It's fair to say that the majority (if not all) businesses that operate online in the world today are involved with and use digital marketing; and one of the main aspects of digital marketing is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This is the same whether you are in the UK, in the US or Australia.

As a leading SEO Sydney agency we see it first hand. SEO services are currently one of the most in demand professional services in digital marketing, because in tough times a well executed SEO strategy can greatly improve the visibility of a business if done correctly.

With a successful SEO strategy, your site content will have good chances to appear in prominent positions of the search engines results pages within the organic listings, helping to bring qualified traffic to the site, and as such allowing you to grow your business and take it to new heights.

It’s not uncommon to see companies fail in their SEO strategy, or resort to using what is commonly referred to as Black Hat SEO techniques when they become impatient with results, but nowadays the search engines are quite sophisticated and savvy to these techniques as they update their algorithms to stop these practices.

Our strong recommendation: it’s always best to stick to tried and tested methods of improving your SEO; this might take longer, hard work and a lot of commitment, but with SEO there are really no shortcuts.

So, the question is, how can we be sure that we are following the right SEO strategies and best practice, to drive our business forward? Rather than focusing on the dos, in this article we focus and highlight the 5 most common SEO mistakes to avoid.

1. Not Hiring SEO Experts

Often the small business owners or individual marketers try their luck in performing SEO activities on their own instead of hiring an SEO agency or SEO experts for this task. The reason is that they believe that if they know the basics they can do it themselves.

To be honest there is nothing wrong with that, and we as an SEO agency we actually encourage our clients to get involved as much as time and resource permit, but in reality, the day to day execution of a well crafted SEO strategy is a complex, full-time job, and only a person (or team) with advanced knowledge of the ongoing trends, strategies, algorithms updates and so on can do it the right way. Therefore it’s usually best to have a qualified and experienced team to manage the entire SEO process.

If you want to take your website and brand to the top, hire SEO experts. Yes it's a longer term investment but it's always best to invest your money wisely, and ultimately this is likely to generate higher gains for you in the long term. In fact, renowned marketing platforms like BHW also never prefer brands that do not have expert services.

2. Choosing Keywords without Researching Them

Keyword Research is a task that is often neglected by newbie SEO enthusiasts. Instead of focusing on this most crucial task, a common mistake is spending most of the time designing the website, hosting, buying SEO tools, and so on and not focusing on the research and planning.

Because of that, unfortunately, the fundamental base on which the whole SEO project stands gets hampered. And despite putting a lot of effort into creating valuable content, acquiring backlinks, and conducting several off-page activities, the site doesn't generate the expected traffic and revenue.

Three keyword mistakes that are commonly made are:

● Choosing keywords that are too competitive to rank
● Choosing keywords that bring traffic, but not the business, or choosing the wrong keywords to target
● Choosing keywords that are not at all searched by the target audience/s

Having an SEO agency on your side, and the right SEO strategies will ensure you get your keyword targeting perfectly matched to your business. The agency will help you find the most profitable terms that can outrank your competitors and bring traffic and revenue to your site and grow your business.

3. Creating Low-Quality Content

The main goal of people using search engines on the internet is to find information relevant to their queries, and/or particular products and services.

The search engines themselves want to make sure that they provide the best user experience and therefore what the consumer is looking for, in the form of the best content and links to the most relevant products and services.

Because of Google’s and other search engines' mission is to provide the highest relevancy and best user experience, if the content doesn't provide value to the users, search engines will not rank those links to appear in top positions on their results pages.

Even if you create many relevant and high-quality backlinks, low value content on your site will always make ranking organically very difficult.

● Non-original (duplicated) content

Search engines can detect duplicate or plagiarised content and can penalise those sites by not ranking them on the SERP (Search Engines Results Page).

This is an issue in particular for affiliate sites which often have content that is not original on their product pages, but that is a duplicate of the manufacturer page. Think for example of retailers that sell shoes like Nike or Adidas, it is very rare to see original content on the retailer website, therefore the challenge is to overcome this, and clever tactics can be leaning on UGC (user generated content), such as user reviews, or own reviews (which can even be in a video form).

