6 SEO Mistakes and How They’re Costing you Money
The number one result in Google gets approximately 32% of all clicks.
This stat highlights something that marketers have known for a while — SEO is essential in today’s world. If your business is located online in any way, you’ll need to invest in SEO in some way to ensure it ranks in search engines and is actually discovered by users.
That’s common knowledge. What’s surprising is that many brands are making frequent, major SEO mistakes. And these mistakes aren’t just theoretical — they’re costing companies huge amounts of money.
It’s not so surprising, then, that only 30% of people would recommend their current SEO provider to a friend or colleague.
Many of these errors are pretty easy to locate and fix, too. Most don’t require huge overhauls of your site, brand, or strategy, just fairly simple tweaks. If you can do that, you’ll surge ahead of the competition and start making a real impact online.
In this article, we’ll show you some of the most common SEO mistakes companies make, and how exactly they cost you money. We’ll also give you some pointers on how to fix them.
1. Not optimizing for local search
Google’s local search feature is incredibly valuable for raising awareness of your brand. It allows you to target people close to you geographically, making it the perfect tool for businesses like restaurants, bars, small shops, lawyers, gyms, and many more.
46% of all searches on Google are for a local business or local service, and 28% of local searches result in a purchase, making it an extremely effective way to reach your customer base.
How is it costing you money?
Failing to optimize for local search costs you money by cutting you off from one of the most lucrative sections of your audience — local customers searching for businesses in their area.
With a local Google listing, your customers will be able to quickly find out who you are, read reviews, and even locate you on a map.
How do you fix it?
It’s also incredibly easy to get started — simply head to https://www.google.com/local/add/login, log in with your Google account, and follow the instructions to create a listing.
2. Not using analytics the right way
As in all areas of marketing, analytics are crucial for SEO success. Without constantly tracking and monitoring your SEO performance, you’ll be flying blind — failing to notice blind spots and areas that need improvement.
How is it costing you money?
You’ll miss the areas where you’re losing money, and you’ll also miss potential areas to make more money. The result, unsurprisingly, is you end up with less money.
How do you fix it?
There are tons of great tools available for SEO analytics. Some of the best ones are:
3. Failing to prioritize site speed
If there’s one thing people truly hate, it’s a slow website. They really do despise it. In fact, they hate it so much that the probability of a bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.
And if the load time goes from one second to 10 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by a massive 123%.
How is it costing you money?
More bounces, of course, means a lower conversion rate. That means you’re failing to monetize your traffic (even if you’re getting a ton of it) and making less money compared to what you could be.
You’re essentially paying for traffic only to have it leave because you didn’t prioritize site speed.
How do you fix it?
There are lots of ways to improve your site’s speed, such as:
- Optimizing images so they load faster
- Enable compression to reduce the size of your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files that are over 150 bytes
- Use browser caching so returning users don’t have to reload the entire page from scratch
- Try to minimize redirects
…and many more.
4. Not building enough backlinks
Backlinks — when other sites link to yours — are a really important and often neglected element of SEO.
A study published on Backlinko found that the number of domains linking to a page was the factor that had the highest correlation to rankings in Google.
How is it costing you money?
Failing to focus on backlinks means you’ll rank lower in Google than you would if you paid attention to building them. Lower rankings mean less traffic to your site, fewer customers, and less money.
How do you fix it?
There are a number of ways to build backlinks. Reaching out to other websites and blogs in your space and offering to create a guest post is one reliable way — just make sure to include a link to the page on your site that you’re trying to optimize for.
Alternatively, if you’ve created a great piece of content you can ask for others to link to it, although this can be difficult if you aren’t well-established. And of course, the best content tends to pick up backlinks by itself over time
5. Creating the wrong sort of content
Content is crucial for SEO, and for marketing in general.
According to HubSpot, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, which highlights just how important it is — and how many of your competitors are pushing to improve here.
But not all content is created equal. It’s vital to create content that connects with your visitors, speaks their language, solves their problems, delivers real value, and builds a relationship.
How is it costing you money?
If you create the wrong sort of content your visitors won’t read it, they won’t engage with your brand, and they won’t hang around long enough to become a paying customer.
A huge part of building a customer base online today is about relationship building — bad content alienates your audience long before they approach the buying stage.
How do you fix it?
Creating the right content is all about getting to know your audience and then tailoring your content to their interests, pain points, and goals. Here’s how you can get to know them better:
- Talk to them. Ask for replies to emails, comments on blog posts, and social media responses.
- Ask your sales team for input. They talk to your customers all day long, so they have a better idea than most about what’s troubling them and what they want.
- Spend time in the same online spaces (like social media sites and forums) to get an idea of the topics and problems being discussed
- Read reviews of similar products to find common areas of dissatisfaction
- Send out surveys and polls to your email subscribers, and maybe offer an incentive for completing them
6. Your site isn’t optimized for mobile
Nearly 50% of all traffic comes from mobiles, which isn’t surprising considering that there are billions of phone owners around the world and most of us seem to be on them 24/7.
If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, it’ll appear weird when your visitors try to access it from their phone. The experience will be unpleasant, it’ll load slowly, and your visitors will be far more likely to bounce away, never to return. That’s not good for business.
How is it costing you money?
By driving your mobile visitors away with a poorly optimized site, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of your market and failing to convert traffic into customers.
How do you fix it?
Optimizing your site for mobile users in a basic way is actually fairly straightforward, and you can choose to add more complexity for an even sleeker design. Here are a few tips to get started:
- Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool. This is a really useful online tool — you simply enter your site’s URL and the tool will let you know if it’s mobile-friendly or not, along with some suggestions for how to improve.
- Use a responsive WordPress theme. These are designed to work well and look good on any device, and it should be made clear in the description of the theme.
- Improve your site speed and loading times
- User-test your site design to gain an idea of how people respond to it and where you need to improve
Optimizing your website for SEO doesn’t have to be a monumental challenge. It’s often simply a case of finding some simple errors and fixing them, and this can have enormous benefits for your business as a whole.
We can help you improve your SEO and raise the profile of your brand, as we have with countless other companies. To find out more, get in touch.
This post was written by Louis Moran.
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