There’s no use in any inbound marketing techniques if you don’t have an audience to market to. That’s why SEO is a critical step in attracting new customers to your business. With SEO, you can attract traffic from relevant local searches. This will help all your other inbound marketing efforts, like social media marketing, blogging and your email list pay off. If you’re ready to invest in local SEO for your business, now is a great time to learn more about common SEO mistakes to avoid.
You Forget to Focus on Local SEO
If you run a local brick and mortar business, there’s no sense in showing up for searches people make in other countries. You’re way more likely to attract potential customers to your site if you try to rank for phrases like “Knoxville restaurant” than if you try to rank for a phrase like “Italian food”, for instance.
By now, everyone has searched for local products and services online. Most people who search for local businesses will end up buying – after all, they’re already looking to buy, they just haven’t found the right business yet. When you focus your SEO to attract this kind of traffic from search engines to your website, you’re way more reap a worthwhile reward for all the time and money you invest in your site.
You Use the Wrong Keywords
Keywords are phrases you include in the writing on your website to help search engines read your content. The search engine will use these words to rank your website in searches that use similar words.
What makes this important, is that you have to optimize your website content to rank high for searches that will help you expand your customer base and grow your business. Ranking high for completely irrelevant keywords will get you nowhere.
However, it’s easy to fall into a trap of focusing on keywords that just aren’t paying off. This could be for different reasons. As already mentioned, it could be because you’re focusing on keywords that won’t bring in local traffic, but it could also be that the keywords you try to rank for are too competitive, or that they don’t bring in people who are interested in buying your product or service.
Because of this, it can be useful to keep an eye on which keywords are bringing in more traffic, as well as whether or not you’re getting more customers from traffic to your website.
You Don’t Use Links Right
Links can be very helpful in improving your website’s SEO. But when used the wrong way, links become useless.
Generally speaking, a few links to websites that aren’t your own can boost your SEO significantly. That said, linking can be a tricky business. For starters, links should preferably only lead to good content on authority sites in your niche. On top of this, the text you use to build the link with (called anchor text) is another important part of building links that will improve your SEO.
To ensure that your links are helping you, avoid using the same anchor text for all your links. Also focus on quality rather than quantity when linking to content from your website.
Hiring a Local SEO Company
Okay, hiring a local SEO company isn’t necessarily a mistake. In fact, the professionals at a local SEO company should have way more experience and knowledge that you do. With the right SEO expert working for you, you won’t even have to think about things such as choosing good keywords and using the right anchor text for links.
But be careful. Not all local SEO companies put effort into learning more about current SEO tactics. Google is always trying to serve users with more relevant content, and so the search engine’s algorithms are regularly updated. This does two things. Firstly, it improves the accuracy of search results by giving Google more things to scan website pages before choosing to list them. Secondly, it prevents malicious web developers from “hacking” Google’s algorithms and abusing the search engine.
And while Google’s ever changing algorithms is necessary step for online safety, the result is that SEO is a dynamic field that’s constantly being updated. Any local SEO company you hire should take note of search engine updates to ensure they implement the most recent tactics that Google will reward rather than punish.
Knoxville SEO Company
Are you tired of trying to manage your website and SEO yourself? Or worse yet, maybe you don’t even have a website yet because the technical aspects of it make you feel overwhelmed. After all, you’re a business owner who knows your industry, not a web expert who can design, manage and optimize a website.
At Serious SEM we understand your dilemma. That’s why we strive to offer local SEO services to local businesses both in Knoxville and other places throughout the US. We can help you design a website from scratch, and once your website is up, we’ll help you manage it. Our aim is to help small to medium businesses grow by implementing SEO tactics that are recent, proven and effective.