While the desire is legit, many people go at it wrong and spend a lot of money getting no results. What should you avoid when developing a search engine-optimized website? Here it is: You need to create content to optimize your website for search engines. Many people know this, but they pay little attention to the content they should develop. As you can guess, it always backfires. To win in the highly competitive SEO arena, you must fully understand your target audience to create content that resonates with them. A great way to understand your audience is to imagine the person who can buy your product or service. How do they look like? Where do they work? How much money do they make? Where do they live? You need to ask all these questions. Once you clearly understand your customer, research the content related to your product or service they are looking for. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools, including Google, that you can use to find what your customers are interested in. These tools will also help you gauge whether your content stands a chance of ranking when you create it.
Not doing enough keyword research.
Keywords drive the SEO world, and for you to stand a chance of winning, you have to use the right keywords that aren’t too competitive and, at the same time, have enough search interest.
1 Not doing enough keyword research.2 Failing to create top-quality content3 Writing scattered content4 Ignoring mobile5 Failing to leverage web analytics6 Ready to rank?
Many people make the mistake of going for high-volume keywords. This is wrong. While these keywords can drive huge amounts of traffic to your website, they are usually highly competitive, and your website will never see the light of day, especially if you are using a new domain. What you need to do instead is to take your time and find long tail keywords. These are keywords that are usually in the form of phrases. While these keywords don’t have large search intents, they are easier to rank and are more specific, so their conversion rates are pretty high.
Failing to create top-quality content
As mentioned above, the SEO world is driven by content, and for your content to rank, it needs to be of good quality. Think about it. What is the sole mission of search engines such as Google? To serve the best results to its customers, right? This means that when you create unique quality content, Google serves it to its customers. Many business owners make the grave mistake of assuming anyone can write blog posts that rank, so most identify one person in the organization who will write the content. While this is a good start, the mistake is that the person dedicated to publishing the content is often busy with other tasks and is often not passionate about content, so they produce mediocre content. The right way to approach it is to hire a professional writer, preferably an expert in the area that the company is looking to dominate in. There is enough trash on the internet, and the world doesn’t need more of it. So the professional writer should develop new research studies that add to the information already available—not regurgitate the same content. Writing content isn’t enough—your writer needs to be consistent. A good rule of thumb is to publish at least four weekly blog posts. When you regularly publish quality blog posts with fresh ideas, it’s only a matter of time before people and search engines make a note of it, and your website ranks.
Writing scattered content
Writing scattered content means writing content on non-related topics. For example, if you have an online store selling computers, cups, and mattresses, you will have a hard time ranking when you write one piece of content around computers, another on mattresses, and another on cups. This is because your website will never establish topical relevance, and search engines won’t view you as an authority in your industry and reward you. The best way to go about it is to create as much content around one topic as possible before moving to the next. For example, answer all the questions that people might have about mattresses before you create content around computers and cups.
Ignoring mobile
People only use their phones for social media and then go to their computers when searching for serious stuff, right? Well, wrong. Since they are always on their phones, they use them when looking to unwind on social media and when looking to buy a product or service. This means that besides optimizing your website for computers, you also need to optimize it for mobile phones. Thankfully, when you have quality content, you have an easy time doing it. The only thing you need to ensure is that your website is responsive. This means that anyone accessing the website can get the information regardless of the size of their mobile gadget. To test whether your website is correctly optimized for mobile, undertake a mobile-friendly test.
Failing to leverage web analytics
Once you have created a website and published quality content, all left is for you to sit back and wait as customers flood in, right? While this might work, in most cases, it doesn’t, and for you to be at the top of your game, you need to measure and analyze the data your website is receiving. Using web analytics, you can tell the keywords people use to find your website and the exact number of people visiting your site daily. The analytics even help you compare your site against your competition and identify any opportunities you might have missed. The best analytics tools to use are Google search console and Google analytics. Both are free, and all you need to do is to link them to your website.
Ready to rank?
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