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As a marketing and content consultant for small business, I have seen my fair share of bad ego-driven decisions and mistakes made by people with the best of intentions. Two most common both have a big impact on your SEO ranking.
Mistake #1: Confusing User Experience
One of the most common problems I see is business owners not having a grasp on what makes for a good user experience on their website. Mostly, this happens because small business owners organize a site in a way that makes sense to them and forget to take into account that the majority of people coming to their site have little knowledge of the products or services being offered. In most cases, it ends up costing them business and they lose out on opportunities to competitors.
Mistake #2: Bad Information About SEO Best Practices
While it's true that Google is constantly updating their algorithm, the updates they made back in 2011/2012 have, pretty much across the board, not changed drastically. many people, however, still have little or outdated information about SEO best practices, especially when it comes to keyword usage and content. This typically goes hand in hand with the poor user experience, as they try too hard to include what they believe to be relevant content on each page, or have too little content. Both of these mistakes can destroy your business' chances of succeeding in an organic google search and even cost you more money in the long run if you get penalized by Google and have to invest in advertising instead.
Fixing Common SEO Mistakes
Luckily, both of the above mistakes can be corrected by taking some necessary steps to evaluate your current situation and put a comprehensive strategy in place to fix your SEO. If done well, most people will see a significant uptick in traffic and conversions to their site within 6-9 months.
Audit Your Content. Many people only think about their onsite content once, during the startup phase, and then forget all about it. But that neglect could actually be hurting your SEO efforts. Just as personal needs evolve through the years, so do customer needs and your business or brand should be able to adjust accordingly. Sometimes an audit shows that you aren't using keywords properly, sometimes it shines a spotlight on the user experience and how menu items are organized, and sometimes it reveals a lack of quality content throughout. Making the necessary changes to your onsite content can have an immediate positive impact on your site's organic rankings. A seasoned content/SEO expert can aid in the process and make sure that after the audit has been performed all of the content changes can be executed. I also recommend that whomever is hired to perform the audit can also put a comprehensive content strategy into place that can further aid in helping customers better understand not only your brand, but also the problems you will solve for them, as well as helping to boost organic SEO efforts.
Offer Customers More Content. Whether this comes in the form of blogs, content marketing materials or social media posts (or ideally some combination of all three!), investing time and money in creating quality content that serves a purpose beyond being solely promotional materials, will also help boost your SEO rankings. This is the "If you build it, they will come" philosophy, which is that if content answers frequently asked questions from customers, provides some sort of educational component or entertains/informs potential customers, they are more likely to engage with your brand and share your content, which will help with your rankings.
Try PR. Google changed their algorithm years ago, so they no longer reward the sheer quantity of backlinks to your site, but now they instead reward the quality of your links. PR is a great way to try and boost your organic search effort by popping up in articles on high-quality websites to help build links back to your site. It is also a great way to position yourself as a subject matter expert, establish a sense of trust with potential consumers and creates more brand awareness.
Sometimes The Solution Is Right In Front Of You
Have you ever felt like the solution to some of your most pressing problems is staring you right in the face? If your problem is SEO and content strategy, then look no further. HYC specializes in content audits and SEO content strategy to help streamline your site's UX and improve your SEO rankings. Contact me today for your free consultation and to determine exactly what your business might need to succeed.