types in the keyword “digital marketing”, they most likely want to know what digital marketing is and expect results that help clear their doubts. The user is probably in the awareness stage and not ready to make any purchasing decision yet. Another user who searches for “digital marketing services” is, on the other hand, already well-informed about digital marketing and now looking for a good service to contract.
By creating content that is tailored to the search intent, you can connect more easily with the user, and they will be more likely to move to the next stage of the sales funnel.
2. No Conversion Optimisation
If your current average conversion rate is 8 sales per 1000 visitors, there are two ways to double revenues: double the traffic or double the conversion rate. In fact, most businesses opt for a mixture of the two.
While optimising your conversion rate is mostly free, increasing traffic may cost a lot of money. And even if you have an unlimited budget for marketing, not fully taking advantage of the traffic is a waste in itself.
Luckily for you, there are many tools that help with conversion optimisation such as Optimizely, CrazyEgg, Hubspot, and Unbounce. They keep track of user actions performed on the page so that you can gain insights by looking at the data.
3. Not Mobile-Friendly
About 50% of all the traffic comes from mobile.
Mobile has become so important that Google will penalise your site if it’s not mobile-ready. Adding mobile responsiveness to a website is not too complicated, thanks to the availability of many mobile-first web frameworks.
If you are doing online business and your site looks horrible on a mobile device, it’s time to act fast to not miss out on potential leads and revenues. When making the site mobile-friendly, pay attention to the font size, image size, and element arrangement.
To speed up loading time, consider creating smaller images for mobile given how much smaller mobile screens are. This will save you considerable bandwidth.
For sites that have a checkout process, make sure to shorten it as much as possible on mobile. The less work your customer has to do, the more likely they will make the purchase.
4. Not Having Quality Content
Content is king. I’m sure we have all heard that.
However, many businesses still don’t invest time and effort in creating outstanding content that is worth sharing. Most of the time, their blog posts are too short.
Google gives preference to longer-form content when it calculates the rankings. Ideally, your content should be at least 1000 words. However, this does not mean you can ramble on to reach the word count. Focus on including as many useful points as possible and pay attention to the tone of the message.
If the content doesn’t have the right tone, your reader won’t feel a connection with you through what you write.
Above are the seven most costly SEO mistakes that businesses tend to make. If your business is struggling to get more traffic and your SEO strategy hasn’t yielded the desired results, it’s time to take a hard look at what you have done and pinpoint the mistakes that are keeping you from reaching your goal.
Contact us today if you don’t want to waste time focusing on the wrong strategy.
