Common SEO Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

Search Engine Optimization is a powerful tool that can really make a difference for your business. It is, however, a complicated and protracted process that requires expertise, care, and attention. If you choose to forego agency help and tackle SEO yourself, there are several common pitfalls to avoid. This blog post covers a handful of the mistakes we tend to see when small business owners go it alone in the world of SEO.

Keywords are at the heart of SEO. When we select keywords for our customers, we use a combination of experience and thorough research. Be sure to spend the time checking the search volume and difficulty of the keywords and phrases you’re choosing and be prepared to make changes if you’re not seeing results.

Google’s algorithm doesn’t like duplicate content on a website. That’s because duplicate content makes it difficult for Google to discern between pages and establish a hierarchy, making ranking pages impossible. Where this might seem like an insignificant problem, it can actually be detrimental to both pages, resulting in lower rankings for both and a whole lot of wasted opportunity. Be sure to rewrite content so that you don’t repeat yourself; it will help you with rankings and, just as importantly, user experience.

Content creation should always involve your best efforts so that users can get the information they want and so Google understands that your website is a legitimate source of information. When you have poorly written content or a low word count, Google won’t rank your page highly. It can also be detrimental if your page is light on multimedia, such as video or images. If you create valuable content that is well written and has plenty of supporting media, it’s a better experience for the humans who visit your page—and you can expect Google to treat it accordingly.

SEO is an organic process that is cumulative and steady. Results don’t happen overnight. But when they do, it can be revolutionary for your business. We have clients who have doubled their sales pipeline in six months from SEO alone, but there is no shortcut. It’s important to understand that, with a little time and money, results will come. As tempting as it is to change everything up or simply abandon your SEO goals, it’s critical that you hold steady and wait for the steady climb in rankings.

It can be very easy to forget to create punchy, effective meta tags for your webpages, but without them you don’t control what users see in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is detrimental to user experience and Google picks up on that. Also, duplicate meta tags are equally problematic: they make it hard for search engines to determine rankings between the two pages, much like duplicate webpage content. Always create meta tags and always compose them from scratch because rewriting (or, technically, patchwriting) can lead to not enough differentiation in the language.

If Google has to wait too long for your page to load, you’re going to get penalized with lower rankings. Poorly written scripts, too many plugins, bloated code… there are many reasons for a slow page load speed. You may have the most beautiful webpage featuring sparkling copy and a fantastic call to action, but with a slow load you’ll lose both user attention and your chances for a higher ranking. It doesn’t matter how awesome your page is if nobody visits it.

Google tests your links. If your page contains broken links, you’ll experience lower rankings in the SERPs. It may behoove you to periodically check your internal links to make sure they are all functional and relevant. Orphan pages are also detrimental. Orphan pages are pages of a website with no link leading to it. This makes it almost impossible for Google to find or crawl those pages and requires users to type in the URL directly… not an ideal user experience.

One of the most limiting beliefs in the SEO world is the belief that reaching the top five results…or even the coveted number one spot… is impossible. We’ve achieved thousands of number one spots for our clients, and it is certainly achievable with enough hard work and an intelligent approach. It can be complicated—even some SEO agencies refuse to promise those kinds of results—but we have the experience and tools necessary to make it happen. It’s all about putting forth the effort, time, and money needed to realize those results.

Higher rankings equal more business—but SEO is complex. There are myriad factors involved in getting your webpage to number one, and it involves skill, tenacity, and patience. If you take the time to avoid these mistakes, you’ll be a step closer to achieving the ranking you want and getting users to follow your call to action.