Some SEO mistakes are well known, but many business owners are still doing them. SEO is an art and it is becoming more complex with every passing day. Somewhere it is challenging to perform website optimization strategy in most effective & efficient manner. No doubt your SEO expert is trying their level best to achieve best possible result for your website but if you are still not getting desired result then I think you must consider and evaluate these 5 obvious SEO mistakes before blaming to your SEO expert (I won’t be surprised if you are making few of them):
This is pretty common SEO mistakes. Eventually, businesses need to perform website migration and it can be quite tricky to do. 301 (for permanent) and 302 (for temporary) redirection can help minimize the impact of traffic and ranking lose during the migration of your website. It becomes difficult to find new URLs of internal pages without having proper redirection and most of the times it confuses search engine and website visitors both. Ultimately it will become nightmare and you will end up with a huge drop in the overall traffic, ranking and revenue. It may take many months of promotional effort to recover your old ranking and traffic. That’s why it is equally important to hire a SEO expert to work closely with your development team to make sure that all URLs are in place and it has proper redirection setup at URL level to avoid any negative impact of website migration.
Another common SEO mistakes that business owners make. Any website related changes can have an impact on website ranking and overall SEO performance. So, it is important for keep everyone in the loop before making changes and it’s all about proper communication. Typically I have observed (and sometimes faced) many instances where website owners don’t inform about proposed website related changes to SEO expert and it makes negative impact on ranking, traffic and revenue. As an example, changes of internal URL structure could diminish link building performance. Inbound links to internal webpages could be based on old URL structure. Search engine bots and real human users will encounter error when they follow the links. Even Google ranks those internal pages on page 1 for many keywords and URL change may drop your internal page ranking from search result page. Major website changes that need to be informed to the SEO expert are:
Due to server or design or faulty code related issues, loading speed can be slower than usual. After years of neglect, it takes longer for visitors to load a webpage in your website. You should realize that something is wrong when the loading speed is more than 5 seconds. It is painful for people to use slow websites and people may start closing your website tab in the browser. People expect that they are going to find their desired solution within couple of seconds after they click the link and if you website starts loading slowly; they will lose their patience and finally close the browser tab. A recent research tells that for every 1 second of delay in website load will drop the possibility of website conversion by 7%, page views by 11% and customer satisfaction by 16%. 7% drop in conversion just because of 1 second slow load speed is really a big thing. I’m just wondering what will happen if your website loads by 5 or 7 seconds slower than other websites? You will lose about 40% to 50% of your potential customers. So, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your website offers a smooth customer experience and your audience is getting whatever they are looking for and it is happening within a fraction of second. Even Google has officially announced that it will consider page load speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches so faster loading speed will increase the chances of getting better ranking position on search result page. That means; you will ultimately get high conversion rate and better ranking position both. You may check with some tools like Pingdom or maybe with Google’s page speed insight tool. I believe anything less than 3 seconds would be good page load speed and anything between 3 seconds to 5 seconds is average. If your website is taking more than 5 seconds to load then its high time, contact your developer immediately and ask them to optimize your website by compressing images, minify CSS, HTML/Java Scripts and to enable caching (if applicable). If you are still facing speed related issue then contact your hosting provider and ask them for better server. It makes no sense blaming your SEO expert for server related SEO mistakes.
Yes! It is true! In many cases, you are competing with your own website. Optimizing your website to beat the competitors is one thing, but focusing on the content is another. As an example, page A, B and C in your website talk about identical topics. All of them have good content, so they regularly compete for positions in search engine rankings, but unfortunately, none reach the top. Search engines can’t decide which page in your website that best matches specific topic and your link building effort is diluted or may be your SEO expert is promoting link A (because same content could confuse your SEO expert as well) but Google is feeling link B is matching better with the search query and because you are not promoting link B so you are not achieving desired result even after writing excellent content on your website. This problem is also known as keywords cannibalizations and you need to fix it immediately to get a solid ranking. Probably you should audit your content to identify topic duplication and take necessary action to fix this.
Creating quality and well researched content takes a lot of hard work and time. Content is the king and if your website has top-notch content, it will survive all Google algorithm update. Avoid using article spinners or hiring cheap content writers to churn out a large number of articles in a short period of time. The audience can easily see if your content is less relevant and they will immediately leave. High bounce rate is a bad sign and Google will notice that. If you have quality content, you will also get more inbound links, contributing to higher positions in the rank. When people arrive to your website, make sure that they will take the time to read your content.
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