For budding digital marketers with little budget to promote their business, SEO can go a long way. SEO or search engine optimization is an internet marketing method of increasing the visibility of a website through unpaid or organic ways.
For businesses, SEO is a must-do to create better brand awareness and connect with customers online. How many online customers do you think you are missing out on if you have no digital presence? A whopping 67 million customers in the Philippines alone, with the number is growing yearly. With a good strategy, your business has a good shot at being seen by these people — as long as you avoid making these top SEO mistakes:
1. Not Making Your Website Mobile-Responsive and Mobile-Optimized
Access to free wifi in a lot of public areas, price accessibility of smartphones, and cheapening of mobile data are factors that contribute to the increase in internet users who use mobile devices to access online content. The use of internet-capable smartphones has been steadily increasing for the past 5 years, while computer usage reached its peak in 2015 and has dropped to 38% since then.
Not optimizing your website for mobile might fly in the early 2000s, but in this day and age, it’s a grave mistake.
Your website may appear clean and sleek when accessed through a bigger screen like on a laptop or desktop, but if it isn’t mobile-optimized, the website will look disproportional and buggy when customers access it using their smartphone. This can lead to higher bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
Rendering your website to be mobile-responsive is a big key to curbing bounce rate, increasing the time spent on your website, and hopefully, increasing the likelihood of website visitors converting into leads.
2. Picking Common Keywords
Organic content for your website is crucial to increase your ranking in the search engine results pages (SERP) because the more relevant information that search engines can find in our website, the likely they will show it to users who are looking for the same content. Make sure to include targeted keywords for your SEO content and build on these to increase your page ranking.
For example, if you are running a restaurant business in Makati City that serves vegetarian food, it might be a no-brainer to include the keywords “restaurant,” “vegetarian,” and “Makati” in your blogs. These keywords may be accurate, but this approach won’t let you stand out from all the other vegetarian restaurants in Makati.
A better strategy is for you to create content on specific keywords that play to your strengths. In the given example above, a better choice of keywords in addition to those mentioned are “healthy food,” “healthy lifestyle,” and “eat healthy”. Creating SEO content that revolves around the umbrella statement of “My Restaurant Promotes Healthy Lifestyle” can give you a lot of topics that you can tie back to the primary message, as shown on the image below.
3. Not Using Meta Tags
Most people think that SEO is all about keywords. However, the ever-evolving algorithm on how search engines like Google determine a website’s page ranking goes beyond just keywords. Meta tags is one of the primary items that your website must have to entice online users to click on your website when it appears as part of a search engine results page.
In layman’s terms, meta tags are text snippets that tells search engines what your website is about and what organic content it likely contains. The more relevant your meta tags to a user’s keyword search, the higher the chance the user will click on your website.
A website with no meta tags will appear plain and vague. For example, if a consumer will search “Vegetarian Restaurant in Makati” and our fictional ABC Restaurant’s www.abcrestaurant.com website does not use meta tags, it will just appear as www.abcrestaurant.com without any additional relevant information that the consumer might find useful. As you can see, the consumer is likely to pass on clicking this website since there is nothing there that says it’s what they’re looking for.
These are just some of the common SEO mistakes that neophyte online marketers make. Interested to learn more about SEO? Visit https://adspark.ph/tag/seo/ for more helpful content you can use right away in your SEO marketing campaign.
SOURCES:
Kemp, S. (January 30, 2018). Digital in 2018: World’s Internet Users Pass The 4 Billion Mark. Retrieved from
https://wearesocial.com/blog/2018/01/global-digital-report-2018
Wong, J. (July 3, 2017). Why You Absolutely Must Have A Mobile Optimized Website. Retrieved from
https://www.business2community.com/mobile-apps/absolutely-must-mobile-optimized-website-01871488#5FJtM5s6XJ0PJluQ.97
Hall, S. H. (August 31, 2018). Keyword Research 101: How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO. Retrieved from
https://optinmonster.com/keyword-research-101-how-to-choose-the-right-terms-for-google/
WordStream (2017). Meta Tags – How Google Meta Tags Impact SEO. Retrieved from
https://www.wordstream.com/meta-tags
Google (2017). Consumer Barometer. Retrieved from
https://www.consumerbarometer.com/
