Your website is the centre of your digital world and right now it is the go to place for most people searching for products and services as COVID-19 has ushered along digital transformation at some pace. So, being found online is crucial.
This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key element of your inbound marketing strategy. SEO will help generate website traffic through various tactics such as completing meta descriptions and H1 tags. As well as writing fresh and relevant content for your website in the form of a blog with researched keywords and good navigation including internal links. The list goes on (we’ve listed further resources at the end of the article for you to tap into to help with your SEO campaigns) however for the purpose of this blog we wanted to highlight what to avoid so that your website is not negatively impacted.
Link building – Quality vs Quality
Link building is an important part of an SEO strategy. External links helps indicate to search engines that your website should be visited as they indicate importance and relevance.
However, these links need to be relevant and from trustworthy sources to build trust with prospects. So, the better quality of link from a trusted website is more likely to indicate to a search engine that you are a good quality website to show up in search results.
So, the main thing to remember is that it is quality over quantity. Understand and know the referring domains.
More on how link building can improve optimisation.
Don’t do nothing
It’s worth remembering that a search engine should be held in high regard like any other visitor to your website. So, you need to indicate to all visitors that you are current, relevant, knowledgeable and most importantly that you are open for business.
If the content on your website is out of date this will impact on where you appear in search engine results pages. The more people that view your fresh and unique content will help indicate to search engines that you are a good quality source of information relevant to return in results pages.
Update your website frequently, add new blogs, images, links and downloads.
Don’t copy content
Don’t infringe copyright. Respect fellow businesses. You are all trying to do the best you can to attract more customers. With blogs being a key part of an SEO strategy, you will ideally be uploading at least 2-3 blogs a month and much more if you have the time. But your content needs to be unique. You can’t copy an article as you will infringe copyright laws and incur penalties. Not only that, a search engine will see that it is duplicate and plagiarised content and this will go against you with organic search results.
Ultimately you are the thought leader in your field so talk about what you know. Help solve your customers and prospects challenges by giving them tips and advice. All the things you know about. This then comes from the heart and makes your brand authentic and trustworthy. Plus, with good quality unique content, this will help you in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Poor meta descriptions
The meta descriptions are ways to assist search engines in understanding what the page is all about. They can also provide the valuable first few lines in a search result listing – that little paragraph under the title that you can see when your search is returned to you. By not completing this you are failing to let search engines and potential visitors understand what they can read about on that specific page. So, when you complete it on the backend remember to include keywords relating to what is on that page.
Keyword stuffing
So, you’ve established your list of relevant keywords – those phrases that you want to be found for in search engines results pages. You’ve created a content marketing schedule of future blogs and you start to upload them to your website with keywords included. What you must not do is stuff that content with keywords. It will be repetitive, lack thought and knowledge. The content will not engage, it will not be insightful and therefore will end up with your bounce rate increasing. And, most importantly, search engines don’t like it.
Search engines will then penalise you for creating an article that is not relevant to your business. Readers might also feel cheated into reading a pointless article and this will go against you with search engines and lost prospects!
So, be thoughtful with your content and remember quality over quantity. It’s more important to have a quality read with one keyword over anything else as people will return to read more, people will share your article which will encourage new website visitors.
Broken links
Broken links in your website can have a detrimental effect on your website’s performance. Keep tabs on this through tools such as Semrush which can alert you to broken links. Fix them as soon as you can to avoid confusing search engines and creating a poor customer experience.
Not set up for local SEO
Make sure that you are set up on Google My Business – you may as well tell the biggest search engine that you are open for business, your website, contact details, address latest updates and offers. This will point back to your website providing a quality link. Repeat this process with other directories and make sure y our contact details are consistent. Watch our video alternative directories to Google My Business to help with your SEO.
SEO Croydon
So, you’ve got the idea of what to avoid. SEO is about attracting leads which includes search engines. In a nutshell, it’s important to create quality, unique and relevant content for your website to help improve your online presence in organic search and help drive traffic to your website.
We can work with you on your digital marketing strategy including a mix of tactics such as, web design, SEO services, social media management, Pay Per Click (PPC), email marketing and CRM – read more about our marketing services.