How To Fix SEO Issues That Can Hurt Your Rankings

In the competitive online landscape, having a solid understanding of SEO is essential for success. However, if your website contains any of the mistakes outlined in this list, you may inadvertently be undermining your efforts.

Targeting the Wrong Keywords

One critical mistake is targeting the wrong keywords. Merely identifying keywords and assessing their competition is insufficient. It is equally important to evaluate how well your competitors are performing with those keywords and continually reevaluate your keyword choices to ensure you are not missing out on better alternatives. Taking the time to meticulously review and validate your keywords before focusing on them enables you to allocate your resources towards keywords that you can effectively rank for, rather than wasting resources on challenging or irrelevant keywords.

The efficacy of your SEO strategy heavily relies on the keywords you target. Therefore, investing extra effort into ensuring accurate keyword selection can significantly impact the success or failure of your campaigns. Consider incorporating LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords, which can help expedite the ranking process for your content. You can identify LSI keywords at the bottom of Google’s search results pages, which serve as valuable resources in enhancing your keyword optimization efforts.

Meta Descriptions and Title Tags

Your page’s meta description appears in your website’s search results. It’s free advertising to users, enticing them to click on your site rather than someone else’s. Using keywords here can also boost ranking because it helps Google decide your content is the right thing to put in front of users for that search.

The title tag shows up in the search results as your website. Keywords are vital here, as well. Using the same title tag on each page can be tempting, but each page on your site is competing against itself for ranking if you use that approach. Instead, vary them up to target different but related keywords.

Slow-Loading Website

If your website loads too slowly, you’re hurting domain authority. People are more likely to bounce off your site if it takes too long to load, and Google considers bounce rate when they determine your ranking. They also factor in your website speed when they push out results to users, so ensuring your site loads as quickly as possible will increase your rankings.

47% of users expect a website to load within two seconds or less. And a one-second delay in page load speed can cause a 7% decrease in conversion rate. So if you earn $100,000/day, you lose $2.5 million per year because your website is slow.

Test your website speed with GT Metrix. You’ll get information on how well your site is loading and recommendations on improving the load time.

Check our BLAZING FAST Web Core Vitals/Page Speed scores. We can assist with getting more performance and faster speeds for your website. Contact us here!

 Ignoring Your Website Analytics

When things work out how you want them to, it can be easy to overlook the data. But it’s at this point the data can be your best friend. You can find where you rank for your keywords, which are getting the most traffic, leads, and conversions, which pages people leave your website on, and more. This lets you see areas of your strategy that are working and pinpoint areas that need improvement if you want to reach your goals.

 Choosing Content Quantity over Quality

If you’ve got 100 blog posts, and none are helpful to your readers, it won’t matter to Google. Google has a user base to serve, and if its users can’t find what they’re looking for on your website, Google has no incentive to include your site in the rankings for that keyword. That’s why it’s better to produce fewer pieces of higher-quality content than to churn out poor-quality content consistently. If you can push out quality content at a high volume, that’s great, but don’t let quality fall for quantity’s sake.

 Not Using ALT Tags on Images

Many marketers and website owners forget about the Google Images search option and the images tab when people use the search engine. With that search, they can find images on your website if you’ve taken the time to optimize them. However, if you haven’t, all the competition that has made the time to optimize their images will beat you.

Adding the ALT text and file title to each image on your website can quickly be done in WordPress.

Inserting keywords here tells Google what the image is about so you can appear in the relevant searches.

Is it Time to Revamp Your Website?

Hopefully, you haven’t found any mistakes from this list on your website. But if you have, don’t panic just yet. You can go back and fix things any time and see your ranking improve. If you’re too busy or don’t have the know-how to do it yourself, SEO Inc. can handle it for you. Contact us today to learn more about our services and to get your free SEO audit. The audit will highlight critical areas where your site needs improvement to see a higher ranking. Or book a meeting directly with our CEO Garry Grant; click the following link to Schedule a call with Garry.

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