Top 5 Common SEO Mistakes Google Says You Need To Avoid
Today, we’re going to talk about the Top 5 Common SEO Mistakes Google Says You Need To Avoid and teach you how you can avoid them.
1. Working with SEO before your site profiles value
Mistake number 1 is working with SEO before your site has any value proposition.
As yourself: “Why would a site choose my site in the search results”
- What differentiates your page compared to other competitors?
- Do you have lower prices?
- Great customer service?
- Better quality?
Starting with the value proposition simplifies SEO. No matter where your site ranks in search results.
If you want to stay on top, searchers need a value proposition: To click on your site, to come back and revisit your site and to recommend your site to their friends.
Focus on providing value a quality user experience.
2. Having a segmented approach
Let’s move to mistake number 2.
Having a segmented approach to SEO is like having a dinner plate, for example, sushi, with everything segmented and none of it working together.
This is great for your food, but it’s not as great when there is no communication between your marketing, business development, and the SEO teams.
A better and a more holistic approach to SEO is to consider the entire user experience. From a marketing campaign to the actual conversion.
And possibly – repeat business.
Vanessa Fox, a consultant and author on search engine strategy wrote about this type of segmented SEO approach with the respect to the Super Bowl when it’s difficult for companies to integrate their television ads with their online SEO efforts.
Vanessa noted that a car company spent millions on TV ads to leave users to a website, where users could edit their own car video.
During this campaign, it did not only help draw visitors to the website but actually helped the query to rank number 36 on Google hot trends.
Now, imagine if this were your company. As the SEO, you can’t just focus on your regular keywords that you do every day. But you also need to integrate marketing campaigns and optimize for the words your campaign has.
3. Time-consuming workarounds
Mistake number 3 is putting effort into time-consuming workarounds, rather than researching new features or best practices that can simplify your tasks.
For example: For sites with paginated content, in the past, some webmasters tried the workaround of using tactics on subsequent pages to their page one.
This, unfortunately, can cause a loss of content in Google’s indexes. The good news is that there are new best practices.
Google now supports rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup for paginated content. So your paginated article or product category is treated as a single series rather than having page rank diluted into the various components.
Also in the past, to have several new or updated pages crawled as quickly as possible, the webmaster might have performed the lengthy task of updating sitemaps with the new URLs, then uploading the new sitemap file and then submitting it to Google.
But, in 2011, Google expanded webmaster tools “Fetch as Google Bot” so that per week, you can submit up to 500 new or updated URLs that you’d like to be crawled.
Or, up to 10 URLs that you’d like crawled along with their linked pages.
When submitting through “Fetch As Google Bot” most pages are crawled within 24 hours.
If you wish to stay updated with news about Google, subscribing to the Google Webmaster blog is a must.
4. Getting caught in SEO trends
In the early days of search engines, both webmasters and search engines chased the user who was running the same race. Get more people to visit and to convert.
Then, as the market matured, things went a little crazy.
It was as if this race split into two simultaneous races, and rather than chasing users, some websites started chasing search engine algorithms.
Over the years, we have seen SEO trends take many forms. Around 2005 SEOs lost focus and spend countless hours editing their content for the optimal keyword density. Meaning keywords per page. Not a great use of their time if you ask Google
Instead, they could have better spent their time making their content readable, compelling and informative.
I’m sure you have a long list of SEO task. Try to avoid the SEO trends and instead prioritize tasks that will bring lasting value.
5. Slow iteration
Google have been known to say that the main constant in SEO is constantly evolving. The faster your team is to iterate, the better.
A good recipe is to:
- Define metrics for success
- Implement improvements
- Measure Impact
- Create new improvements
- Prioritize those improvement based on market and personnel
- Repeat
The advantage to having an agile SEO cycle is quite clear.
In 2009, Google launched rich snippets.
Recipe and event sites that could iterate quickly and implement the proper markup could now show much more appealing search results.
The same was true of video sites that were able to quickly create and submit video sitemaps.
Again, those who are agile get the benefits.
Those were the most common mistakes of SEO (according to Google) but let’s cover some of the “must do’s of SEO to reach success”.
- Do something cool
Have a value proposition that separates you from your competitors.
2. Include relevant keywords in your copy
There’s no need to think about keyword density but make sure your content includes the keywords people actually search for.
3. Be smart about your tags and site architecture
Title tags and meta description tags. And your site architecture.
4. Sign up for email forwarding on webmaster tools
This allows for important messages from Google such as notifications about crawling issues. Just make sure you check your inbox regularly so you’re not missing out on important notifications.
4. Attract buzz and natural links, votes, 1+s, follows
This helps bring natural links, great reviews, votes and followers.
5. Stay fresh and relevant
Perhaps expand your reach to social media sites. That’s a great place to reach your audience. Or, make sure your product is accessible on smartphones.
Final words
We hope that this article helps you avoid the common SEO mistakes and instead focus on the good practices that can give you long-lasting positive benefits.
