There’s a popular belief that having a website can help your small business expand its reach and attract more customers. Sadly, that’s only half-true. If your website is not properly optimized for search engines, it will still struggle to attract new visitors. While there are several ways to boost the search engine rankings of your website, you should be aware of the following SEO mistakes that can hurt your business badly.
Not Having an SEO Strategy
Not having an SEO strategy is costing you plenty of potential customers. If you put your content on the internet without any strategy, the chances of reaching your target audience are rather slim. If you do not possess expertise in SEO, consider hiring an expert SEO company in Nashville that will help you with a comprehensive strategy.
Even if your business is not based in Nashville, you can still hire professional services that include keyword research, link building, on-page optimization, content marketing, and more. The professional SEO experts will help you review and update your SEO strategy regularly to ensure it aligns with the latest changes made to the search engine algorithms.
Not Optimizing Your Website for Mobile
You will be surprised to know that mobile devices are responsible for 58.7% of global website traffic. If you want your small business to be successful, it is important that your website is optimized for mobile screens. If your website is not responsive to smaller screen sizes, you are most likely to miss out on valuable organic search traffic from mobile users.
Mobile-friendliness is one of the major rankings signals in both Google and Bing’s algorithms when it detects relevant searches on mobile devices. If you have a mobile-friendly website, it will outrank other sites that aren’t optimized for mobile in the mobile search results.
Over-Optimized Anchor Text
Over-optimizing your anchor text might have worked before, but in 2024, it can result in penalties or lower rankings. An excessive number of exact-match keywords and keyword phrases are seen as suspicious activity by search engines. Avoid making this mistake at all costs.
Instead of excessively optimizing your anchor text, focus on creating a natural link profile with various anchor texts. This natural link profile includes, but is not limited to, generic anchors, branded phrases, and natural language phrases. This way, the anchor texts can add more value to the content and not be used just for SEO purposes, helping you avoid penalties.
Publishing Plagiarized Content
Publishing quality content on a regular basis helps you boost your visibility by improving your rank in the SERPs. However, if you are simply copying content from other websites to fill your content repository, your website may end up getting penalized. In order to secure a higher ranking for relevant searches, you need to publish unique and original content.
If you are using information from a different source for your website content, make sure to cite the sources. You should also avoid repurposing content from other websites. In order to steer clear of plagiarism, always check your content on a plagiarism checker before publishing it on your website.
Having Poor Website Speed
Search engines promote websites that load quickly and offer a better user experience. If your website takes too long to load, it will be difficult to get a better ranking on search engine results. While you work on your SEO strategy, you also need to make the necessary changes to ensure your website loads within 2 seconds.
In order to achieve good loading speed for your website, you need to optimize it properly. That means you need to compress images and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. You should also use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve the site from different locations, helping make your website load faster. By doing so, you can improve its ranking in the SERPs.
Conclusion
You can easily avoid most of these SEO mistakes if you keep yourself updated with the latest search engine guidelines. At the same time, you will need to stay up-to-date with the latest changes to the search engine algorithms. If it feels like too much work, you can always hire professional SEO agencies to take care of your SEO practices.
