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5 common SEO errors you should avoid doing

SEO is the practice for improving the quality or quantity of relevant organic traffic to your website from search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the unpaid or organic traffic to a website by improving the visibility of webpages and website in the search engine results page (SERPs). To achieve top ranking for your target keywords, you need to apply SEO to increase your rank.

While there are many online resources on how to improve your Search engine optimization practices or the best ways to implement SEO on-page and off-page strategies, the common SEO mistakes cannot be overlooked. Here are some of these SEO mistakes which most professionals make and ways to fix them. 

Here are most common Search engine optimization mistakes to avoid:

1. Not using Google Analytics data

Google Analytics is most popular for being able to track traffic and user interactions across your site. With Analytics marketers can see where their traffic is coming from, track conversions, see how customer interact with their site and see which pages are most popular.

Without Analytics it’ll be a lot more difficult to run an effective SEO campaign or to track your results over time. Analytics let’s SEO experts see which pages are underperforming, and which pages are starting to do well. If you aren’t using Google analytics, you could make the mistake for re-optimizing pages that do not need SEO.

2. Not setting clear SEO goals

It should come as no surprise that you need clear main aims to succeed with SEO. But many business owners and marketers run SEO campaigns without having any aims. They believe that doing SEO will increase their traffic, which in turn will increase of their sales. 

For your SEO efforts to pay off, you need to understand what you want to achieve. Is it better quality traffic, more organic leads, or more sales you’re trying to get?

For instance, let’s say you are getting 10000 monthly organic users to your website but only 1 percent of them end up buying from you. In some cases, there are two possible reasons such as

• You are driving the wrong kind of traffic to your website and
• Your website does a poor job of converting visitors into customers

3. Lack of Location-Specific Pages

Searches consisting for location-specific keywords and "near me" have seen a rise, especially with the mobile users. Since 2013 to 2017, for instance, there was a growth up to 900 % growth in mobile searches for "near me". Furthermore, 76 percent of people who use their mobile device to search for something nearby visit the related business within a day and around, and 28 percent of those searches result in a purchase.

An increase in the mobile consumer base has made local visibility critically important for many businesses. An essential component of global and local SEO is high-quality, locally optimized content and location-specific.

The possible fix for this SEO mistake is to have well-optimized location-specific unique pages to help improve your ranking in local SERPs. Recognizing your brand with a local presence should make your ranking in the local search results much more accessible. Clear location signals are natural when you have a single location. 

4. Having the Google Analytics tracking code set-up wrong

In order to make sure Google Analytics is collecting data accurately, you want to make sure it is installed correctly. Unfortunately one of the most common SEO mistakes is to add the tracking code in the wrong spot, install multiple tracking codes, and add a custom code that does not work properly and set up custom filters that could alter your data too much.

Best practice is to install for the tracking code following Google’s instructions, make sure it is just after the opening {head} tag and to set it up using the default code provided by Analytics. Another good practice is to keep a default property in Analytics that isn’t filtered, so that way you always have pure data on hand.

5. Holding onto old school SEO best practices

Google is constantly developing of their search algorithm. As a result, SEO is also changing.  The strategies that were working well ten years ago are no longer effective. So if you want to stay on the top of Google SERP, you need to keep yourself updated and use modern SEO techniques.

In these days, old school SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing and private blog networks (PBNs) are greeted with penalties rather than rankings. That’s why you should keep yourself updated on modern SEO best practices and keep an eye out for latest updates, changes by Google and shifts in the industry.

6. Keyword stuffed content

Keyword stuffing is when someone tries to manipulate of their rankings by targeting just one and small handful for high traffic keywords all over the site, even when they aren’t the most relevant. This tactic used to work. Nevertheless, Google has changed for their algorithm to make it much more difficult to be deemed relevant for competitive and high traffic terms.

Overusing your target words looks spammy and creates for the poor user experience. Instead for focusing your energy on cramming as many high traffic words into your content as possible, write unique, naturally written content that is more useful to your target audience. You should still target relevant keywords, but do not go overboard. Google’s webmaster guidelines are a good place to start for how to avoid the biggest SEO mistakes. The best advice can be summed up this way: “Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.