Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Most Common Mistakes

Google’s algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content.

But rankings can fluctuate for multiple reasons. Sometimes its due to human error and preventable.

The quick list of why sites drop:

1. Tracking the wrong keywords

2. Recent Google algorithm update

3. New website

4. Low quality content

5. Low quality links

6. Losing high quality links

7. Cheap hosting

8. Google penalty

9. Competitors trying harder

10. Business moved locations

On-Page SEO Mistakes

#1: Content Quantity Rather Than Quality

Content is still king. While there are other elements of SEO important to reaching the top of the search engines, high quality content remains at the top of the list.

How To Fix This: First step is to find the weak content on your website. To do this you can go to Google and type site:domain.com and see what pages are indexed in Google. From there determine what pages should be there, and if there are pages that should be deleted. If you built your site from a WordPress theme its possible you have pages and pages of irrelevant content indexed and worst it has nothing to do with your business.

#2: Unnatural Links

The effects of low quality link schemes is silent but deadly. Unsuspected business owners can be subject to these penalties.

Unethical SEO companies build poor backlinks on spammy third party sites to generate short term results for clients. Kinda like steriods for websites.

How to Fix This: You can fix unnatural links by making sure they don’t pass PageRank. To do this, add a rel=”nofollow” or remove the links entirely.

#3: General SEO Mistakes

If you’re handling the SEO for your site, investigating these key areas is going to help you kick major butt in fixing your seo issues.

1. Lack of communication: Before you panic, check with your marketing department, It department or in-house webmaster. A simple seo fix might be one email away.

2. Site crawl errors: Website errors can prevent your site from showing up in search engines. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find your site crawl errors.

3. Search engine algo changes: Learning about algorithms can help pinpoint recent fluctuation in your sites ranking. Moz has a great historical record of Google updates.

4. Recent site updates: If your site was recently updated by a team member, its possibly they inadvertently triggered an seo failure.

5. Recent CMS updates: WordPress sites regularly undergo system wide software updates to fix bugs and exploitation. If your site has custom features, its possible a recent update triggered an seo mistake.

6. Domain name expired: It’s possible your credit card was expired and your Domain Registrar could not charge your card to renew your domain.

#4: On-Page Technical SEO Issues

After examining your big picture SEO health, its time to find and fix the problem.  A large majority of SEO problems are due to human error.

• Rel=canonicals: The rel=canonical tag functions as a 301 redirect for search engines without physically redirecting readers.

• Nofollow links: If used in the wrong places it Nofollow links can cause havoc by no passing along link juice to deeper pages.

• Meta Robots: Excludes individual pages from search results.

• Robots.txt: A text file created by webmasters to tell search engine robots how to crawl and index your site.

• Page titles: Verify their visibility in search results and in your source code.

• H1 tags: Verify your H1 tags contain relevant keywords to describe your pages.

• Forgetting Image Tags: Ensure every single image on your website is optimized to be searched and indexed by search spiders by including ALT tags on each image.

• AJAX sites: Sometimes they can serve search engines the wrong content.  This is common with website builders like Wix.

• Hreflang: Verify your language tags are serving the correct pages.

• Navigation links: Verify that you have not recently changes your site wide navigation. Lack of links to deeper pages can hamper their placement in search results.

• Internal-links: Same concept as above but related to links within the content of a page.

• Meta Descriptions: Used to describe the content of a page to visitors in search results. Verify their visibility in search results and in your source code.

• Shared Hosting: Sometimes servers go down and neighbors commit crimes. Check with your hosting provider and make sure your site does not share the same IP with shady neighbors.

• Https / SSL: Duplicate content issues can arise if you are serving both secured and unsecured sites to search engines.

• Failed plugins: When not consistently maintained, plugins can have a cascading effect on the rest of your website.

• Site Speed: Google uses site speed as an SEO ranking factor—not a huge one, but definitely an important one.

• WordPress reading settings: Visit the reading settings in your WordPress dashboard. Make sure you unclicked the Search Engine Visibility button that says Discourage search engines from indexing this site.

