Top 5 SEO Mistakes & Best Way to Deal with Them in 2021

When it comes to the online business, SEO is one of the essential components for your business growth. SEO does wonders in driving traffic to your website and increases your brand authority. 

It increases your online popularity and channels the traffic flow to your business website. However, search engine optimization needs expertise, and you must know about the common SEO mistakes that might limit your results.

Let’s discuss the SEO mistakes and how to deal with them to fetch excellent results for your business.

1. Not Doing Keyword Research

Keyword research is the crucial component of search engine optimization. It is one of the initial steps for forging your business SEO strategy. 

Keyword research focuses on increasing relevance on your targeted keywords. Google wants to show the best relevant results to the searchers, and keyword research helps you become the best relevant result for your business keywords.

Hence, it is mandatory to keyword research and filter out the right keywords for your business. When you target the right keywords, it will deliver reliable results; however, when you work on random keywords without any research, then it will be ineffective.

96.03% of the pages don’t receive any traffic due to no first page rankings. And one of the common reasons behind low rankings is inadequate keyword research.

Source: Ahrefs

So, don’t make this mistake if you want rapid growth for your business. You need to research proper keywords and segment the business-intent keywords to drive exceptional results.

How to do Keyword Research?

Find Your Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the main keywords that define your business. These are typically one or two words without any modifiers. You need to first find your seed keywords to drill down other keywords for your business further. 

It’s easy to find the seed keywords, like if you are selling bags, then your seed keyword can be bags.

Hence, find your seed keyword to forward your keyword research.

Employ the Keyword Research Tools

Brainstorm is fine, but online tools always surf the internet and have information that you might not think of. Moreover, keyword research tools help you get better insights about your target keywords, like keyword difficulty, search volume, similar keywords, CPC, etc.

So, use the keyword research tool to do better research. The tools you can use for keyword research are Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Keyword.io, etc. 

Analyze Your Competitors

Competitor analysis helps you a lot to show you the further path in your keyword research. You may look for the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. You can use the various online tools for competitor research and filtering the business-intent keywords that will drive conversions.

So, include competitor research in your keyword research to get the best keywords for your business.

Segment the Short and Long Tail Keywords

The perfect blend of short and long-tail keywords in your content is important to extend your brand reach. The balance of the keywords helps you in both gaining high traffic and consistent cash flow.

Short tail keywords have high search volume but are hard to rank. The consistent optimization of these keywords helps you receive the most traffic. On the other side, long-tail keywords have low search volume but are easy to rank. Moreover, long-tail keywords have better conversion rates that can help you roll in some conversions.

So, segment both the keyword types and consider the balance of both in the content to get tangible results.

These are some ways you can consider for effective keyword research. 

2. No Sitemap

This is one of the common mistakes webmasters make. Sitemap.xml seems illogical, but it has SEO value. Crawlability and Indexing are crucial to make you rank in the search engine results. Search engine crawlers read the web, which is called crawling. Once crawlers read your website and save it in the index is called indexing.

When searchers make a query, search engines provide the results from their index. So, it’s crucial to ensure smooth crawling and indexing to rank in the search engine results. Hard to crawl websites often suffer to appear in the SERP. 

You need to add sitemap.xml on your site to improve the crawlability of your website. Sitemap.xml includes the URLs of your website, and crawlers can easily go through your site. Hence, it’s mandatory to add sitemap.xml to make your site search engine friendly.

If your site is on WordPress, then there are some plugins that auto-update your sitemap when you publish any new page. So, consider the sitemap.xml for your site to make your site navigation easy for the crawlers.

3. Choosing Quantity Over Quality Backlinks

This SEO mistake not only limits your business results but also harms your online growth. Google launched the Penguin update to restrict link spamming. Backlinks are one of the prominent ranking factors, and search engines promote the backlinks but quality backlinks.

If you make the links from thousands of spam websites, then all those backlinks are fruitless. Although, they harm your website authority. So, instead of the quantity, focus on the high authority backlinks to get favorable search engine results.

Initially, you must need to avoid the black hat SEO techniques like link farming, paid links, link schemes, doorway pages, etc. Google can detect these unethical techniques to generate links and dilute your website authority. 

To scale a website authority, you are targeting for link building, you need to do some research. First, the website should be relevant to your niche; for example, if your business is related to construction and you are getting backlinks from a technology website, then it is fruitless. Relevant links have more value for your website because they drive referral traffic that can be your customers. Moreover, you should look for the domain authority (DA) of the website. Backlinks from high DA websites draw more link juice to your website, boosting your domain authority and rankings.

So, focus on the quality links to get profitable results in search engine result pages.

4. Not Optimizing Meta Title and Description

Meta title and description are representative of your website in the SERP. Your meta title and description have a significant impact on your CTR. Moreover, you have the opportunity to optimize your keywords in these to improve your relevancy to the user queries.

When you don’t optimize the meta title and description, Google fetches these on its own according to the query. However, there are high chances that you don’t rank well in search results when you don’t add meta title and description.

So, consider the optimization of meta title and description, as it is one of the best on-page SEO practices.

How to optimize Meta Title and Description?

Best Practices for Optimization of Meta Title

• Write unique and compelling for each page
• Be compact and descriptive
• Don’t be boring
• Consider title case
• Make it click-worthy
• Align with search intent
• Add your prominent keyword
• Mind a character limit of 6o characters

Best Practices for Optimization of Meta Description

• Write unique description for each page
• Express your webpage content (What user can expect)
• Don’t be generic; make it engaging instead
• Use sentence case
• Intrigue customers to click
• Align with search intent
• Include your target keyword
• Make it under 160 characters

These are the best practices to optimize the meta title and description that you must consider in your SEO optimization to increase your traffic.

5. Populating 404 Pages

Often webmasters don’t give attention to the 404 pages, but these are harmful to your website. Initially, users don’t like 404 and if they hit one on your website, then decreases your reliability for them.

Moreover, it shows that you are not optimizing your website, and your authority decreases for the users and search engines.

Hence, it is a significant mistake to leave the 404 pages un-optimized. 

Here are the prominent reasons that cause 404s

• Misspelled URLs
• Page moved or deleted
• Server Malfunction

How to fix 404 pages?

Use the redirects if you moved or deleted the page

301: For permanent redirections

302: For temporary redirections

Ask the user to check the URL spelling

Give a link to the homepage on 404 pages

These are some ways to handle your 404 pages. Too many 404s are not good for site health and user engagement. So, always track your website’s broken pages and optimize them timely.

These are the top 5 SEO mistakes that you might be making and shouldn’t. Moreover, now you know how to deal with these mistakes. Audit your website and look for these mistakes to correct them instantly. It will help you increase your SEO results substantially.

Moreover, if you need consultation or service, you may hire a digital marketing agency to upkeep your site health and marketing to drive exceptional results.