Before starting this article, I would like to remind you that everyone makes mistakes, so whether you have been in this industry for years or a new player, you will likely make mistakes and the only way to minimalize the mistakes is to learn about your mistakes. There will be many SEO mistakes to talk about, but primarily, we want to share some of them with you, so that you can identify and avoid them and then hopefully, it can gain you success faster and more efficiently. If you are a business owner, don’t forget to share this knowledge to your SEO services agency too.
- Serving Bots Before Humans
If your SEO efforts are still all about chasing algorithms, or trying to trick search engines, you’d better leave it all behind, since now what it takes to rank well today is exactly the same as what it takes to satisfy visitors.
Unfortunately, many people still think about putting bots above actual humans which can result in ineffective tactics like keyword stuffing, specific content length, and manipulative linking schemes. I understand that this kind of thinking works in the olden days, but in today’s SEO environment, you really need to change your paradigm.
This is because the main priority in SEO is to always focus on your human visitors, since they are the people that will buy and use your products or services. For example, the main idea of creating a mobile-friendly website is to satisfy mobile users with lots of useful, original, and well-written content that can load quickly.
- Thinking about Tactics Instead of Strategies
Many people still mislead between tactics and strategies. In fact, this confusion has become a big problem which causes people to be inefficient and aimless. Therefore, it is important to achieve significant long-term success by having a clear understanding of the difference between the two; here are the simple ways to differentiate them:
- Strategy: A big picture objective that will give you a significant competitive advantage.
- Tactics: The actions you have to take to achieve that strategy.
For example, when you want to sell things online, you will use social media selling as your strategy, but providing lots of content per day to make people aware of your products is the tactic.
- Failing to Accurately Track Performance
It is important to know exactly how you’re performing, so that you can see whether you’re making sufficient progress or not. Furthermore, instead of relying on your gut instinct, you can try to track your performance through so many powerful tools available that can range from Google Analytics and Search Console to paid tools like Raven, SEMrush, and Moz.
With those tools, you can increase what is working and fix or eliminate what isn’t working well in your campaigns. Besides, you can detect any problem early and it will also allow you to correct it early.
- Taking Advice from Questionable Sources
With internet, you can easily find a lot of information, but you need to be careful as information that you get from the internet may have been out-dated, or they can be hoax too. On the other hand, SEO has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. This surely makes it is easy for you to find information that is flat-out false. Therefore, you need to stay on top of SEO by reading the top publication from the trustworthy sources. Furthermore, since SEO is a constantly and rapidly evolving industry, you need to keep learning from many reputable sources.
- Not identifying Worthwhile Key Performance Indicators
In SEO, there are many things that you can use as your key performance indicator. However, not all things can be used as a good KPI; it depends on the context. For example, if you determine the number of new links on your website as a KPI, then you will call it a win if there are a lot of links coming from one website, and this is not true, as the links can also come from comment spam.
Therefore, your KPI must be objectively measurable and tied to a specific business goal, such as getting in front of ideal prospects, generating positive PR, or generating revenue, such as a link within content that’s relevant to what you do.
By knowing the 5 mistakes that even smartest people often do, you can prevent yourself from doing the same mistakes. Hopefully, after performing good SEO strategies, you can easily run a good SEO performance for growing and improving your business.
