If you want your website to get more visitors, then you need your pages and posts to rank well in search engine results. The higher you rank; the more people will see your pages listed and click through to your website. To achieve that, you’ll need to make sure your website is optimised for search engines. However, if you are not using the latest SEO tools, it’s easy to make mistakes that can have a negative effect on ranking. Here, we’ll look at some of the SEO mistakes you should avoid and show you the best SEO tools to help you avoid them.
1. Using keywords incorrectly
Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines when looking for products or information on the internet. When someone searches, Google will look at the keywords they have used and will then list the web pages that contain those words. The better your web pages match the search terms used, the better your chance of ranking higher.
That, however, is just a basic overview. Search engines are a lot more sophisticated than that. In reality, it’s about how you use keywords and where you put them on your page. Ideally, you need to use an SEO tool that can analyse your web pages and can show you where the best places are to put them, such as in titles, subheadings, image alt-tags and meta descriptions.
2. Not looking at how well you rank for keywords
Even if you have keywords in the right place, it doesn’t automatically mean you will rank well. That’s because lots of other websites will be doing exactly the same thing as you. Unfortunately, those websites might have other attributes that make them rank even better than you and this means you might not be able to compete for the highest positions with those companies for those specific keywords.
The benefit of analysing how well you rank for keywords is that it will show you which keywords your rank well for and which you don’t. If you sell phones, for example, you might not be able to compete for the term ‘mobile phone’ with big brand competitors; however, you might still rank well for different keywords like ‘latest mobile phones’ or ‘mobile phone bargains.’ SEO tools that analyse keywords can help you find those terms which will get you more visitors overall.
3. Ignoring your competitors
One of the best ways to improve how well your website ranks is to learn from your competitors. If their website is getting higher rankings and more traffic than you, SEO-wise, it’s probably doing some things better than you are.
You won’t be able to tell this just from looking at your competitor’s website, however. Instead, you’ll need to make use of the latest technologies that analyse competitor’s sites so you can compare how well they rank for different search terms, find out how much traffic they get and so forth. Once you understand what they are doing better than you, you’ll have the insights you need to make improvements to your own website.
4. Making sure all your website is visible
Unfortunately, simple mistakes in how you set up your website can mean that some of your pages or posts can’t be found by search engine crawlers. If this is the case, their content can’t be indexed by the search engines and thus won’t appear at all in results. What’s more, as crawlers jump from link to link, any other pages these link to might also be undiscoverable.
What’s worse, is that you’re unlikely to know if you have accidentally blocked a search engine from indexing a page. It will still be there on your website and if it doesn’t appear in search results, you might just put this down to poor ranking rather than a technical issue. You can now use tools that will analyse your website and tell you if you have any pages that block search engines so you can quickly resolve the matter.
5. Putting up with a slow website
As users are quick to abandon slow loading websites, search engines are reluctant to rank them highly. They don’t want your slowness to give their users a poor customer experience. There can be many different things slowing down your website and various things you could do to boost speed even more. Analysing your site speed can help you find out what they are so you can improve your ranking.
6. Thinking you’re finished
Google uses over 200 separate criteria to decide which web pages appear in search results and in what order. Over time, these criteria change and the algorithm it uses to make ranking decisions is constantly updated. What helped you rank well today, may not be so important tomorrow and this means companies can soon slide down the rankings.
To carry out SEO at the launch of your website and then think the process is finished is a mistake made by many. In truth, SEO is an ongoing process that ensures the website is constantly being tweaked to keep up with changes to search engine algorithms.
SEO tools that help you avoid mistakes
The one word we’ve kept mentioning throughout this post is analysing. It’s analysing your website that can help you find the solutions to improve your SEO and ranking. Until recently, most website owners had two options, to use a plethora of separate tools that looked at individual SEO elements or to pay very expensive monthly fees for the combined SEO tools used by leading SEO agencies and larger organisations.
Thankfully, technology has moved on and there is now a comprehensive SEO platform, called marketgoo, aimed at smaller organisations. marketgoo provides a suite of tools that does everything mentioned in this post and a whole lot more besides and is available directly from eukhost. Affordable and suitable for any website, whether hosted with us or not, you can find out more about it by visiting our SEO Tools page.
