Hi there! Lots of website owners and marketers start optimizing their sites without the help of SEO experts. It’s great, as there are lots of guides on the web and you don’t need significant expertise to learn SEO basics.
However, at the beginning of their way, they can’t help but make some common mistakes. Here are the most popular ones:
Wrong keywords
Of course, everyone knows that the keywords’ quality is more important than their quantity. Unfortunately, most of the mistakes are still associated with keywords. It’s not enough to collect all the possible key phrases.
Keywords irrelevance
If your keywords aren’t relevant to the subject of your site, don’t wait for high rankings. Implementing irrelevant keywords, you won’t reach your target audience.
For instance, if you sell building materials and another site is a blog about building houses, your aims, as well as keywords, will be different. Having a commercial website, you’ll use such phrases as ‘building materials online shop,’ ‘price list of cement,’ ‘order building materials online,’ etc. For an informational site on the same subject, your key phrases will be ‘build house,’ ‘how to build a house,’ ‘can I build a house,’ etc.
High keyword difficulty level
This factor is crucial for you if you’ve just entered the niche. Keywords with incredibly high search volume have a high keyword difficulty level as well. So, don’t hurry up collecting extremely popular phrases.
Start selecting keywords with low or middle keyword difficulty level. Most of the Keyword Research tools now may provide you with this score. In my opinion, Serpstat provides the most accurate data on the keyword difficulty:
Irrelevant Title tags and Meta descriptions
The data given in title tags and meta descriptions form the snippet shown in the SERP. It influences users’ decision on whether to visit your page or not.
Not using relevant meta title and description may also cause deterioration of behavioral factors. What does it mean? Let’s imagine you search for ‘iphone xs’. You may be willing to find out its features and news about it. Search engines show you both informational and commercial results:
You’ll open only those pages which have informational intent, as you’re not going to buy anything. If some website selling smartphones doesn’t mark its commercial intent in its snippet, you may visit it and fail to find the necessary information.
In this case, the time you spent on a website will be very short. Search engine robot will notice it crawling the website and decide that the page isn’t relevant to the search question. In this case, the page will lose its position in search results.
How to fix it
To make sure you didn’t make any SEO mistakes conducting keywords analysis for the title, h1 and the text of your page, you can check it with Serpstat Text Analytics.
To do it, start with Keyword Clustering: create a project and attach URL of the page you want to analyze > add all the keywords you use on your page > select a search engine and region > chose a type of clustering > click on Finish.
When the result is ready, open the project and click on Start text analysis. Its results provide you with automated suggestions for optimizing meta tags and text of the page:
Technical optimization
These mistakes are the most crucial ones, as they impact whether search robots will crawl your website properly.
Low website speed
All the website owners want to create an engaging design and add various images, videos or documents, but fail to consider that all these features affect their page speed.
Time needed for loading is one of the factors that are important not only for crawlers but also for your visitors’ experience on your site - people won’t wait long for your webpage to load. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insight to monitor your website speed.
Not optimized visuals
Not optimizing your visuals you lose great opportunities of improving your ranking. First of all, limit their size, not to lower your page speed. It’s very convenient to use jpg format for photos and png for graphics.
Not optimizing your website for mobile
Some marketers ignore mobile optimization and lose a great deal of traffic. More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones.
What’s most important, from July 2018 Google considers mobile page speed when ranking websites for the mobile search results. So, make sure that optimizing mobile page speed is the second thing you do after optimizing your desktop version.
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