5 Mistakes Many Smart People Keep Making in SEO

5 SEO Mistakes many Smart People Keep Making_YWF-01

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

Understanding bounce rate in Google Analytics

Understanding Bounce Rate in Google Analytics

What’s Bounce Rate?

Bounce rate is a metric that shows you how many visitors that do completely nothing on the page they entered. This means they don’t give any response to your internal links on the page. Internal link means a menu item, a ‘read more’ link, or any other internal links on the page. In the other words, Google analytics server doesn’t get any trigger from the visitor.

This will cause Google to think these three things:

  1. The quality of the page is low. There’s nothing inviting to engage with.
  2. Your audience doesn’t match the purpose of the page, as they won’t engage with your page.
  3. Visitors have found the information that they were looking for.

In SEO perspective, it is important to optimize every aspect of your site. By looking closely at your bounce rate, you can optimize your website even further. No wonder many SEO services attempt to keep their client’s page free from any bounce rate.

But bounce rate doesn’t mean bad all the time. In fact, it is okay to have bounce rates in some cases. As bounce rate really depends on the purpose of the page. Bounce rate isn’t a bad thing per se if the purpose of the page is to purely inform. For example, read a post or find an address.

So, the best solution is by creating a segment that contains “New visitors” only. If you discover that bounce rate of your new visitors is high, it’s time reevaluate user engagement with your site. To reduce the bounce rate, you can add a clear call-to-action, a ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ button. Moreover, being clear from the start with what visitors could expect will also give good point to your bounce rate. There more things that you also need to consider when optimizing your page. For instance, internal links that point to related pages or posts. Having a menu that is easy to use will also prevent your site experience a high bounce rate.

From a conversion perspective, bounce rate can be used as a metric to measure success. Bear in mind changing the design of your page will shake your bounce rate. It will cause the bounce rate increase or oppositely decrease in bounces. This explains why you have low conversion rate.

Or you can also compare your site with other popular pages and learn from the pages with low bounces rates. Usually, an unnaturally low bounce rate is caused by an event that triggers the Google Analytics server. Think of pop-ups, auto-play of videos or an event you’ve implemented that fires after 1 second. Besides, you can also use a tool that can track scrolling counts. This count is helpful as you can know whether your visitors actually scroll down the page and read your content.

This makes bounce rate is different from exit rate. In general, exit rate is a metric that displays percentage of page views that were last in the session. So, it is about users deciding to end their session on your website on that particular page.