Getting your small business off the ground and gaining a reasonable market share is no walk in the park. One of the best ways to achieve total dominance over the market is through digital marketing.
Some small businesses will even take on small business loans specifically for these marketing drives. However, some business owners use SEO practices that end up disastrously not justifying the loan they took. This article shines a spotlight on the top 7 SEO blunders you should avoid.
What does mean SEO?
One way of improving the quality of your website to ensure it ranks higher in search engine results pages (SERP) is Search engine optimization.
Search engines use algorithms to cherry-pick the content that best answers a user’s query. A site that ranks higher is likely to get more traffic as people tend to click on a site that appears first when they key in their queries. Some of the ways to optimize your site are:
Use keywords: that search engine users and your competitors are likely to search or rank.
Link building: high quality and quantity of backlinks to your site proves the content is high quality and will lead to a higher ranking in Google and other search engines.
On-page optimization: this includes using keywords in your title tags and meta description.
Site-architecture optimization: internal links within your website will boost the website’s ranking. You can also use relevant anchor texts and ensure a fast site speed.
Benefits of Applying SEO correctly in your business
SEO is an effective marketing strategy. These are some of the benefits you will get by using SEO for your small business:
- Maintain high SERP ranking: SEO will increase your site rank, increasing organic traffic to that website. Top ranking sites get 90% of traffic, increasing sales.
- Cost-effective: most small businesses depending on small business loans cannot afford to invest in expensive marketing strategies. Compared to pay-per-click (PPC), SEO is cheaper and attracts more organic traffic.
- Increased conversion rate: most people searching on search engines are potential buyers. They will click on the top-ranking sites and might buy from them. The business will gain market share.
- Boosts credibility and trustworthiness: potential buyers trust the sites that rank highly on search engines. Ranking higher will boost your brand’s credibility.
- Gives a competitive advantage: most businesses are employing online marketing and SEO. You want to be ahead of the curve by applying this strategy.
SEO Mistakes You Should Know to Avoid
When optimizing the website, some mistakes might make you lose sight of your SEO goals. Some of these common mistakes are:
1. Using duplicate keywords: every page on your website should have unique keywords.
2. Not optimizing content: you will end up including irrelevant keywords, trying to rank generic keywords, ignoring search intent, or not optimizing page title, meta description, and anchor text.
3. Poor linking practices: avoid building too many links or linking to unrelated sites.
4. Outdated SEO strategies: avoid such tactics as private blog networks and create different pages for each keyword variation, as these will only attract ranking penalties.
5. Slow page loads: give your users the best experience by avoiding large images and redirects that lead to slow page loads.
6. Lightweight content: besides the SEO practices above, you have to deliver brilliant and in-depth content that provides comprehensive information.
7. Overlooking mobile users: using a conventional website layout will not work optimally for mobile users, sidelining more than 50% of all internet consumers.
Conclusion
SEO has proven to be an effective marketing strategy for most small businesses. You should avoid lousy SEO practices such as keyword stuffing, not optimizing content, and publishing thin content if you want a fruitful digital marketing campaign.
Follow the link in the introduction section to learn more about small business loans to help get your marketing campaign on the right track.
