SEO Guides, Tips & More!

SEO strategies are constantly changing because of the increasing “intelligence” of search engines and their algorithms. Given the rate at which things change in this area, it is easy to understand why there is often so much confusion surrounding SEO best practices and how easily mistakes can be made. To help remove some of the mystery and misconception, I have outlined three common SEO mistakes that clients often make. These include:

Not having a site optimized for mobile devices

With 80% of internet users accessing and searching the internet with their mobile devices, it should come as no surprise that having a mobile optimized site is quite important. If users have a difficult time navigating your site because it doesn’t display correctly on the screen, you risk not only losing visitors, but your rankings will suffer as well. Deploying a responsive web design will make it so your site displays properly no matter what device is being used and will create a user-friendly experience that in turn will ensure your visitors can access important information and keep them engaged.

Low or Not Enough Quality Content

Over the last few years, user-engagement has become prominent in SEO. As a result, having high-quality content has risen sharply in importance. This means there needs to be a greater focus on understanding your target audience and what it is they are searching for and creating content based on their preferences. Making your user’s satisfaction a top priority will help create content that not only drives traffic, but increases conversions as well. Creating a blog that provides advice, tips, and answers to their questions and updating it regularly is a great way to deliver fresh, relevant, and timely content.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content generally refers to content that either completely matches other content or is very similar. This creates a problem for the search engines in deciding which page, or which content, is more relevant to what the user is searching for or worse yet, the content does not even get indexed at all. The last thing anyone wants is to lose ranking because they have been found to be using duplicated content. Fortunately, this is an issue that can be easily remedied. Remove pages with similar content from your site or combine information from pages that contain some of the same information into one. You can also indicate your preferred URL to search engines by using canonical URLs or set up 301 redirects from the duplicate pages to the original content page.