As businesses become increasingly online, SEO is paramount in ensuring your small business is noticed by its target audience. Thanks to SEO, a solid online presence can be created without spending too much time and resources on advertising. While a key part of SEO involves pandering to the search engine algorithm, there are many more factors that affect SEO growth.
Search engine optimization, in reality, involves a combination of factors. Use the right set of keywords, write human-friendly content rich in value and information, and design a website that offers an impeccable user experience for optimal SEO performance.
While using a reliable free rank tracker can do miracles in finding keywords and analyzing your competitors, it is still vital that you look at SEO beyond the lens of keywords. SEO is all-encompassing, and oftentimes, many small businesses do not realize this, leading to them having a superficial and low-impact strategy. Such a strategy could drive early results but may not sustain the growing traffic and eventually fail.
If you are looking to take your small business to the next level, here are all the SEO mistakes to avoid (and what to do instead) to turn your website into a lead-generation machine:
Not Thinking Local
Local SEO can be a game-changer for a small business. Since a small business’s first consumer base is its locality, it is vital that people around you can find your business. Optimizing your SEO to meet the needs of your local audience will ensure you always have relevant footfall on your website or physical store.
By connecting with the local community, your business can forge a network of consumers who think of your business whenever they want to purchase. Often, business owners assume that being present online is sufficient for people in the neighborhood to know about your business, but the truth is far from it.
How to Fix it:
- Create your Google Business Profile and update it with correct information about your business.
- Focus on creating location-specific content pieces with short and long-tail location-based keywords.
- Create local content pieces and request your customers to share feedbacks about your business. User-generated content is highly regarded by search engines. User feedbacks will also help boost your local business rankings.
Insufficient Keyword Research
Keyword research is crucial when aiming to take your online business beyond the scope of boundaries. By conducting efficient research, you will find trending keywords to use, keywords that are easy to rank for, and any potential opportunities you are not leveraging yet.
Using incorrect keywords will make finding your website challenging for search engines, resulting in no organic traffic. In addition, not keeping search intent in mind, neglecting long-tail keywords, using only a single keyword throughout the webpage, and focusing on only broad keywords can lower your ranking potential.
Another crucial aspect of keyword research is competitor analysis, which helps identify keywords with high-ranking potential that your competitors aren’t currently using.
How to Fix it:
- Spend time understanding your target audience and their search intent. Use an adequate tool like RankWatch to conduct keyword research.
- Look closely at what your competitors are doing and areas they aren’t covering yet. Focusing on covering those keywords can help climb SERP rankings.
- Avoid practices like pushing exact-match keywords or stuffing your content with keywords. It will make your website seem spammy and lower authority.
Publishing Low-Quality Content
Low-quality content can make it challenging for search engines to understand the value your business provides to its target audience. This can significantly lower your website’s authority and credibility. As a small business, it is crucial that you consistently produce high-quality content that is enriched with verified and dependable content.
It is also essential that your website does not have plagiarized content to avoid getting penalized or losing rankings on SERPs. Other low-quality content effects can include losing brand reputation, higher bounce rates, difficulty keeping your customers engaged for a long time, lower user experience, and loss of potential to earn quality backlinks.
How to Fix it:
- Instead of publishing content in haste, spend time understanding what your target audience wants, their search intent, and what keywords are relevant to your business niche.
- Focus on adding more elements to your content pieces to add more depth. Make sure that the content being published is well-researched.
- Audit your website to find pages with errors (3xx and 4xx) and duplicate content. These factors can lower your website’s quality and, eventually, its rankings on SERPs.
Bottom Line
SEO allows small businesses to demonstrate their expertise and earn the trust of their target audience. However, to ensure that your business website wins every customer, it should be enriched with relevant keywords (both short and long-tail) and have high-quality content. Another crucial aspect to remember is to stay ahead of your competitors by constantly analyzing what they are doing, areas they aren’t leveraging yet, and how your business can have an edge over them.