How would you feel when you find that your hard work is pushing you back? When the more effort you put into your work the more negative the results? Everyone says hard work is the best route to success, but sometimes that may differ. Sometimes your hard work can damage you badly because you are moving in wrong direction. This can be happen in your SEO campaigns too. If you are conducting wrong SEO then you will not achieve desirable ranks. You are doing further wrong SEO that will eventually cost you your current position. And as you keep going with your wrong SEO you will get heavily penalized. That’s all there is to it.
Thus, it is very important that the effort you use or the money you invest should lead you to the right path along with the targeted traffic and business.
Nevertheless, in the last 5 years of my marketing career I have found some costly SEO mistakes which can destroy the whole campaign. Here are few I am going to share today.
Just Working on Homepage
Home page is the most important page of a website. So, no doubt it should get maximum priority. Google doesn’t mind it too. But it doesn’t mean that one should put all his/her efforts on the home page and neglect to put any value to his/her deep pages. Deep pages have their own value; they can drive traffic, earn and pass SEO juice, and should be equally optimized.
In terms of creating backlinks, one should never ignore deep pages. Creating backlinks for only the home page can make your site over optimized followed by penguin attacks. So working only on home page more and more can lead you to the door of SEO damage or algorithmic penalty. Check the image below to get an idea how unnatural it looks when Google sees some data like that.
Note: Deep pages should have 30-40% of the total backlinks to keep the marketing campaign safe and natural.
Lack of Keywords Diversity
Backlink is still one of the most important factors to get ranks for your site. That’s why hyperlink text is important. Backlinks help google to identify what the site is about or for what the site is known to others. But just think if someone is discussing your website, will all of them address you the same way? Some may use your domain name, some may use your title, some may use other long term phrases, even some may use non relevant terms like click here, visit this link etc. Some may write your domain with www or some may write it without www. So if you want to rank your campaign naturally then you must ensure that you are not using same exact keywords for all your backlinks, try to put as much variation as you can. Few common variations you can use
- Your web url (www and without www)
- Your business name
- Your primary keyword
- Your secondary keywords
- Visit this link
- This link
- Click here
- Check this website
- Can also use a few LSI keywords
Focusing More on Linkbuilding Rather than Onpage Optimization
Link building has the power to push a website for positive google ranking. However, it will only work when a site has good onpage optimization. Onpage optimization is the first and most important part of SEO. A good onpage optimization will not only help you get to the desired rank faster, it will also help you by reducing your offpage SEO budget. So without proper onpage SEO it will be super tough or impossible to rank a website by just pushing it through backlinks.
Targeting all Different Keywords for One Page
Last week I took a class in one of the leading SEO training institute in Bangladesh. I received some questions like, how many keywords I use for a page. This is really very tricky and tough to answer. I was asked similar questions in facebook, twitter and linkedin as well. Actually that is tough to answer. You can target 5 keywords, 10 keywords, 15 keywords. But it should be relevant. For example, if I sell various tryps of gates like driveway gates, iron gates, metal gates, wood gates and many more then do you think all of these keywords are good to target for the home page / any specific page? These are little different than one another. So if the keywords are different like this then it is not good to target all of them for one page.
Now let’s think about the other set of keyword, How to reduce bounce rate, ways to reduce bounce rate, bounce rate reduction tips etc etc. These are similar and can easily be targeted for one page.
So always target the closely related keywords for the page which better describe the content/theme of the page. If it can be done accurately then it will ensure better return from your SEO campaign.
Not Keeping an Eye on Analytics and Webmaster Tools
Sometimes Data can say everything. In every campaign you have to monitor the data to identify how the campaign is going. Let me give you a live example: what is the need of exams in study? Because an exam can say how the student understands the subject? In the same way, monitoring the data from analytic and webmaster tools can give you a signal if you are doing your SEO wrong or not.
For example, if you find your traffic has dramatically fallen down how can you identify what happened? The first step should be to look at the analytic and webmaster tool. Check when the traffic started reducing, was it normal and gradual or did the curve fall down dramatically. What was the date? Were there any kind of google updates released on that day? Have you got any email in your webmaster tool from google? Is your site indexing and working properly. Are you competitors building bad backlinks for your site? All of these data along with lots more can be found on analytic and webmaster tools which can help you modify/build your current/future SEO strategy.
See also: What Large Businesses Do and We Don’t
Giving Priority on Link Quantity
These days quantity has more psychological advantage than SEO. SEO is now all about quality and it needs quality site structure, quality content, and quality backlinks. 1 quality backlink from an author website can be more usefull than 1000’s of low quality backlinks. In my professionals career I have found so many clients who measure their investment on the number of backlinks they are getting. And after a certain period those clients pay some extra amount to remove those low quality backlinks they built earlier. So if you are serious about your SEO campaign then always avoid low quality backlinks even though they can be in larger numbers.
These are few of the most important mistakes most of online business owners do in terms of their SEO campaigns. Either they are not aware of it or they are not serious about it. But these things are equally important as your site’s security. So are you committing any of the mistakes I have just mentioned? If yes then it is time to work on it. If you need any consultancy related to SEO then don’t hesitate to contact me.
