2 Major SEO Mistakes and How to Fix Them
· BlueHat Marketing
No matter what your business is, it is important to adapt your strategies as the world around you changes, and not doing so severely decreases your SEO power. There are some egregious mistakes that many are still making in their SEO strategies. Being an outdated SEO strategist is a hindrance to the earning potential of freelancers and businesses alike. So let’s look at 2 major SEO mistakes that you may still be making, and how to fix them quickly.
Bad: targeting single, highly competitive keywords.
If you were a business at the dawn of the internet age, then targeting a single, overly-general keyword such as “shoes” would be a good idea. Too bad it’s 2015, and the internet is no longer the under-populated, too-high-tech, normal society outlier that it once was. These days it is a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog business world where people scrape and claw to get ahead. It’s certainly still a lucrative place to be, but it’s a lot harder than it used to be to get noticed.
If you are still targeting single keywords like hats or shoes, you are likely doing things wrong. Sure, it might get you a lot of visitors or views, but it is unlikely to draw any customer that actually wants to buy your product.
Good: Targeting long-tail keywords.
There are a few reasons why it is better to target long-tail keywords. Basically they are just longer, more specific keywords. For example, a long-tail keyword could be Knicks T-shirts instead of shirts. See why this a better idea? Let’s keep with our Knicks experiment. If I’m looking to buy a Knicks T-shirt, that is almost certainly what I am going to type into the search bar, right? And if that is what your company happens to be selling, you want me to come to you.
This example is cut and dry, but what if we had a more difficult situation? I used to work for a furniture store in a town loaded with the most furniture stores of anywhere on the east coast per capita. My boss mistakenly wanted us to rank for furniture, but it’s easy to see why that’s a huge mistake in an area that literally had over 30 furniture stores. We were much better off ranking for teakwood furniture or dining room furniture, two things that we specialized in, and could therefor rank higher for. The other big advantage here is that someone searching for something more specific is much more likely to buy when they find what it is they were looking for as opposed to something like “furniture” or “T-shirts”.
Bad: Writing dull, unnatural text.
This might sounds simple, but I don’t necessarily mean that this is the same as writing bad content. Everyone knows that bad content is an SEO killer. If you have terribly-written, spammy, useless content on your page, then it is going to hurt you. What I am talking about here is having content that doesn’t reflect how the user searches for your content. A lot of the time it is simple. If you are selling cars then you use car or car dealership or used car dealership, and you should be set. But if you are running a different kind of website, say an SEO company or blog, then it would be detrimental for you to write something like “SEO improvement” as a blog or page title. While writing that might get your point across, it certainly isn’t the best you can do. What you should have written was…
Good: Writing how people search.
“How to improve your SEO.” This is by far the better choice. Back in the day, I was using search engines with a greater degree of success by writing things in question form since that would always direct me to exactly what was needed. Nowadays everyone does it. So even though I look less cool than I did before, it is overall better for us marketers and business people, because that means the visitor gets to exactly what they want. Titling things in the way that people search for them is a sure fire way to increase your clout with the search engines.
A solidly managed SEO campaign can mean the difference between success and failure. Too often, people are either lazy or misinformed, and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This is very hurtful to your earning power. Do not continue to make these two major SEO mistakes. They are easily corrected, and can make a world of difference.
For help with improving the power of your SEO campaigns , call the experts at BlueHat Marketing.
