SEO mistakes that can impact your search rankings

So many content marketers and bloggers are struggling to get organic traffic or even sustain their search engine rankings. Search engine optimization can help you boost your brand while increasing your site’s traffic. Quality content that is relevant to your target audience can boost your authority to secure future SEO success.

So, let’s explore SEO mistakes that can impact your search engine rankings. Also we’ll see how to fix them and improve your search engine performance.

SEO mistakes impacting your search ranking

1. Not doing keyword research

You might not know this, but not all keywords are going to grow your business. Some keywords might even harm your conversions. Whereas, right Keywords can help your search traffic and rankings.

keyword research a vital part of your SEO strategy that helps you discover the best keywords to rank for and increase your traffic. It can also bring new leads to your website and help your business increase sales. It’s not enough to simply create content and stuff it with keywords to engage your target audience.

The keyword research strategy is extremely important and can help you discover great opportunities for your business to stand out amongst competitors. Different types of keywords can serve different purposes. For example, you can use generic keywords to describe your business, your product, and your services. These are important for brand awareness.

You can also use niche keywords to be more specific. Long-tail keywords may not necessarily attract the same traffic as the general keywords, but they can lead to better business prospects since the search intent is more specific. When optimizing for keywords, these simple guidelines can help:

• Don’t optimize for global keywords when you only offer services or products to local customers.
• Stop optimizing for generic keywords that send visitors who aren’t motivated, relevant or useful to your business.
• Optimize for both informational and commercial keywords. Don’t focus on just information. Otherwise, you won’t build a successful business that generates income.

2. Not adding title tag or meta description

Search engine optimization increases the organic traffic to your website to improve your business success. While working on producing quality content, just don’t forget the crucial step i.e. Adding title tags and meta descriptions to your pages that can help your SEO.

As you’re aiming to increase your search rankings, all your pages should be optimized based on what search crawlers want to find. In this case, meta tags are providing all the necessary information for each page and what it should rank for.

A meta description can provide an overview of what the page is about while the title can also include the keyword that you are ranking for. An effective meta description can increase your click-through rates and thus, bring more visitors to your site. Your meta description should appeal to your potential customers to convince them to click on your link.

By not adding meta tags, you are reducing your chances of getting your content ranked and discovered through specific keywords. Start by experimenting with the different ways you can present your content in just 160 characters. Think like a user and what would grab your attention to visit a website.

3. Having too many 404 errors

Imagine you’re a user looking for “affordable bikes” as a search term. You’re looking at a meta description that resonates with what you’re looking for so you decide to visit the site. That’s when you see “Error 404” and no content at all.

Many users face similar problems and they end up disappointed or frustrated by the user experience. The common message of ‘page not found’ can happen to all websites. However, there are many cases that it shows up way too often. As a business owner, you might not even know that a page is not working.

404 errors can impact your website’s ranking. The more errors you are having, the worse it becomes for your SEO strategy. It’s useful to know that Google is actually normalizing 404 errors. They are aware that things can change and that all websites can end up having such pages. However, it’s important to be aware of them and work towards removing them.

A website owner that is having too many 404 errors is signaling Google that they are not frequently reviewing their website or that they have abandoned it. This could negatively impact a good ranking in SERPs.

On the contrary, you can run 404 checks to locate pages that are not working anymore to ensure that they are redirected in the correct page. If you’re still having a 404 error on your site, make sure that you are customizing it while including a call-to-action to improve the user experience.

Conclusion

It’s hard to stand out from the crowd, due to the enormous amount of content that’s being published. Also, there are some SEO mistakes that we can make at some point that can impact your search rankings.

The above discussed mistakes should be avoided to rank higher in search engines and to divert more traffic to your website.