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Social Media Analytics

Social Media Analytics is a term often heard – and often misunderstood. Let’s break down just what this crucial business tool is, and why you need to use it.

It should, perhaps, seem obvious. Social media offers a huge pool of consumers ripe for brand communication. But that attitude is dangerous in its brand-centric focus.

Social media isn’t about brands. It’s about people sharing their lives with others they know – or get to know – based on common interests.

Still, social is a wonderful place for consumers and brands to connect, as long as they remember one thing: Social media may provide your brand’s first and last impression, so both need to be good ones.

This is where Social Analytics comes into play.

WHAT IS SOCIAL ANALYTICS?

“Social Media Analytics (SMA) refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make business decisions. This process goes beyond the usual monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or ‘likes’ to develop an in-depth idea of the social consumer.”

This is a pretty apt description, though we’d like to clarify that “social media sites” encompasses not just Facebook, Twitter, and the like, but forums and review sites as well as blogs and news outlets.

Just as buzzwords lose meaning over time, many brands lose sight of the value of Social Analytics because at first glance social data comes with a lot of noise. Nobody has time to sort through results that include spam, bots, and trolls to get to the good stuff.

When you have state of the art tools, however, Social Analytics becomes a treasure trove of consumer insights you can’t find anywhere else. Building on that, we’d extend the definition above to say Social Analytics is a collection of data unearthed via multiple techniques from multiple sources versus a single tool in and of itself.

To clarify, let’s run through some terms often confused with Social Media Analytics.

SO-CALLED SYNONYMS THAT AREN’T

If Social Analytics is a destination, what tools contribute to the journey? And what are their distinctions.

Social Media Intelligence is the closest term-cousin to Social Media Analytics. Social Intelligence represents the stack of technology solutions and methods used to monitor social media, including social conversations and emerging trends.

This intelligence is then analyzed and used to create meaningful content and make business decisions across many disciplines.

Social Media Listening is one of the terms most often confused with Social Media Analytics. But Social Listening applies to one specific aspect of Social Analytics: Learning about your audience.

The goal here is to uncover what they love, hate, and love to hate – as opposed to any assumptions you may have. It’s about getting to know them as people, not just prospects.

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SEO Growth Hacks

Get featured snippets for your site

A featured snippet or “rich answer” is when Google highlights content at the top of the SERPs for certain queries.

The highlighted part at the top of the page is the featured snippet. As per a 2015 report, roughly 19.5% of all queries have these rich answers.

Now if you look at the image again, you’ll notice that Wikipedia actually ranks at #3 for this query. Yet, because of the featured snippet, it occupies the top spot on the page.

In other words, Wikipedia gets the bulk of the traffic for this query despite ranking below other websites.

This is a great example of a tactic that lets you punch above your weight (i.e. a growth hack). A site that lands a featured snippet spot invariably gets much more traffic than sites that outrank it in the SERPs.

Create content that supports scalable, long-term link building

Not all content is equal when it comes to SEO.

Some content types, such as research reports, tools, in-depth guides, and even pranks and hoaxes often attract far more links than standard blog posts.

Focusing on these content-types can often get you outsized results for less effort.

Tweak your on-page factors

While domain and page-level link factors still matter, content, engagement and experience matter nearly as much, if not more.

We often find that we can make great strides applying this tactic to sites that haven’t paid attention to on-page factors.

Google’s recent moves also show an increasing reliance on on-page factors, whether it’s penalizing slow sites or making sure that sites are mobile-friendly.

Which is to say, if you can offer users a stellar on-page experience, you might be able to outrank much stronger domains.

Invest in influencer relationships instead of conventional outreach

When most marketers think of “influencer marketing”, they usually think in terms of social media marketing.

Sure, getting your content shared by an influencer can drive a ton of traffic, but the benefits go beyond that.

Content creators often look to top influencers (which includes newsletters and sites) to discover new content. More often than not, content shared by influencers gets linked out to by dozens of their followers.

