10 SEO mistakes you might be making

SEO is just one of many acronyms in the digital marketing world that you’ll come across on a regular basis. People will just band it about assuming your understand what it means and the ins and outs of it. If you’ve made your way to this blog then there’s a high chance that you know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. And then in turn, this is ability of your website to be seen in search engine results organically (without paying). Ideally you want to be on the first page because how many times do you scroll further? So read on to find out our top 10 SEO mistakes that people make:

1. Broken links: if you have broken links in your website (hyperlinks to other sites/pages) then this counts against your SEO, make regular audits of the content on your website for broken links.
2. Poorly written content: Google ranks on unique content, and also, the vicious circle – the more people who read and are engaged with your content, the better your ranking will become. Therefore you need to make content that people want to read.
3. Duplicate content: don’t duplicate the same content across your site, the likelihood is that Google will only ‘read’ it once, or may even downgrade you for it.
4. Copied content: Google hates seeing the same content across multiple sites as well as multiple pages. Firstly, it’s plagiarism and can be illegal, and secondly, Google will likely downgrade or de-index your website.
5. Keyword stuffing: obvious keyword embedding is really obvious to the consumer, and actually to Google as well, it’s a clever machine! So don’t try to fill every page with keywords, cleverly and creatively craft your content for optimisation.
6. Avoiding analytics: you need to measure what you’re doing so you know what does and doesn’t work in terms of SEO on your site, make sure you’ve enable Google Analytics on your website and monitor it regularly, acting on the data.
7. Ignoring social media: social media can have an impact on your SEO, so make sure that if you’re using it, you’re using it to your advantage. Check out our top tips for maximising social media SEO.
8. Non-unique meta descriptions and title tags: each of your website pages should be useful and relevant so should have unique titles anyway, and the 160 character meta descriptions are vital SEO tools and so should be used to really sell what the page does, and in this way should be unique to the content they’re talking about.
9. Anchor text: so you want to include a URL to another page or site. Did you know that “click here” could be affecting your SEO? Google crawls your page and hyperlinks are a key tool for it to be able to work out the theme of your page – so make sure the words that you use for the hyperlink are relevant.
10. Not optimising the right keywords: yes, the big one! Make sure you know what the keywords are for your industry, locality, customer base, and then use them wisely. Google's keyword planner can help you with this.

We can help you to optimise SEO for your website, and help you to create a content plan that will dazzle Google. If you need help not making these SEO mistakes then drop us a message: hello@webfwd.co.uk