Maddie Karlsson

December 22, 2022

Through SEO, marketers can improve their websites’ search engine rankings, but by committing common mistakes, the websites’ ranking may be harmed instead. Here’s what to avoid when it comes to your SEO efforts.

The wrong keywords Choosing your keywords is the first step towards optimizing your site, and choosing the right ones is imperative, the point is to target those words your preferred audience is searching for or have such keywords as will bring targeted traffic to your site. If you have no organic visibility for the keywords you choose, a low click-through rate and a high bounce rate may all indicate that you are targeting the wrong keywords. There’s no point in optimizing the site content for every single keyword you can think of, as search results won’t be targeted enough and you’ll see a high bounce rate which means you are tanking your site’s credibility and that’s something that’s hard to recover from.

Too many keywords The meta keywords tag is not as helpful for your site ranking as you might think, it’s definitely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Google doesn’t actually use keyword meta tags in its rankings, not directly anyhow. So, listing keywords in the meta keywords tag alone, won’t help your ranking much. The best way to get a high ranking for your carefully chosen keywords is to add them naturally to the body content page.

Repetition The search engines have learned to recognise keyword cramming, and it’s a useless tactic that may penalise your site. There’s a difference between organically repeating your keyword in a natural manner, and just cramming a text full of the same word, it needs to make grammatical sense.  

Hidden text Something that’s considered very bad SEO-practice is hidden text: when you make the text the same color as the page in order to be able to add lots and lots of keywords that human’s won’t see when just visiting your site, but search engines still pick up on. This may lead to your site being penalized or simply ignored by search engines. In official guidance from Google, they state: “Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.”

Misdirected efforts Don’t spend too much time specifically on search engine optimization either, you should be putting just as much effort into optimizing all elements of your site. It’s a cost-effective way to drive site traffic, and it does take a bit of time and effort to learn and keep up to date with all the constant changes to the algorithms. But, just driving traffic to your site alone won’t automatically mean conversion. The quality of your site and products, its user-friendliness, service and quality of content will ultimately determine your success rate.  

SEO is an important part of your marketing strategy, aiming to increase your business’s organic search results and drive organic search traffic to the site, with the ultimate goal to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) so that you receive more traffic. We can help you with a well-thought-out search engine optimization marketing plan. Drop us a message today for a 15-minute initial consultation.