The problem with non-original content can be even more damaging than you might think. In fact search engines can permanently suspend a site from being crawled due to the presence of duplicate content, and on the web there are millions of websites on which the content is created by scraping bots ‘stealing’ someone else’s content.

● Thin content

When you have low value content on your site, the URL of the pages will be marked by the search engines as low-valued content or thin content. Because of that, normally Google and the other search engines don’t see the pages with thin content being really valuable to the user, and so that content will face strong challenges to rank high in the search results.

This can be pages with a low ratio of text, or not enough content for the search engines to assess the value of the page. Pages with thin content are often easily identified by looking at the analytics data; engagement metrics in Google Analytics for example will be likely to show poor user engagement such as high bounce rates, low time spent on the page, and/or low number of pages visited. Needless to say that those users are unlikely to come back, and that revenue metrics will be likely to also be low.

So what can we do to improve the quality of our content, and specifically of these pages?

● Add tables, infographics, images and videos

We can start adding value to our users and improving their experience on our website by complementing our content with collaterals such as tables (with relevant and supporting data), and stats.

These will likely increase the value of your content for your users. It is important to note, that this, as it is the case for all other recommendations in this article, should always be done with the user in mind. Adding value for your users will ultimately result in higher chances that it will be rewarded by the search engines too.

Infographics and relevant images with appropriate meta descriptions might also help you to acquire links from other websites, and in turn increase the authority of yours.

On the other hand, videos and other highly engaging forms of content, will help to attract users likely to spend more time on your site. This, and low bounce rates are always good signals for the search engines as they indicate that the content on your website is of high quality and valuable.

Again these are the signals that search engines will use in their ranking algorithms when they look at choosing which websites and content return for a user search query.

4. Focusing on the Search Engine Algorithms and Updates

Another common mistake we see repeated over and over again is to overly fixate the attention and focus on gaming the system, and outsmart the engines and their algorithms. In fact, it was only a few weeks ago that we saw the latest core algorithm change rolled out by Google causing the usual havoc and panic amongst website owners and marketers.

As usual there were some strong fluctuations, and again as usual, some websites were affected more than others, but the reality is that updates like this will always happen as it is the nature of the search engines and rankings to move and evolve, but it is also true to say that as usual Google’s recommendation is to continue doing what you are doing well and keep focusing on your users.

The other recommendation also remains the same, focus on providing quality content and value to your old and new audiences. Therefore our suggestion is to forget about trying to outsmart the system but instead have a solid plan for your website and content that is primarily focused on providing value to your users.

5. Don’t Forget the Basics

As we reach our final recommendation, we have intentionally left this to the last point because it is often very easy to forget about the basics and instead focus on the latest trends and buzzwords. So here is a reminder not to forget and disregard the basics.

Basic optimisation tasks such as the ones at the foundation of technical (on-page) SEO, like the optimisation of title tags and meta descriptions are still key and extremely important but often forgotten or dismissed. However, titles and descriptions, together with headings, are still used by the search engines to understand the content of your website and web pages.

Additionally, and not less importantly, titles and meta descriptions play a fundamental role in attracting clicks (or not). These elements are the ones that can help your listings to stand out from the rest, ultimately being the deciding factor in the conversion of impressions to (relevant) traffic. Remember, rankings are good, top rankings are even better, but being at the top of the SEO listings is not winning the race, that only happens when you bring the users and potential customers onto your website.

To Wrap Things Up

Over to you now. We hope that you have found some value in this article and that at least some of our recommendations have resonated enough to prompt you to take action and make some changes to your SEO strategy today.

If you can, we strongly recommend leaving it to the professional and hire an SEO agency that can take the burden off you whilst you dedicate your precious time to what you can do best. But if that is not possible, then start with our five suggestions and we are confident that you will be on the right path to make an impact in 2021!