Seven SEO mistakes you might make in 2019 and how to avoid them

Improvement doesn’t always come from making things right. In fact, the only way you’ll really improve is by failing, over and over again.

However, when it comes to SEO, a mistake might pass by unnoticed. You might not have any idea that you’re doing something wrong. Now, there are thousands of obvious mistakes that you could be making, like not adding keywords in titles or engaging in low quality link building.

But here are some more subtle, modern mistakes that SEO might make these days.

1. Not fixing broken pages with backlinks

Broken pages are really a major issue for websites, especially if they have backlinks pointing to them through those web pages. Broken web pages are bad for the internet and, thus, bad for your website. Why you ask? Well, to understand why we first have to understand what a broken page actually is. A broken page is simply a page that doesn’t exist. You see, it’s not actually the broken page that matters, but the link that’s pointing to it. When Google’s crawler finds broken pages, it wastes time and resources and it doesn’t like it. Both the linking website as well as the linked website containing the break have to suffer. If you have too many broken links on your site, Google will be upset because you’re constantly wasting its resources.

2. Publishing too many poor quality pages

Another issue that is generally related to bigger websites is the ‘thin content’ issue. Although not always the case, when you have a small website, it’s pretty easy to come up with some decent pages. However, when you have a site with thousands of pages, the effort required to have qualitative content on all of them is a lot bigger.

Thin content pages are pages that have no added value to what’s already on the web. Google doesn’t really have a reason to index the site so you’ll either end up in the omitted results or be manually reviewed by Google. This might take a long time, so be careful! However, it’s possible that the algorithm ‘penalises’ your website anyway without any warnings, by simply not ranking it.

3. You have duplicate content issues

Very closely related to thin content pages are duplicate pages, which are even worse.

Duplicate content is bad. Not only that you’re not providing anything of value and you’ll get into Google’s omitted results, but you’re wasting Google’s resources and that might eventually affect your entire website.

4. You target “out of reach” keywords

It’s good to have big dreams, but sometimes, too big dreams can overwhelm and demoralise you. If you want to be able to lift those 250 pounds, you first have to be able to lift 50. When you’re first starting out, it’s always better to start targeting lower competition keywords and build your way up.

5. Ignoring the organic search traffic you already have

Since we’ve just talked about what keywords you want to rank for, why not talk a little about keywords you’re already ranking for? You know… you probably have no idea what keywords you’re actually ranking for. You’re probably thinking “I already rank for them, why should I care?” Well… the truth is that you might get some traffic from keywords you already rank for, but not all of it. If you’re getting five searches from a keyword that has 100 monthly searches, you’re probably not on 1st position because the average CTR for 1st position is around 30%. If you’re on position 5+, then there’s still room for improvement.

6. You over complicate things

On a completely different note, many people over complicate things when it comes to search engine optimisation. This is mostly true, especially for beginners or start-ups that want high organic search rankings in a record amount of time.

SEO is an ever changing domain and you have to constantly keep an eye for major updates. But constantly running after the next update, shifting your strategy 180 degrees or abandoning the essentials to pursue some rather unsure things won’t do any good.

Although it’s good to stay up-to-date with things (and you should), it would be a better idea if the foundation of your strategy were based on the basics of SEO, the long-lasting ones.

7. Not starting with SEO in mind early on

SEO can often be postponed because it seems like other things are more important. Many people build their website with “I’ll start SEO later” in mind, just to wake up to the reality that their website is built completely wrong and major changes are required in order to make it SEO friendly. Often business owners only ask an SEO consultant on their opinion after most of the development for the website has been done.

If you want to see good results with SEO and also minimise costs, you should start with SEO as soon as you start developing your website. Otherwise, things will only be harder and they will take more time.

http://bit.ly/2TpMwxD is a digital marketing agency based in Eastbourne, generating business for clients for more than 13 years.