You have invested countless of hours building your website. The website looks great and you are happy with your work. You submit the website to Google and hope to start generating traffic within a short period. However, many months later, your website does not appear anywhere close to the first page of Google and your business is struggling. This article will explain the most SEO content mistakes that could be costing you traffic.
Targeting Search Engines Instead of People
A common SEO mistake many people make is to forget that the content is read by people. For this reason, they write content that is targeted towards the search engines. Instead of doing this, you should create high quality content that add value to your readers. Doing this has a number of benefits, which include:
- It will help increase the number of backlinks.
- It will help you establish yourself as an expert in your industry.
- It will increase the number of people who share the content.
- It will help increase the number of email and social media subscriptions.
Keyword Stuffing
Google ranks articles based on keywords. For an article to rank well, it needs to have the keyword on the title, meta, and in the body. A common mistake many people make is to stuff the keyword inside the body. This means having the keyword appear in the article many times. This is wrong for a number of reasons. First, Google’s algorithm hates keyword-stuffed articles. Second, such article is very difficult for one to read for the readers. Finally, it’s aim is to beat the search algorithm instead of solving the readers problems. Consider the image below.
No Specific Keyword
While your articles should aim to be organic in nature, they should also be optimized for the search engines. This is because, Google’s algorithm ranks articles based on the keywords on the title. For example, if you search the keyword ‘lose weight’, the titles of the articles you will see will have that keyword. This keyword should be on the title, the body of the article, and in all images that you use. These attributes will Google’s algorithm identify your article and rank it.
No Internal and External Links
Another common SEO content mistake is to avoid any links on their articles. Internal links are those that point to other pages on your website while external links are those that point to pages in other websites. When analyzing a page, Google’s algorithm tries to find the most useful content to serve its users. As such, it prefers pages that link externally because this helps provide reference to the content. Therefore, all your articles should have internal and external links.
Building too Many Links too Fast
As mentioned above, backlinks are very important in how Google ranks its pages. However, the reality is that Google values the quality of backlinks that an article generates. As such, it penalizes people who use tricks to gain backlinks and game the system. To avoid this, you should develop quality content that people will link to organically. When you move very fast, your website can be flagged as being spam. In addition, you should avoid buying links because this will be waste of money. Doing this will be a major SEO content mistake that will cost your website.
Targeting to a Global Audience
Another SEO content mistake many people make is to target a global audience even when their target market is local. The challenge with this is that competition in a global scale is very big, meaning that your content will likely not rank high. For example, since our company targets customers from Cyprus, we decided to optimize our content to Cyprus customers. Here, the competition is relatively little, which makes it easy to rank higher.
Final Thoughts
To rank high on all search engines, content is very important because it is what Google uses to rank websites. While there are other mistakes you might be doing, these six SEO content mistakes are the most common ones.
If you are struggling to rank, our team at SoftwareCY can help you create intuitive search engine-optimized content for your website.
