Search engines help you acquire new readers, viewers, and listeners for your content, but frequently you alone are the reason search engines prevent your content from ranking higher in the search results.
Search engines want to show the world your content, but not if you’ve made mistakes that compromise the user experience and search engines’ policies.
The key is to give search engines what they are looking for while evading the common mistakes content creators generate.
- Brief Content
Google prefers long-form content because it offers searchers enough information to fulfill their needs. As a rule, the more thorough the content is, the more likely it resolves the searcher’s query, and that is what Google seeks.
A study conducted by SerpIQ revealed that content displayed in Google search results in positions 1-3 had approximately 2,400 words, on average. Simply put, long-form content ranked better on Google.
So the question begs, should each piece of content be long, just for the sake of being long? Absolutely not, but it’s essential your content is extensive enough to fully address any questions your searchers’ have.
Concentrate on developing quality content more than a precise number of words, however, as superior work will boost your rankings more than a 2000-word article. If you get a keyword-rich, original piece of quality content that is only 400 words, it’s more ideal than utilizing filler or duplicate content.
- Selecting Bad Keywords
Keywords are a major source of frustration for those new to SEO. Now more than ever before, individuals as well as search engines are searching for long-tail keywords. Rather than concentrating on how you or your business talks about things, find out how your customers or potential customers refer to them. One of the greatest SEO errors that you can make is choosing an ineffective keyword.
It is also critical to not get overly specific or too broad. There is a subtle distinction between an ultra targeted keyword that is so precise it won’t ever be searched because nobody will recognize the need to search for it and a keyword that is so general that you will never rank for it. Reduce the things you want to rank for and try to brainstorm a keyword that is detailed.
Don’t neglect to incorporate local keywords when required. If you only serve a particular city, it is far more vital for the city name to be contained in your keyword. Be cognizant of how you do business when attempting to frame an effective keyword.
Use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or SpyFu to determine the keywords that will suit you best. With these tools, you can see trending keywords and discover how to develop optimum keywords for your company or products.
3. Inaccurate Information/Misspellings
Unfortunately, at times, your content will simply fail to produce the traffic, rankings, shares, and leads you desired.
However, something even detrimental could occur. For most publishers, it’s unavoidable. It’s not a question of if, but when it will take place.
You could publish content that includes incorrect information. We’re not talking about just minor Not typos or spelling errors – things that require an apology and a correction.
Will such a big blunder be forgotten by the next day? Maybe, particularly if you’ve created a robust brand and you don’t make any more huge errors.
But if your brand regularly produces content containing errors, will it cause your core audience start to second-guessing your brand and it’s credibility? Definitely. Your brand will appear unprofessional.
People have absolutely no patience for content that wastes their time.
Losing the confidence of your audience will eventually harm your brand and create significant damage to your SEO measures.
- A Lack of Imagery and Design Elements
No one likes dated websites that look like they were designed circa 1995; fresh, contemporary-looking websites perform much better. Content is no different: If you have pages of text that lack imagery or design elements, then viewers—in addition to Google— will not prefer your content over your competitors.’
Design elements that break up text improve dramatically improve the user experience and keep readers on the page longer. The longer they remain on the page, the greater likelihood Google will elevate the content’s rank as a result of dwell time.
Essentially, the hypothesis is that the longer they are on the page, the stronger possibility it’s addressing their needs, which means a greater chance to be linked to, shared on social media, or be visited again.
- No Content Breaks
Generally speaking, the attention span of readers is extremely brief— some may say it’s even shorter than that of a goldfish. Thus the importance of recovering the reader’s attention continually, throughout an article.
To do that, break up the text. Incorporating subheads, lists, and images to break up the content will keep the readers engaged and on the page, which, once more, will help in getting the content detected by search engines.
- Incorporating Long Paragraphs of Text
Likewise, using long paragraphs is an excellent way to get your readers to abandon your page instantly. The shorter your paragraphs, the better you can secure and maintain, the focus of readers.
- No Outbound Links
Readers want content that’s trustworthy. If your content is simply you doing the “talking” and fails to link out to other content (to cite sources, for instance), why would the readers find it reliable or be compelled to link to you?
Google realizes this as well. A number of SEO experiments have revealed that pages with outbound links usually perform better in the search process. That’s because content that has outbound links is just typically superior, more well-researched content!
Reboot Online conducted an experiment to determine whether outbound links boost ranking in organic search results, and discovered that they do make a difference. The experiment couldn’t identify how great the impact was, but nevertheless, there was an impact.
- No Promotion
You may think that just because you develop content and make it stronger than everyone else’s it will immediately surge up the search rankings. There is a reason SEO takes some time. You need to hold on for people to arrive at your content and provide positive SEO-ranking signals, for example, links and social shares.
Those ranking components can take hours, days, months, or in some cases, even years. Although if you promote your content, you can deliver it to the correct eyeballs sooner… and in doing so, get the ranking signals quicker.
Formulating a sound promotion strategy is vital.
- No Meta Optimization and CTAs
Another error is utilizing the default options for your content’s meta information—titles and descriptions. While this may be the final of the SEO mistakes addressed it’s crucial; you can, and should, optimize the content title and description; if you don’t, Google will use your header and the first couple of sentences, by default.
Rather, create unique meta titles and descriptions for each of your content. In WordPress, for instance, it’s simple to do by installing the Yoast SEO plugin—or a host of others.
Also, strive to catch people’s attention with calls to action (CTAs) in the meta information. If you can capture the searchers’ attention when they view your content in search results, there is a strong possibility they will click on it. Additionally, clickthrough rate is one of the biggest ranking indicators, as reported by Searchmetrics’ 2015 Ranking indicator study.
- Neglecting Analytics
No system solves everything, which is to say you must be able to determine what is effective and what is not beneficial for your SEO strategy. Having a way to see data makes it simple to learn and adapt to what search engines are looking for to elevate your content to the top.
Failing to use an analytics tool can cost you a ton of money as time goes on, as you will continue placing your efforts into strategies that may not be successful.
Leverage an analytics tool to pinpoint what you are doing well and what you can do better to be more successful.
In Conclusion
If you steer clear of these ten frequent content-related SEO pitfalls, you will be far more effective with organic search traffic to your content. And not by accident, you will also be building some strong content, which will help bring you extra traffic as a result of positive word-of-mouth and multiple other channels. If you need assistance with SEO and want the help of professionals, MAXBURST can help you implement an SEO strategy that will get you results.