A good SEO strategy is central to online success. When you make it easy for search engines to find you, you receive better rankings on search result pages, and, consequently, more clicks and better conversion rates. For favorable ranking, we will discuss below a few SEO mistakes that you should avoid in 2020:
1. Stuffing keywords
Keywords guide search engine crawlers to make sense of your website and index your web pages accordingly. However, Google doesn't want you to put too many keywords in your posts. The technique is considered black hat SEO and will most likely take a toll on your ranking. Ensure your keywords are sprinkled evenly throughout your textual content and that many different variants of the key phrases are used.
2. Providing irrelevant content
When your content doesn't match the keyword you want to rank for, Google assumes your post is irrelevant and penalizes you for it. In a word, you can't solve keyword stuffing by writing plain content. Search engines want you to guide them with keywords but not dupe them into awarding you points you don't deserve.
3. Experimenting with your website
Search engine optimization is a broad topic that requires plenty of time to understand. Even seasoned SEO experts struggle to get the hang of some optimization tactics for websites in particular niches. This means you need an expert who truly understands your industry to get your SEO right. For example, if you run a law firm, you will need a company such as Black Fin Lawyer Marketing that caters to players in the legal industry. Non-specialists can get the basics right, but there are niche-specific tricks that they most likely wouldn't know.
4. Overlooking internal linking
An internal linking strategy may not carry as much weight as a backlink strategy, but its impact is still significant. Your website should be an interconnected network of webpages where users can find complementary information without searching for it in the navigation bar. A good internal linking strategy will reduce the bounce rate on your website and send a signal to Google that you are providing relevant content.
5. Not optimizing your pages for mobile devices.
Unlike 20 years ago, when the bulk of internet users used computers to access websites, everyone has a smartphone these days. Regardless of your target audience, there will be more mobile users navigating your web and blog content than PC users. You have to make your pages easily accessible and readable from the tinier screens. This is not something you can choose to do anymore. It is something you have to do or risk losing a lot of business. Search engines will penalize any site that isn't optimized for mobile. Additionally, such sites will receive high bounce rates, which will convey a message that something is not right with the content you are putting out.
Conclusion
There are hundreds of SEO guidelines to follow, and getting them all right is next to impossible. However, some mistakes carry a lot of weight and can significantly undercut your other efforts for favorable ranking. Start with the ones in this list and slowly streamline your SEO strategy by identifying and addressing the smaller mistakes.
