Editorial Staff
Making mistakes is part of the learning process and it is common when it comes to SEO.
You’ve might have completed all the SEO modules in our SEO school, and apply it accordingly. But what about the SEO trap that most of the marketers falls into?
How can you avoid these traps so that you won’t waste any of your energy and traffic lost?
Therefore, our experts have shared the most common SEO mistakes that the marketers make, as well as the solutions to avoid it.
SEO Mistake 1: Obsessed in Creating Content and Forget About Link Building
The most common mistake for most of blog owner is when they are prioritizing to produce content and totally forgotten about link building.
You might have list down tons of keywords you wish your site rank for, and then you’re overly obsessed in producing content in daily basis and forgetting about the backlink part.
You have a bank of content now, but since none of the external link are pointing to your pages, they will result in zonk.
The SEO juice from backlinks might take long time for it to work, and it get stronger by the time.
This is why, it is recommended to start the link building process the same ratio as the content you produce.
Must it be 50-50 effort between creating content and link building?
We recommend you to take 70% of your effort in creating content, and spend 30% in link building.
Every time you finished creating some articles, stop creating a new one for a while and start analyzing each content performance and start build link around the best performing content.
SEO Mistake 2: Quantity Content Over Quality Content
We’ve seen a lot of blogger that produce the content daily with the mindset “the more content published, the higher chance rank in SERP”.
When we checked, each of the content only contains 500 words with poor quality on it.
This is entirely wrong and it does not work that way.
Unless your site has giant authority like Forbes or NYTimes (they can rank a content on page 1 Google with just 500 words within few days), you shouldn’t do it this way.
It is better to produce 1 high quality content with 2,500 words per week rather than creating 10 thin and low quality content per day that will never rank.
Especially, if you’re site is considered new, you won’t stand a chance to compete a higher authority sites with just 500 words and low quality content.
Remember, quality over quantity.
SEO Mistake 3: Quantity Backlinks Over Quality Backlinks
Quality over quantity is also works in the link building process.
Again, we’ve seen a lot of marketers buying cheap backlinks from DA 50+ without do a proper analysis on the site’s overall SEO metrics.
In our module, we have explained that even a 2 weeks old domain can get 50+ DA with the black hat SEO method. This is why, you must always check the other metrics like TF, traffic, age, and DR to check if the site is really good to place backlink. Go check out our course 3 to refresh your memory about the SEO metrics!
Having a numbers of unique referring domain backlink is good, but having a backlink from a high quality site is even better.
For example, it is better to have a backlink from a real high authority site with 40+ DA, good TF, 80+ DR, 100K Traffic than hundreds of backlinks from 50+ DA PBN sites with DR 10, low TF, low traffic, and <5K Traffic.
SEO Mistake 4: Focusing Heavily on One Facet of SEO
Focusing too much on one method isn’t healthy. Specializing your SEO drives efficiency, but it isn’t driving stability.
Every month or two, we see a big Google update. And like clockwork with each change, we see stories about people reporting large losses across numerous websites. You can’t avoid algorithm changes, but you can be prepared.
Avoid relying too much on one method. If your focus is on on-site methods, branch out into link building or vice versa. You will seldom read about a website with a solid and organic backlink profile and great content permanently losing its position. Balance is the key.
SEO Mistake 5: Seeing SEO as One-Time Fix
The most common mistakes we see from all the new digital marketers are thinking that SEO is a one-time fix to the website as opposed to their on going PPC campaign that they monitor regularly.
SEO is an optimization that you need to do in regular basis, starting from link building, internal linking, finding orphaned content, website speed and even keyword rank tracking.
For example, one of our clients done the SEO for one-time and claiming that their site traffic dropping a year later. When we checked, their site has installed bunch of new unnecessary plugins that are slowing down their site speed.
Then, we also found out that their site has published over 200+ new pages without proper internal linking, and SEO optimization.
From this sample, you can see that optimizing SEO is not a one-time job and must do in regular basis.
SEO Mistake 6: Giving Up in SEO Too Quick
The biggest SEO mistake marketers commonly make is thinking SEO is a short-term strategy. Too often, marketers are giving up quickly because their SEO metrics don’t improve.
It’s important to know that SEO is a long-term process and you will rarely see substantial organic traffic growth if you work on SEO for just a few weeks.
Don’t try to game the system and trick search engines with cheap tactics. In the long run, you will get penalized. What you want is to keep producing high-quality content on your website and distribute that content.
Don’t give up on SEO and content creation. If you don’t see any increase in your organic traffic during the first couple of months, that’s completely normal. What you want to do is be consistent with your content creation and promotion. SEO will follow, but don’t be impatient.
SEO Mistake 7: Wrong Understanding About UX Concept
One of the common mistakes done by the SEO newbies is thinking the UX is always about the good and fancy design of their website.
They think that by having a classy font, some animation effects on their homepage, can increase the user experience.
In fact, all of these features are just slowing down your website.
According to the our research, if it is takes more than 3 seconds for a website to load, half portion of the visitors will bounce back.
So, it doesn’t matter if your site has all these fancy design and theme, if at the end your user will just exit your site without even seeing all the features mentioned above.
SEO Mistake 8: Trying to Rank For Generic Keywords
If you want to rank in Google you have to make sure that you’re using the right keywords for every page. One of the biggest mistakes we frequently encounter is that site owners optimize their pages for generic keywords.
If you are a relatively small business that wants to rank for ‘rental car’, you’re aiming too high. Try to come up with something more specific. Otherwise, you’re competing with all the car rental companies all over the world, which is impossible to do!
You could, for example, add the area in which your company is located to the keyword. But there’s more you can do to make your keywords more long tail, as we call it.
The longer and more specific the keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for this keyword. Of course, this also means that the search volume for this keyword is lower. But you can compensate for this by optimizing a lot of pages on your site for different long tail keywords.
Your site will eventually gain more traffic for all of these keywords combined, than it ever would if you optimized for one main keyword, for which your page will never rank on page 1 in Google.
SEO Mistake 9: Failing to Keep People on Your Site
You might now have several pages that rank on Google SERP and get many clicks from a various keywords.
Once the visitors land on your page, the next step is to keep them sticking around your site. You don’t want your visitors to exit your page the moment they finished reading that specific content.
The best way to do it is by having a suggested post that is closely related to the current page that your visitors are reading.
By adding internal links, your site visitors and Google will know what pages are related to each other and can be interesting when they’re looking for information on a certain topic. So make sure to spend time on your internal linking to create a great site structure that keeps people on your website!
Bottom Line
We know that SEO is a lot of work. And that it’s not easy to remember all the different parts that you need to work on. But it is important to do so, on a regular basis.
You don’t want one of the mistakes we discussed to cost you your rankings. So make sure to: focus on site speed, write great content and optimize for the right keywords. If you make sure people visit your site and don’t leave right away, have great calls-to-action, link internally and prepare for mobile. Do all of this and you’re already on your way to a well-optimized website, the holistic way.