Create content for questions, not keywords

As a growth-focused marketer, you want to create content for the next generation of consumers, not the last.

In the words of Wayne Gretzky, go “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

For SEOs, this means being aware of two trends that are changing computing: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice computing.

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10 Marketing Tips for Start-Ups

The reality is, most start-ups are bootstrapping their way toward growth. With limited funds entrepreneurs are forced to get creative in their problem solving. Marketing lends itself perfectly to this way of thinking, with savvy practitioners capable of making a big splash without breaking the bank.

Unfortunately, you will encounter some challenges along the way. How do you decide where to focus your marketing efforts? Where do you allocate your limited budget? Who do you market to? No matter how good a marketer you are, there’s always going to be a certain amount of guess work involved in answering these questions. Put yourself on solid ground by following these 10 marketing tips for start-ups.

What’s Your Budget?

In a recent study, BDC highlighted that 30% of Canadian small and medium enterprises have a marketing budget of less than $5,000 per year. Avoid the temptation to get caught up on the total dollar amount you’re spending. Instead, budget on a figure you can comfortably afford. How effectively you spend these dollars is more important than trying to break the bank on your marketing budget.

Make Use of Different Platforms

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. With the plethora of channels out there, marketers have never had it better. Start off by experimenting with different strategies. Craft an elevator pitch; Invest in online display ads and make use of email marketing software like MailChimp. Keep trying different ways to spread the word until you find one that works for your business.

Find Your Niche

A common pitfall for new entrepreneurs is the belief that everyone is their target market. If you’re trying to sell to everyone, you’ll fail to create any connections with potential customers. Establish who your target market is and tailor your advertising effort toward them. Speak to these potential customers, understand their lifestyles, concerns and needs. The better you know them, the more effectively you can sell to them.

Make Use of Social

Social media is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal. Find out what platform your target market uses and engage with them. For example, you won’t find many male tech enthusiasts on Pinterest, so it’s not essential for you to be on every platform. Join in the discussion on social, talk to potential customers without giving them the hard sell. Ensure your personal profiles are also up to date. Customers will be curious who you are and some may want to follow you.

Ensure Quality Content

Content Marketing isn’t just a buzz word. It’s one of the most effective ways to get people talking about your products. Create a blog and link to it on your social channels. People love reading lists (after all, you’re reading one right now), try to think of lists that provide a jumping off point for conversations. Note what topics are trending in your industry, or local area, and use them for content. If you’re creating the content the only investment you’re making is your own time.

Identify Allies

No matter what industry you’re in there will be key figures and influencers in positions of power. Work toward building a relationship with these people by sharing their content, interacting with them and even introducing yourself to them at events. If they can be convinced to share your content it will give your marketing and legitimacy a massive boost.

Attend Events

Though we live in an increasingly digital age, networking events still serve an important purpose in the business world. Identify events in your industry and attend. Take the time to introduce yourself to people and ask questions. Grow your network of potential customers by speaking to them face-to-face.

Use SEO to Grow

An entire cottage industry has popped up around search engine optimization but it’s an area you can tackle yourself. Make use of Google Analytics and Search Console to see which pages on your site are performing well. If your site runs off a platform like WordPress, the Yoast plug-in can point out tweaks and improvements you can make to aid your SEO ranking. If your content is well written, lacking in errors, and hits the keywords you want, you’re already doing well.

Follow Up

Customers have never been more empowered to provide feedback. Go above and beyond to ensure the feedback you receive is positive. These testimonials are worth their weight in gold as a marketing tool. Reach out to your customers and ask them how you can improve your product and service. A satisfied and engaged customer has the potential to do your advertising work for you.

Market Yourself

As the owner, you are the public face of your company. Take the necessary steps to always appear professional in the eyes of your peers. Present yourself well, say the right things (avoid divisive topics on social media) and show up at all your industry’s major events. If you turn yourself into a trusted figure in your field, it will have a tremendous effect on your business.

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