5 common SEO mistakes small businesses make and how to avoid them

Starting a business can be challenging for many. You don’t know all the tools, and you don’t have the resources to hire all the necessary experts. Because of this, you’re granted to make some common SEO mistakes. After all, marketing, advertising, and positioning strategies tend to be difficult to handle. 

The arrival of SEO tools and tactics led businesses to focus part of their attention on different ways to position themselves. The rise in digital jobs and businesses was also a major factor in this. That’s why if you’re starting your business, and will start using SEO strategies, you must learn what not to do. For this, here we bring you 5 common SEO mistakes that you should avoid.

What is SEO positioning?

Before we tell you what these common SEO mistakes are, you must first know what SEO positioning is.

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it aims at improving a website’s positioning on Search Engines. These search engines not only focus on Google, but they also position them in Bing, Explorer, and different engines.

SEO works with different technical aspects such as the structure or metadata of a website.

However, it also works on the contents of different websites to make them useful and relevant to users.

Why is SEO important?

There are endless benefits for which SEO is important for any business.

The main one being that optimization tools and tactics allow you to place your website in the top places. Thus, improving your position within search engines.

These strategies make your page or website much easier to understand and work with.

Besides, it allows readers or new visitors to easily understand what your business is about. This also happens with search engines as they must be able to quickly understand your business. Because of this, you should strive to make a simple logical, and attractive website for your target audience.

5 common SEO mistakes small businesses make and how to avoid them

We have already explained the importance of SEO or the optimization of your websites for the growth of your business. Now, we’ll show you 5 common SEO mistakes you could make and how to avoid them.

• Low loading speed

One of the most common problems of websites that don’t have a good positioning within search engines is low loading speed.

Many of us have been victims of those sites that take too long to load.

If it takes too long to load, your user will get bored and leave to look somewhere else.

This, in addition to making web positioning impossible, increases bounce rates.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who, after spending very little time on your online page, decide to leave.

How to solve this?

Today, there are many ways to lighten the weight of your site to make it load quickly. Let’s first find out what’s the reason why your website is much slower. In some cases, they are different factors and some of them are beyond the hands of programmers.

Ideally, you should start with image optimization and remove the heaviest elements from your page. Then, check the sizes of its images. Find out if they’re very tall and have a disproportionate width about your design template. If they are, it’s best to start working on it and run them through a compressor.

Check your website speed with the free Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool. This will allow you to see the score that your website receives in both desktop and mobile versions. If you need some tools to improve the performance of JavaScript, CSS, HTML, there are many tutorials on the internet for each problem.

• Not using the right tags (title h1, h2, h3 …)

To optimize your SEO certain strict rules should never be broken. One of them is linked to the use of headers or titles.

Each site or landing page must have an h1 title, which would be the main one. This is one of the most common SEO mistakes for beginners since they want their titles to all to stand out the same. However, it isn’t possible for there to be more than one h1 tag on the same page.

However, and this is very important, Google doesn’t penalize those sites that have more than one H1 title on their pages.

Nonetheless, we recommend not adding them for aesthetics as they can cause usability issues for your users. The most important thing about all websites is to work in the simplest and most logical structures for your visitors.

Differences between h1 and title

It’s easy to get confused between what is the h1 and the title of your page.

That’s why we’ll explain their differences to you now.

While the h1 works as the post title for readers, the title is an HTML tag that shows the title from a search engine perspective.

On the one hand, if you have an h1, the best you can do is structure the contents so that the subtitles are h2, h3, h4, and so on.

The title, unlike the previous term, contains the SEO keywords of the written material and there should only be one.

• Not taking care of the internal linking

Interlinking or internal linking is one of the fundamental strategies to create an excellent SEO optimization strategy. This means placing links from your own site within your content. Interlinking promotes reliability and authority. One of the most valuable factors of this strategy is that it provides the user with information or content relevant to them. Besides, it also allows search engine bots to navigate your site and track the URLs.

One of the first steps that you must take into account to fix this error is to make a basic plan of the architecture of your website.

Organize the structure of your page to make your information accessible to your users from the Home page. This way, they easily go from it to the smallest categories with products and posts. To know what are the lower pages that get the most internal links and which links you can use, you check your Google Search Console to analyze them.

• Duplicate content

This is a common SEO mistake that applies mostly to digital businesses, and it entails publishing content already present on your website. Most often than not, what happens here is that they place the text that the supplier gave them on a product file. This is, as you can already imagine, a mistake for any business.

Placing the same text for all products on every page is often penalized by search engines.

Besides, it tends to be unpleasant for the readers or visitors of your pages. Ideally, each product sheet should be different, eye-catching, unique, and have its own personality.

To discover what the most suitable file is, you must carry out copywriting. This will help you increase conversions for your products and customers. What’s important here is to have the help of copywriting professionals to get closer to each of your digital goals. In this case, you can hire the services of an SEO agency to help you. After all, they are the ones who know the most about SEO marketing and how to make a successful website.

• keyword stuffing

Keywords are one of the strategies most used by those who want to carry out SEO optimization strategies.

The use of keywords is a crucial step to climb among the first links of the main search engines.

However, you shouldn’t go overboard and place way too many of them on your site.

Otherwise, Google and many other search engines will simply ignore you and leave your site on the last pages.

What are keywords?

They’re those terms that can help you to make some content stand out from others. It also allows you to bring them closer together compared to other topics.

What’s great about them is that they help your readers and visitors quickly understand your website’s topics and what it conveys to them.

Each article or page will have a different number of keywords.

Something very common that most sites experience when using keywords is that they use them excessively. For example, some of them use them in the titles, h1, h2, h3, and every 20 words. This is a big mistake because it affects the reading experience of the user. Another reason is that it tends to be forced and does the opposite of attracting new readers as it drives them away altogether.

To avoid this, you should work with an SEO professional to figure out how many words are ideal for your website. They will help you to identify which ones are the most relevant and attractive to your audience and how many times they should be in the text. All of this will allow you to stop using way too many keywords.

BluCactus, your ally in Digital marketing

BluCactus international marketing agency serves clients all over the world. Our specialty? The creation of web designs and SEO positioning in online searches. Our group of experts focuses on helping businesses and brands succeed in one of the most competitive sectors in the market, the digital world.

BluCactus will accompany you in every step that your brand takes. This goes from the creation of the branding of your business to the creation of content. Our focus is on supporting you with the creation of your website or the administration of your accounts on social media.

This online marketing agency, based in Dallas, TX, seeks to strengthen your image as a brand and take it to the next level. Don’t wait any longer to have the help of the best specialists in digital marketing and contact us through our social media or website.

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