5 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid and 5 Ways to Boost your Web Strategy

In the small business world, acquiring leads by drawing people organically to your site is a goal that takes time, patience and expertise. As an industry leader in the digital marketing field, Absolute Marketing Solutions crafts strategies for our clients incorporating many of the latest rules and practices of SEO as part of a larger strategy to acquire qualified leads. Our job is to make sure that websites perform well, adhere to the latest algorithms and most importantly – look and feel good to the end user. Here are five common mistakes made in the SEO game, followed with 5 solutions to maximize your small business’ online effectiveness.

5 Common SEO Mistakes:

1. Choosing the wrong keywords: let’s say you’re doing SEO for an intellectual property lawyer in Manhattan. Don’t choose the word “lawyer” as your keyword, because chances are very unlikely that you will ever rank for it. Research keyword opportunities in Google AdWords keyword planner, and see that while you might not get as much traffic from a long-tail keyword such as “copyright defense lawyer in Manhattan” but at least whoever is searching for it could be more motivated to hire you at that time.
2. Learn who your true competitors are. Lots of SEO’s ask their clients who is their competitor, and sometimes they name companies simply because they like their site, or know them from the industry. However, are they really doing better than your company? What keywords are they ranking for? What about direct and indirect competitors?
3. Technical, or on page optimization needs to be done in a way that appeals to both search engines, but most importantly – your target audience. In desperation to rank for a particularly keyword, many SEO’s can resort to poor on page optimization that will result in a terrible user experience. Your customer doesn’t need to read “copyright defense lawyer in Manhattan” ten times on a single page. Be smart and be sensitive. If readers get frustrated and click away soon after entering your page, Google will believe that page to be of poor quality and won’t favor it despite the prevalence of the right keywords.
4. Don’t forget to have a mix of long tail and mid tail keywords. Don’t just choose head terms. Try to think of what someone would search for in order to find you. Never lose sight of the human element in doing SEO.
5. Don’t neglect the importance of Local SEO. For many businesses, missing out on local can be a huge detriment to their overall SEO strategy. Explore and research what is the local competition and make sure your NAP (name, address, phone number) is consistent everywhere it’s published. If you have more than one variation of your address, Google will think you are separate business entities, and that will decease your local influence in this respect.

5 Ways to Boost Web Strategy:

1. Establish what the business’ goals are, and set up conversion funnels on the site. For instance, if a business needs to collect email addresses for an email list, create a signup form that counts how many entries are placed over time. Establish that as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to measure your success.
2. Measure EVERYTHING. Some businesses don’t understand or realize the value of marketing unless they see an upward spike in traffic. An upward spike in traffic could be useless. Bottom line is customers, conversions, and seeing those numbers and percentages increase over time.
3. On page optimization. Without on page optimization, your site is not going to rank for anything. Make sure your list of keywords is reflected in the titles, metas, H1’s, and of course within the body of the content. Make sure it sounds like it’s written by a human being, and don’t stuff your keywords for the sake of it.
4. Rich snippets and data highlighter. Markup as much as possible on products, services, and anything else that website has to offer.
5. Alt tags. Sometimes people find sites by performing image searches. Make sure all your images have alt tags and they’re relevant to the page they land on.

There are a number of activities and tools that can be utilized to harness the full power of digital marketing to you and your business’ benefit. If you have any questions about creating a digital marketing strategy, contact the team at Absolute Marketing Solutions today!