If you have experience in working with SEO, you probably recognize some common SEO mistakes. We see many different SEO mistakes in our everyday lives and the mistakes listed below are some of the most common and also have the biggest impact on results.
1 – Measurable goals are missing
The first mistake is about not setting measurable goals. This is important no matter what type of marketing you work with, but it is extra important when it comes to digital marketing such as SEO. The reason for this is that it is possible to evaluate and thus optimize. The prerequisite for being able to evaluate and optimize is that you have something measurable that you can evaluate against. So the goal is hugely important.
For me personally, it is obvious that you should have a goal, but unfortunately it is often the case that there is no measurable goal with an SEO initiative. One reason for this is possibly that it has become so obvious today that one should invest in SEO that the goal is forgotten. I love working with SEO, but not so much that I want to do it when it doesn’t work. Everything should be about results.
2 – Miss the search behavior
It is common to start from the inside-out perspective. We feel that companies like to start from their own conceptual world – rather than based on how their potential customers name things. Just finding keywords and doing a keyword analysis are among the hardest things in SEO.
There are many different examples where companies internally designate a product or service in a certain way, because they do not consider that what the customers are actually looking for fits. The problem is that search volume often differs greatly between different terms – it can often be up to 100 times more searches on one keyword compared to another.
3 – Not to be clear
Google is like a three year old boy. In other words, you have to be extremely clear to the search engine what each page is about. Every single web page (URL) should be optimized for one keyword, and in some cases two keywords. An example is the keywords “brokers” and “real estate agents”, which are two synonyms that can be used on one page together. It is very important that you are clear to Google, and so every single page on your site holds within a clear topic.
4 – Forget about prioritizing
A common mistake on many websites from an SEO perspective is that one does not choose to prioritize what content is important. The prioritization is done using the navigation and internal structure of the website. Many people choose to prioritize all pages evenly, or hide important pages from an SEO perspective far down in the structure. A simplified way of explaining this is that the more clicks it takes to the important page, the fewer “points” it gets from a Google perspective.
5 – Don’t Duplicate You
Especially e-retailers, but also others, have encountered the problem of Google downgrading a page due to duplicate content. Duplicate content means that, for example, the same body text can be viewed on several pages (url) on the web. You must ensure that all content that is published is only on one page and is completely unique. Another problem for e-retailers is that duplication is created by sorting or filtering. To locate this, you should review if new URLs are created each time you do a sorting or filtering on your site. The simplest solution is to ensure that no sorting or filtering means that the url changes.
In the end, I also hope that you have been able to bring something personal with you, which you can bring into your organization to prevent mistakes or to solve an existing problem.
