21 Mistakes That Kill Search Traffic and Conversions
SEO mistakes are commonplace. And when it comes to addressing these mistakes, it is not as easy as you may think and cost you a fortune in due course.
Over the past years, SEO has evolved tremendously and committing these petty mistakes has become trite.
To rank a website in the top SERPs for improved traffic and visibility, it is essential to deploy a variety of effective tactics. Essentially, these tactics should be in line with search engine guidelines.
On the way, you are required to fix all the small errors and cannot afford to make petty mistakes.
Below, let us get a load of the 21 common SEO mistakes that can critically come in the way of your traffic and conversions daily:
1. Failing to do Competitive Analysis
Failing to do competitive analysis will slow down your efforts to take your business up. Therefore, doing a competitive analysis makes sense.
This will help you get an insight into things that actually work and do not work for your business. In other words, you can become familiar with the strong and weak points of your business and implement ways to streamline the performance.
If you follow the suit of your competitors having earned great success in the business, you are sure to get a better competitive edge.
2. Failure to Understand Your Audience
Acquiring general knowledge of your target audience is essential for your digital marketing strategy.
This includes an understanding of their online behavior and the various sources they are largely active in. the same will help you in reaching out to them anytime.
Failure to do so has resulted in breaking down several digital marketing strategies and closing down many businesses.
3. No Plans or Goals
Many businesses commit the mistake of not creating any or proper business plans for achieving the quantifiable goals (for visibility, sales, or traffic) through online marketing.
A well-thought-out plan will help you achieve your goals and allow for the desired adjustments when you are not achieving those goals.
4. Failure to Optimize Navigation & Hierarchy (silo)
Undoubtedly, your target visitor would appreciate and love navigating your website easily. Meanwhile, there seems no way for Google to figure the most fundamental content of your website if there is no well-defined hierarchy.
A crystal-clear hierarchy needs to be integrated into your website from scratch, as doing so will work wonders for you by attracting visitors and elevating your rankings.
5. Poor Page Load Time
Today, time is precious to all and it is hard for everyone to keep patience. The same seemingly appears true in terms of page loading.
If the loading time of your website is slower than the regular one, you are very likely to lose the targeted traffic and conversions 24/7.
Thanks to the up-to-the-minute technology and tools, using which you can readily figure the issues causing your website to load crumb by crumb. You can do critical research to turn up the tools.
6. Websites still Not Mobile Friendly
Since 2015, more and more people have been using mobile devices when it comes to visiting a website. That means your maximum target audience is mobile users.
Therefore, it means if your website is not mobile-friendly, you are missing out a lot. The word of recommendation is to create a responsive or mobile-friendly website that can attract more traffic, sales, and lead!
7. Poor Keyword Selection
Choosing the right keywords for enhancing your business visibility matters really very much. This is because selecting poor keywords may easily bring your website’s visibility down.
Therefore, always hire a reputable SEO company that can pick out the most relevant keywords for enhancing the visibility, ROI, etc of your business. Alternatively, you can take the help of keyword selection services available online.
8. Not including LSI (related) Keywords
Not including LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords in the business today may be one of the biggest mistakes that you might commit.
Things have changed dramatically over the course of time. In other words, what used to take place some years ago is no longer workable or effective today.
Since 2015, it has become essential to include keywords in a specific webpage (being optimized) considering that they should be assorted and centered on a single topic.
9. Writing for Search Engines Only
Simply writing content for search engines only is another bad way to kill targeted traffic and conversion. The content you write must include some significance or value to your targeted visitors considering their needs.
The ploy, as a matter of fact, will do the magic in attracting maximum traffic and ensuring conversions.
10. Failing to update old content
Present-day customers are unquestionably smart and give preference to only fresh content.
Therefore, if you consistently serve them old or stale content, the odds are very high that will move to another website with fresher content.
The bottom-line is to update your webpages periodically. Also, add a link to a newer post on the webpages and you can attract massive traffic easily.
11. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content will invariably bottleneck your efforts to turn around your website’s performance.
If you are not sure whether your website has fresh or duplicate content, you can utilize a variety of duplicate content checkers such as Copyscape or the SEMrush Site Audit Tool.
12. Poorly Written Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Poorly written title tags and meta descriptions also have the intensity to kill search engine traffic and conversions. Therefore while creating these types of content, have a look at ad-related PPC ads for motivation.
Keep in mind, if you have earned a good ranking in SERPs and nobody is clicking your website, it is an imaginative vision to expect ROI from it.
13. Failing to Add Contact Information to Your Website
Many websites simply have a contact form on the contact page! And this not only makes things inconvenient for your target users but also leaves a bad impression on them.
That is why, to deliver utmost satisfaction to your potential clients, make sure your website features a phone number and address on, if possible, all pages.
14. Omitting a Call to Action
A weak call to action (CTA) or omitting it is very likely to kill your search traffic and conversion. Therefore, many webmasters include it essentially today on every web page to get profits.
A call-to-action provides your target audience with stepwise guidance that prompts them to take a specific action.
15. Lack of Testing
Checking out your website content viz. videos, audios, images, etc. of your website periodically in terms of functionality and performance is a smart idea.
This action will help you know whether your target audience is conveniently using them currently. Omitting to do so will drive the targeted traffic and conversion rates away from your website.
16. Failure to Use Targeted Landing Pages
While your users search a specific product/service of your business via a targeted keyword/phrase, they expect to be landed on targeted web pages relevant to the keyword/phrase they looked for.
That is why it is worth considering using targeted landing pages for your website’s success.
17. F.O.M.O. – Using FOMO or “fear of missing out” smartly
F.O.M.O. is the technique commonly used by a businessperson to enhance the desire of your targeted customers to buy your services or products.
If used smartly, it can really work wonders for you by enhancing the sales of your business. You can use “limited-time offer” or “while supplies last” like phrases smartly on your website or other sources to prompt your targeted audience to buy your product/services fast.
18. Failure to Seek Reviews
Getting reviews written by your past clients also contribute mightily to enhancing the level of trust and confidence of your potential and existing customers on your website.
To make the reviews appear authentic, if possible, try to link the reviews to the clients.
19. Neglecting Social Media
Neglecting Facebook, Instagram, etc. in the fast-growing trend of social media, can have dangerous repercussions.
After all, social media has the great power to drive maximum traffic to your website. After collecting the information of your clients from social media sites they are presently active, it is all easy for you to reach out to them.
20. Inconsistent Posting Schedules
Not necessarily that you must post two blogs every day, maintaining a regular posting schedule is something valuable to your audience.
Have you ever thought about what will happen if you maintain posting at least a blog or two blogs a week for some time and you do not post blogs for several weeks?
The answer is your target readers will not tend to return weekly until you start posting regularly again! You might have got the gist. Right?
21. Giving Up Too Soon
Patience is the key to success. A successful business does not start delivering success overnight but in fact, takes a lot of time and effort.
Therefore, if you look forward to the steady growth of your online business, never give up too soon but make efforts on a continuous basis.
What Are Your Thoughts?
After reading the 21 mistakes end-to-end, do you think you have made anyone or more than one from them that kill your valuable search traffic and conversions?
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