Top three mistakes small-business owners make with their SEO strategy

Google, SEO strategies, search engine optimisatiion
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Most small-business owners don’t get results from their SEO activities and efforts. That’s usually because they commit some well-known SEO mistakes.

Search engine traffic is one of the most valuable traffic sources for your business, especially if you’re a small business. And it can be difficult to pull off SEO in the right way.

Let’s focus on actions that you must not do to safeguard your SEO efforts. That’s because it will always be easier to add more SEO activities to your planner than to correct the mistakes that will tear your website traffic down.
Top three common SEO mistakes small-business owners make:

Common SEO mistakes begin from erroneous keyword research to misreading the search console’s data, which means that the scope of mistakes can be too broad.

For brevity, let’s get started with the three common mistakes that can have the most impact on your SEO performance.

Abandoning SEO after a few months

SEO takes patience and results don’t happen overnight. SME owners sometimes stop investing in SEO for fear of not seeing results, and usually, the wait is not that long.

Google algorithms take time to verify the relevancy of newly published web pages. An Ahrefs study, found that the average age of top ten ranking pages was over two years. The average age for the highest position is nearly three years.

It is believed that Google uses over 200 factors to determine the quality of a webpage. To allow your SEO to bring in customers organically, your content must be of top-quality and more than that, the web development must be on point.

This shows that small-business owners should hire expert SEOs, stay patient, and give time to SEO efforts to take-off.

Targeting irrelevant keywords

Keywords are most important in SEO. Google uses keywords in your content to match them with user queries through their search engine.

Each website is unique, so spend time in keyword research to identify the keywords that will help you rank higher. Keywords need to have a focused intent, and they must not be vague or too broad, especially in the case of smaller websites.

Your research should be tailored to your company. For example, if you are an electrician, search for information about the problems that you solve. It is a mistake to focus too heavily, on non-competitive keywords (e.g. “electrician” instead of “24×7 electrician in Darwin”). This is a perfect example of a keyword for local SEO.

While it is important to rank for terms such as “electrician near you”, imagine the impact of ranking for the term “electrical surges” because your customers were interested in “what to do if you get an electrical surge?”

Avoiding investing in link building

MonsterInsights claims that backlinks are second in Google ranking factors, if not more important than quality content.

When creating web content, backlink building should be a key element. Because of the effort and time required, small-business owners often ignore this important step in the SEO process.

And remember, do not create spammy links. It is better to have fewer high-quality backlinks than 100 low-quality ones. That’s because Google’s quality guidelines forbid unnatural links. They also prohibit links that aren’t helpful to users.

Final thoughts

It can be difficult and time-consuming to understand the factors that influence your SEO results, positively or negatively. But these three SEO mistakes if avoided are sure to improve your site’s user experience and your search ranking.

SEO can drive customer acquisition and growth if you have the right approach.