6 Toxic SEO Mistakes

 

Getting your website found online isn’t easy due to the overwhelming amount of competition making it hard to reach the top of Google for your chosen keywords.

To achieve great rankings, find new customers and create leads you need to ensure your SEO strategy is on point. Here are 6 common SEO mistakes that are toxic for your website:

1) Not realising the importance of content

If your website doesn’t have decent content and the right phrases your SEO will suffer. The right phrases will help people find you when searching on Google and good content will keep those people engaged while on your website. Both elements are crucial for SEO.  

2) Not considering your audiences needs

Your audience should always come first. Think about who your readers will be? What will they want from you? What will they be searching for? What issues will they need resolved? And what are their needs and requires?

If you can deliver all this information to your audience via your website, Google will be able to match the content to relevant search phrases making it easier for your audience to find what they are looking for.

3) Copying content

We know writing content for your website is time consuming and dull but copying content is not a quick solution.

Copying content from other websites is against Google’s guidelines and you will be penalised for it. Not only will the page be de-indexed from Google, your entire website could be too if you continue to break their guidelines, making it impossible to be found within the search engine.

Content is too important to rush, it requires thought and planning to ensure everything your audience requires is covered. There are no shortcuts when it comes to content writing.  

4) Ignoring tags and headings

Title tags and headings tell the search engine as well as your readers what the webpage is about. It will be displayed on the search results page to entice people to click.

Your tags and headings should also include your primary keywords/phrases as they carry a lot of weight in terms of optimisation.

5) Complicated navigation

Every website should be user-friendly, which means it has to be clear, consistent and easy to navigate.

Without clear navigation your audience (and Google) will struggle to find pages throughout your website. If Google can’t find the page easily, they won’t index it which means it won’t be found on Google.

6) Not optimising for mobile

One of Google’s biggest algorithm changes of recent times was to favour mobile-friendly websites over non mobile-friendly websites.

This means if your competition has a mobile optimised website but yours isn’t then you are likely to appear below them within the search engine.