You can still benefit greatly from SEO in 2018. As a matter of fact, SEO is one of the best inbound marketing approaches. If your site is not ranked on Google yet, this is the right time to develop a powerful strategy. But make sure you avoid some common search engine optimization mistakes. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. No KPI
What is your Key Performance Indicator for SEO? What do you want to do? Do you want to monitor your ranking, traffic, conversions or leads? With KPI, you can find out if your strategy is working for you. If you don’t have a KPI, you may not be able to know where you are heading.
2. Duplicate content
For ranking, you have to have unique content on your web pages. If several pages have the same content, be ready to get a penalty from Google. Your site may be downgraded. As a result, all your efforts will go down the drain.
Therefore, make sure your content is unique. Before you publish content on your blog or site, it’s better to check it with Copyscape or some other tool that you think is reliable.
3. Low quality content
Make sure you write for humans, not just search bots. What this means is that your content must be relevant, informative, grammatically correct, and optimized for relevant keywords.
It’s not a good idea to use article spinning software. Today, search engines have become extremely smart and they can detect if the content is written for humans or search engine bots.
4. Over optimization
By content optimization, we mean content that contains relevant keywords. Aside from this, the content should be coherent. If the content is not engaging, you will fail to keep the readers hooked. As a result, your bounce rate will be higher, which means lower chances of getting a higher rank.
Today, Google is smart enough to detect low quality content that has too many variations of keywords. So, make sure the text on your site is not over optimized.
5. Targeting wrong keywords
Your SEO strategy won’t work if you target wrong keywords. Based on your KPIs, make sure you create content that includes the right keywords. What this means is that you should opt for those terms that can help you achieve your business goals. In other words, they should help you get organic traffic, leads, engagement, conversions and sales.
Therefore, it’s better to have a solid strategy in place. You can use AdWords Keyword Planner for this purpose.
6. Poor link building
If you are buying or exchanging links, know that this is a big mistake and can get you a penalty from Google. When it comes to link building, you should keep in mind that quality should be your number one priority. Having 10 quality links is much more beneficial than having 100 poor quality links.
So, these are some of the common SEO mistakes that you may want to avoid in 2018 if you want to improve your search engine ranking.