Marketing is a complex art these days, though many marketers and business owners think they can skip a ton of effort by leveraging clever SEO tricks. Unfortunately, many of those same business owners make common SEO mistakes and pay the price.
Let’s look at these common mistakes and examine how you can avoid them in the future.
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Treating Mobile and Desktop Traffic the Same
These days, most traffic comes from mobile devices instead of desktop computers. So it’s surprising that tons of marketers forget this fact and act as though traffic from mobile and desktop devices is the same.
This is a big mistake. Any marketer looking to succeed in the modern advertising environment needs to tailor their content for mobile screens and interfaces. It’s the best way to drive mobile user engagement and prevent most of your traffic from hitting the disastrous “back” button.
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Failing to Prioritize Local Customers
Many marketers also don’t prioritize local customers. It’s easy to get caught up in the chase for tons of traffic, but it’s always the wrong move.
Instead, your SEO efforts should prioritize targeting a specific group of consumers: those people most likely to build or work with you. This is intuitive when you think about it – it doesn’t make any sense to market to Californians if your business is located in Texas.
Take this philosophy and extend it to all of your SEO marketing strategies. Each bit of content you create should be focused on local, likely customers for your brand, not everyone on the Internet.
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Forgetting that Content is King
No matter how skilled and savvy you are in the realm of SEO strategy, you can’t forget this simple fact: content is ultimately king. This is another way of saying that your content can’t be:
● spammy
● low-quality
● clickbait-y
● otherwise annoying or unengaging
Instead, all the content you funnel into your marketing channels has to be:
● high quality
● engaging
● informative
● entertaining
You get the picture. The better content you produce, the more all of your search engine optimization efforts will pay off. It’s one thing to get people to your site through SEO magic and another to get them to stay there and read your content.
As an SEO marketer, don’t forget that your content quality matters just as much as your SEO game.
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Focusing on Short-Term SEO Gains
Lastly, many marketers focus too much on gaining only in the short term. They prioritize bad SEO tactics and subpar content that might get them clicks and traffic over the next few weeks or months but that won’t result in long-term success.
In fact, Google will eventually penalize you if it discovers that you’re engaging in short-term, low-quality SEO practices like:
● buying huge quantities of backlinks with questionable quality
● spamming your website with keywords nonsensically
● reposting content already found elsewhere on the Internet
It’s tough to crawl out of a negative reputation hole if Google sticks you down there. Do yourself a favor and avoid getting stuck in the first place by following the other tips mentioned above.
Prioritize quality, focus on the audience that matters, and plan your SEO efforts for long-term success. Good luck!
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