6 SEO Mistakes That Are Harming Your Business

SEO is undoubtedly one of the best ways to bring traffic to your website. It helps your page to rank higher in Google search results, putting more eyes on your content. If implemented correctly, SEO is a game-changer. If implemented poorly, though, it can have a negative effect, lowering your standing in search results and decreasing traffic.

#1 Too many keywords

First and foremost: keywords are the bedrock of good SEO. Strategically placed keywords that make contextual sense works wonders. They help Google to categorize your website, propelling you up the search rankings and drawing in that all-important traffic.

It’s easy to find keywords simply by putting a search term into Google and then combing through the related, suggested searches. From there, it’s just a matter of threading those keywords into your content. Some content writers go too far, though. By cramming your content with vast numbers of keywords (some with questionable relevance), all you do is flag your website as spam.

Highly niche SEO strategies, such as SaaS SEO, for example, need to use keywords selectively. SaaS companies keep to only use two or three hyper-relevant keywords per post, which can help to increase their rankings through in-depth and niche content such as keyword-relevant guides.

#2 Bad linking

Links are an extremely important part of SEO. They help search engines to categorize your site alongside others and build a network of interrelated content. Acquiring links from authority or targeted domains is a fantastic idea and works wonders.

When pursuing these types of links, you need to be careful. Bad links have the opposite effect. If you get links from low-level or spammy sites, then Google will classify your content alongside them.

Fortunately, it isn’t too difficult to identify a spam-style link. If, for example, a site has the URL www.freeiphoneoffersthebestdeals.com then the chances are that it’s spam. Acquiring a link from that site hurts your link profile, which then hurts your domain's trustworthiness and can hurt your search rankings.

#3 Too many images

Stuffing  your site with too many images can have a negative effect. It’s all about load times. Image-heavy sites consume bandwidth and take far longer to render. That might not be a problem for you if you have high-speed broadband, but not everybody has access to top speeds.

For those with a poor internet connection, the website will be painfully slow to load, might not load at all, and will likely send them looking elsewhere. Google sees and understands this problem and prioritizes sites with clean interfaces that load quickly. Images are important but use them sparingly and try to keep them small. That’s even more important in the age of mobile traffic.

#4 You aren’t optimized for mobile

Too many businesses still focus all of their attention on designing a website that functions well on a desktop. They forget that mobile traffic now makes up a vast portion of the internet. Smartphones have advanced to such a degree that people are able to browse on the move.

Websites look totally different on smaller mobile screens. A site that appears slick and professional on a desktop can look clunky, buggy, and broken on a mobile device. This has negative effects for SEO. Google will (naturally) favor sites that display well across multiple platforms.

Fortunately, it’s easy to remedy this problem by using a responsive theme. These website templates adjust everything (including formatting, paragraph spacing, and plugins) to suit the screen they’re being viewed on. You don’t have to do a thing, but your site is always fully optimized.

#5 Recycling content

This is a big mistake that many businesses still make. While there’s nothing wrong with exploring a topic in greater detail, simply rehashing pre-existing content will see your website penalized. For example, you might have written a successful post about the best ways to make a greener office space.

It can be tempting to revisit successful content again, making only minimal changes, but Google’s algorithms see this. Search engines want fresh, original content that offers users value. Resharing old information won’t work.

Worse still, avoid content recycling software. This is becoming more popular. The software takes an existing piece of content and uses artificial intelligence to make alterations, usually to sentence and syntactic structure, in an attempt to make it seem original. Although these tools are advanced, they’ll never fool the search engine algorithms.

#6 Neglecting internal links

External links are powerful but don’t forget that your website should exist as a network. Internal links between posts and pages are important because they give Google an idea of what your website is truly about. This, in turn, increases the accuracy of recommendations and helps to boost your ranking.

Internal links also have the benefit of keeping users on your website for longer. By linking pieces of content together or including a “what to read next” style link at the bottom of each piece, you give readers a reason to remain on the site and engage with more content.