What are some common on-page SEO mistakes that website owners make, and how can you avoid them?
For many small businesses, having a strong online presence is critical to driving sales and revenue. However, many website owners make SEO mistakes that can hinder their website’s visibility and cause it to lose rankings.
(Searching in Google “Professional SEO Help“? Contact us today!)
Google’s algorithm changes and evolving search engine landscape can be a constant challenge to keep up with. It’s not enough to have a website that looks good and delivers a great user experience, you need to get it to perform to the best of its abilities.
The most effective way to do this is with a good content strategy that incorporates SEO best practices and standards. This includes a mix of written content, video, and social media posts that will keep your audience engaged with your brand.
While you may be eager to use keyword stuffing as a shortcut to search engine visibility, this practice is actually detrimental to your ranking. Search engines now recognize this technique and penalize sites that practice it.
Using generic high-traffic keywords to target a wide range of topics without any relevance to your site’s niche is another big mistake. It can dilute the topical focus of your pages and confuse both readers and Google about what your website is about.
Not only is this a bad SEO strategy, it also makes your site less relevant and valuable to visitors, which can result in a higher bounce rate. Bounce rates can be very important in determining the success of your search engine optimization efforts.
The key is to focus on keywords that bring the most value to your readers and ensure you’re incorporating them in a natural way throughout your content. This will help you build contextual relevancy and avoid keyword-stuffing penalties.
Registering your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is an excellent idea to let search engines know about the existence of your new website. This will help you monitor the performance of your pages, and provide Page Experience reports, indexing errors, and warnings that can help you quickly fix any site health issues.
Meta descriptions are an invaluable tool for displaying your website in SERPs and attracting clicks. Yet, a recent study found that almost 63% of websites have no meta descriptions, while 54% of them have duplicates!
You should always mark your headings correctly to help search engines understand the page hierarchy. Your title should be H1, major sections should be H2 tags and sub-sections should be H3 and H4 headings.
Implementing relevant structured data is a huge step in improving your website’s SERP visibility, so not doing it is a huge mistake! Structured data can include rich snippets of your product ratings, videos, recipe results and other types of information that people are searching for.
It’s also a good idea to incorporate relevant and unique content on your website since this will keep your visitors engaged and increase your conversion rates. Moreover, make sure your website is mobile-friendly and that it loads fast.