When you invest your marketing capital in professional SEO companies, you want your website to rise in search engine rankings. It would be unfortunate to know that your w…
When you invest your marketing capital in professional SEO companies, you want your website to rise in search engine rankings. It would be unfortunate to know that your website ranking has become worse with time rather than getting better. Of course, there has to be something wrong with your SEO strategy that’s causing this decline in your rankings. So what could those mistakes be? It’s better to find out the fault and fix it rather than not knowing the fault and committing it repeatedly. To help you understand what might hurt your SEO rankings, here are the top 5 mistakes to keep an eye on and avoid.
- You Are Focusing on Quantity of Backlinks
If you think a huge number of backlinks will boost your SEO ranking, you are living 2 years in the past. There was a time when the quantity of backlinks was among the metrics that were considered for a website’s ranking. Today, you have to focus on quality backlinks. If you did not know already, Google even introduced a “disavow” tool to help online websites get rid of backlinks that they considered low quality and shady. This was a direct message from Google that it was going to weigh only quality backlinks. The update was then rolled and low quality backlinks were punished.
- You Use Too Many Keywords
If you look at the past Google ranking algorithm updates, you will realize that Google shifted its entire focus on quality. From backlinks to the web content, Google wants quality because it wants to deliver high quality results to its users at the end of the day. In terms of the content, Google wants you to give information rich and useful content to your website visitors. Not to mention, this high quality content keeps visitors on your website too. Longer visitor stays on your website also contribute to your SEO rankings.
- You Are Targeting All Keywords
The most important thing about SEO is often said to be keywords. That’s just a half-truth. The most important thing for SEO is relevant and potential keywords. When you research and work on your industry-specific keywords, you will realize that some keywords don’t work for you as good as others. They might be relevant to your industry but the amount of traffic they bring to your website might be negligible. Therefore, what you want to do here is make a group of keywords that have really received a significant response from people. Bidding on keywords that don’t work for you is just waste of money.
- You Are Ignoring Mobile
Today, there is more traffic on the internet from mobile devices than there is from non-mobile devices. Looking at this big change Google made immediate adjustments. It announced that websites optimized for mobile devices would get better rankings when a user searches for something on a mobile device. So, if a mobile user searches for a keyword that you and your competitor have your websites optimized for, your competitor’s website will appear in the results, not yours because you don’t have a mobile friendly website. It is up to you to have a mobile website built separately or go for a responsive design.
- Your Website Loads Slowly
There can be many reasons why your website loads slowly. Maybe your website was coded roughly and the long strings of codes are causing the website to load slowly. Maybe the images on your websites are very large. Sometimes the plugins required for your website to load properly are causing it to slow down. Whatever the reasons are, your SEO company needs to work on those issues, inform you about them and have them resolved as soon as possible.