Together with a good content strategy, search engine optimization is the most important way for entrepreneurs to attract visitors to their websites, and increase their company’s conversions and sales. Since SEO is a very dynamic field, and trends in this niche change fast, many website administrators make big mistakes that influence their company’s profits at the bottom line. In this article, we have listed some of these mistakes and tried to discuss alternatives that will level out the negative effect they are causing.
Forgetting that SEO is also about conversions
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The main goal of search engine optimization for most people is attracting more visitors to their websites. For this purpose, they use sets of popular keywords, tags, and designs that make the website more hospitable for search engine crawlers. Building a website audience is a legitimate goal, but website administrators, SEO experts, and especially entrepreneurs often forget about their audience’s quality and their website’s conversion rates. If you are running an online store, you need your audience to shop, and not just read the good-quality content you are posting.
Website administrators need to constantly check their website’s conversion rates, and engage the right audience with more specific keywords, even if some of these are low-traffic ones. Conversion should be an entrepreneur’s ultimate goal when it comes to SEO because after all, it is directly tied to the company’s profits.
Link quantity over link quality
Most new web entrepreneurs are amazed at the opportunities offered by a combination of Internet and HTML. They add dozens of links in posts that are 500 or 600 words long. They use links for providing more information about basic terms, every visitor should know. By doing this they make two major mistakes. First, they overshadow good quality links by linking even the broadest terms to their Wikipedia pages. Second, they put more links that lead to the same page or website, which may look like they are over-promoting it to both Google crawlers and real website visitors.
Instead, they should focus on link quality. Experts say that links, both internal and external, should be relevant and important for clarifying certain parts of the posts. They should also look natural to the reader and contain useful and interesting information.
Neglecting optimization for local search
Search engine optimization is going through drastic changes with each new Google algorithm update. Five or ten years ago, SEO experts could optimize websites so they pop up on Google Search’s top page for phrases like ‘best restaurant LA’ or ‘most delicious burgers on Staten Island’. Today when we type these phrases into Google Search, we can find articles on the first page that rank restaurants and fast food joints and local pages of the Yelp or FourSquare platforms.
Many people think that Google algorithm updates have killed search engine optimization, but actually, they just changed it. One of the biggest changes in recent years was applied to local business search. Entrepreneurs now need to add their businesses to Google’s Business Listing, they should include keywords known to local people in their content and have a good presence on review websites.
Using ‘Click here’ for internal links
Web administrators and content creators need to be creative when it comes to internal link anchor text. Many of them simply use ‘Click Here’ or ‘This Post’ tags, which from an SEO perspective is a huge waste. Same as with links to other websites, anchor texts should contain some kind of information about the linked page or post. Call to action can also be added to the anchor text, but it should be more informative, like: ‘Click Here to Find out More about SEO’.
Search engine optimization is constantly changing its patterns and the only way to keep your website up to date is to follow all Google updates and other trends that define this dynamic industry. This will also allow you to be among the first entrepreneurs in your niche to apply these current trends, which will increase both your website’s popularity and your company’s profits.
