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There is a popular belief that having a website can help your small business expand its reach and attract more customers. Unfortunately, this is only half true. If your website is not properly optimized for search engines, it will still struggle to attract new visitors. While there are several ways to increase your website’s search engine rankings, you should be aware of the following SEO mistakes that can seriously harm your business.
Not having an SEO strategy
Not having an SEO strategy is costing you a lot of potential customers. If you put your content on the Internet without any strategy, the chances of reaching your target audience are rather slim. If you don’t have SEO experience, consider hiring an expert SEO Company in Nashville that will help you with a comprehensive strategy.
Even if your business isn’t based in Nashville, you can still hire professional services that include keyword research, link building, on-page optimization, content marketing, and more. Professional SEO experts will help you review and update your SEO strategy regularly to ensure it aligns with the latest changes made to search engine algorithms.
Don’t optimize your website for mobile
You will be surprised to know that mobile devices are responsible 58.7% of overall website traffic. If you want your small business to succeed, it’s important that your website is optimized for mobile screens. If your website isn’t responsive to smaller screen sizes, chances are you’re missing out on valuable organic search traffic from mobile users.
Mobile compatibility is one of them main classification signals in both the Google and Bing algorithms when it detects relevant searches on mobile devices. If you have a mobile-friendly website, it will outperform other sites that are not optimized for mobile in mobile search results.
Over-optimized anchor text
Over-optimizing your anchor text might have worked before, but in 2024 it can lead to penalties or lower rankings. Search engines consider an excessive number of exact match keywords and phrases to be suspicious activity. Avoid making this mistake at all costs.
Instead of over-optimizing your anchor text, focus on creating a natural link profile with multiple anchor texts. This natural link profile includes, but is not limited to, generic anchors, brand phrases, and natural language phrases. This way anchor texts can add more value to your content and not just be used for SEO purposes, helping you avoid penalties.
Publication of plagiarized content
Publishing quality content on a regular basis helps you increase your visibility by improving your SERP ranking. However, if you simply copy content from other websites to fill your content repository, your website may end up penalized. In order to ensure a higher ranking for relevant searches, you must publish unique and original content.
If you use information from a different source for your website content, be sure to cite the sources. You should also avoid reusing content from other websites. To avoid plagiarism, always check your content with a plagiarism checker before publishing it on your website.
Have slow website speed
Search engines promote websites that load quickly and provide a better user experience. If your website takes too long to load, it will be difficult to rank higher in search engine results. While you are working on your SEO strategy, you should also make the necessary changes to ensure that your website loads within 2 seconds.
To achieve a good loading speed of your website, you need to optimize it properly. This means you need to compress images and minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. You should also use a content delivery network (CDN) to serve your site from different locations, helping your website load faster. By doing so, you can improve your ranking in the SERPs.
Conclusion
You can easily avoid most of these SEO mistakes by staying updated with the latest search engine guidelines. At the same time, you need to keep up with the latest changes in search engine algorithms. If it seems like too much work, you can always hire professional SEO agencies to take care of your SEO practices.
