In this post we will cover the 5 SEO mistakes most online business owners make and how to fix them!
SEO can feel overwhelming, trust me I get it! Before I invested in learning more about SEO and how to help my clients implement it, it used to feel like a monster. And don’t get me wrong; there is so much to SEO you could continue learning for a lifetime. However, you don’t need to know everything about SEO in order to successfully implement it in your website and marketing strategy!
There are common SEO mistakes that you can easily avoid and we are going to discuss them in this post. After reading this I want you to feel confident in avoiding these SEO mistakes so that you can start using the power of SEO in your business.
*We are not getting into the tech of how and where to add SEO in this post. But if you do want to learn more about the nitty gritty then you can head over to this blog post that shows you how to do exactly that!: Showit SEO: How to Add SEO to Your Showit Website the Right Way
Here are the SEO mistakes we are going to cover in this post (and how you can fix them):
- Ignoring keyword research
- Only optimizing your website Homepage
- Not blogging to increase website traffic
- Writing for Search Engines vs writing for Humans
- Forgetting to add internal links
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1. SEO mistake: Ignoring keyword research
If you aren’t familiar, keyword research is:
Doing research to find specific search queries that users are making in search engines. For example, someone who could look up “how to make apple pie”. In this case, how to make apple pie are the keywords.
The reason this is important is because you want to write content that your ideal clients are actively searching for. If you don’t do keyword research you might end up writing a blog post, or content on one of your main website pages, that no one will actually search for.
Keyword research is the first thing that you should do if you want an SEO optimized website. It will help guide you in writing your website copy (the text on your website). You will also add these keywords in other areas of your website to optimize for SEO.
This research will also help you plan out your website strategy. You can use this data to determine which keywords you want to target on which page and where there’s opportunity for you to realistically rank. It’s actually pretty cool because you might even end up wanting to add another page or two based on keywords you can rank for that you may not have thought of originally!
Here are some helpful posts when it comes to keyword research:
2. Only optimizing your website Homepage – Mistakes small business owners make when using SEO
If you are a small business owner who is diy-ing your website SEO, don’t make this SEO mistake! Yes, you want to optimize your Homepage for SEO but if you don’t take advantage of adding it to other pages on your website you are missing out!
The great thing is, when you do keyword research you’ll be able to clearly see where the opportunity is for you to rank in search results. When you have gathered a list of keywords you want to target I would recommend categorizing them into different topics. You will be adding similar or related keywords into these topics. Think about the pages you want on your website and what type of keywords would make sense.
Here’s an example:
If you have a services page you can add keywords related to providing your specific service. On my own website, I use the keywords “Website Design and SEO services” for my services page and I have similar keywords throughout that web page.
I have a client that has a Photo Booth and after doing SEO keyword research I saw there were a lot of searches related to pricing. So I recommended creating a separate page for Photo Booth Rates. This was separate from her “service” pages because those pages shared details about different types of photo booths.
You can start to see how keyword research is so important to do before anything else! It really does guide the rest of your content creation for your website!
3. Common SEO mistakes: Not blogging to increase website traffic
You do not need to blog in order to have an SEO optimized website. However, it does significantly increase your website traffic! I’ve already shared how it’s important to optimize more pages on your website than just your Homepage. This is because the more pages optimize for SEO the more opportunity there is for Google (or other search engines) to share your page in search results, driving more traffic to your website.
Let me paint a little picture for you:
You and one of your competitors both launch a new website and optimize pages for SEO. You’re both starting at the same place. But what if your competitor continues to consistently blog, adding more and more content to their website that can appear in search results, and you don’t. There is a lot more opportunity for your competitor’s website to appear in SERP (search engine results page) because there’s simply more content. Which means they’re providing more information and being more helpful to their clients.
Each blog post should answer a specific question. This way when someone searches for something related to your content you can appear in SERP increasing your website traffic!
If you want to take SEO seriously and really use your website to grow your business, Blogging is a non-negotiable!
4. SEO mistakes to avoid: Writing for Search Engines vs writing for Humans
Ok, so we have chatted about the importance of using keywords to rank in search results. What I really want to emphasize here is that keyword research helps you find search queries that people are searching. This is why keyword research is important because you’re understanding your ideal clients and what they are looking for.
The SEO mistake small business owners make is over using keywords, aka keyword stuffing. And this wouldn’t exactly be your fault if you’ve ever done this. This used to be an SEO tactic that apparently worked. That was all before my time in website design and SEO. This tactic was to basically use the same keyword over and over and over. But search engines picked up on this long ago!
Now, not only do search engines penalize you for keyword stuffing, it makes for a bad user experience. And the whole point of having a business is to solve our clients’ problems’. Create content that actually answers the questions your clients are searching for.
This SEO mistake is honestly so important because check this out; this is an update released by Google:
“The helpful content update is a significant change to Google’s algorithm that rewards high-quality, user-focused content in search results and demotes low-quality pages created primarily to rank well in search engines.” – Semrush
Google literally wants you to focus on users first! Which now you know is good for your SEO and also helpful for your users, win-win!
Also, think of it this way, if someone finds your content and it’s genuinely helpful it will build trust. They will want to continue reading your content and stay on your website longer. This is how you build your community through website and blog traffic. And overtime some of those people will then turn into clients helping you grow your business!
5. Another SEO mistake: Forgetting to add internal links
First off, what are internal links? Internal links are when you link to another page of your own website within your website. So for example, I’ve linked to a few of my own blog posts throughout this blog that are related to what we’re talking about – that’s internal linking.
Again this is super helpful for your users. You can continue to share information that will help them. But it’s also really good for your SEO! It helps Search Engines crawl your website so they can index it.
Now what does it mean to crawl and index a website?
Crawling is when a search engine basically reviews the information on a web page and then indexing is when it files it. Think of it as a library, the search engine reviews and determines what information is on your web page and then files it in a library that it can then pull from when it matches a search query.
When you internally link through to different pages on your website it’s easier for search engines to find them. If they land on your homepage and the search engine finds your homepage it can crawl through to other pages linked there.
Conclusion for mistakes small business owners make when using SEO
To review, we covered the following 5 SEO mistakes and how to fix them:
- The importance of keyword research and how to implement keywords in your website strategy
- Optimizing multiple pages on your website for SEO
- Consistently blogging to increase organic traffic
- Making sure you are writing your content for humans and not search engine algorithms
- Adding internal links throughout your website
I hope these tips were helpful and easy for you to follow. If you do have any questions feel free to reach out through email or book a free consultation if you want me to help you with your website design and SEO strategy.
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