If you want to customers to compare car insurance quotes, for example, on your website, you might write an article on what features owners of a specific type of vehicle would want. You wouldn’t fill your pages with the words “Buy auto insurance here!”
Knowing your customers thoroughly and what they want can help you build a successful site.
Keeping track of your visitors, what they click on and what they don’t, how long they stay on your site and their locations also help you create a user-friendly site that is relevant to potential customers’ Internet searches.
5 Serious SEO Pitfalls
1.) Avoid SEO Articles
Articles on your website that are full of SEO words and phrases are not going to drive people to your site. They won’t encourage them to purchase your product or service, either, according to Jill Whalen, an SEO expert and CEO of High Rankings.
Articles that are meaningful and that help your customers are what will keep them on your site and help build your credibility.
Articles that have useful tips and information related to your business will help increase your sales more than just general content articles with SEO keywords stuffed into them in random places.
Think about your customers and what they would want to know if they were purchasing one of your products.
An alternative to articles is to write a more personal blog. Blogs can help you connect with your potential customers.
Offer unique, helpful information in your blog to encourage your readers to do some things for themselves, but also to promote your business’ expertise and trustworthiness.
2.) Irrelevant Titles
Put relevant titles on each page of your website. The title should reflect the content of the page.
Search engines look at the headings of webpages to determine a site’s rankings when people search for keywords related to the site.
If your site sells clothing, for example, and you have a page entitled “Which Style is Right for Your Body Type?” but you then fill the page with advertisements and irrelevant material, search engines are not likely to index your site.
You might instead offer a series of useful articles on the page that relate to popular clothing lines. The page may also have an interactive tool to help people choose an entire outfit based on their body types.
3.) Overfilling Your Pages with Keywords
Like SEO articles, having keywords filling every page of your website is not going to drive useful traffic to your site.
If your pages are filled with the same keywords, you will also not get traffic that turns into customers.
Use keywords throughout your site, but don’t overdo it. Your website should offer useful content, not spammy-looking paragraphs.
4.) Not Enough Links
Contact other sites with content similar to yours to ask about exchanging links. Add a helpful page of these links to build a resource for your site’s users.
Check the links regularly to be sure they work. Update them whenever you find that one is not working. This will help your website improve its SEO rankings.
5.) Poor Site Usability
If your website is difficult to use, all of your hard SEO efforts on your articles, blogs and page titles will be wasted. Make your page simple to navigate, and users can easily find all of the articles with rich content you so painstakingly created.
They can also find your contact page if they have any questions or start shopping on your ecommerce page with ease. Including a site map to help your visitors find their way around, iNineDesign suggests, will also help boost your search rankings.
As visitors to your site discover that your site is useful and easy to use, they are more likely to come back, and to spread the word among friends and online contacts that your site has something special to offer.
You will gain a reputation for helping your customers and build your credibility in your industry as an honest and helpful business owner.