The 5 most commons SEO mistakes that small businesses make
When talking about SEO, small businesses in particular can really dominate the local search simply by using the right strategy and proper techniques of search engine optimization. Unfortunately, most of the small businesses fail to do so. Why? Discover the 5 most common SEO mistakes that small businesses make and that you can avoid with a little awareness and planning.
1 – Wait for the website to be launched before considering SEO
The most common mistake is to wait to have a website (or even worst, to redesign the website) beforeconsidering SEO as part of the business development. SEO is not just about keywords and on-page optimization, but should be considered in a 360 degree view and includes multiple aspects that have to do with the structure of the website itself. The contents of individual pages, the website layout, the architecture of the information, the added and deleted pages, those with changes to the URLs and in particular the 301 redirect can seriously affect the SEO performance of a website after its launch. Moreover, besides not achieving improvements in the future, not considering the SEO from the beginning, can lead to losing all the results achieved up to that point. And we do not want that to happen, right?
2 – Leave the SEO activity to a developer
Obviously, a good web developer knows the basics of SEO, but it’s really difficult to find a highly skilled professional who excels in both programming, web design, and SEO. The skills and the elements to monitor are definitely too many, and it’s inappropriate for a single professional to handle it all. Even if they are part of the same team, a developer and a SEO professional have surely different specialisations. We could compare them to a personal trainer and a nutritionist in the goal of loosing weight: certainly complementary, but definitely not exchangeable.
3 – Exploit SEO as a short-term source of revenue
SEO doesn’t work as a typical advertising tool. It’s not about “pay to get”. In this case, we would be talking about SEM, but that’s another story. Google and search engines dictate the rules to follow, but the hard truth is that there are no real guarantees with SEO. A good SEO expert offer their experience and knowledge of these rules to maximize your chances of getting traffic, conversions, and improving your ranking. However, the reality is that Google’s algorithm contains thousands of variables that no human can control at once. Despite this, companies continue to invest in this channel as SEO still has one of the highest ROI rates among all digital marketing channels. The key is to understand that SEO is based on a long-term strategy, and by investing in the right way, you can obtain enormous benefits.
4 – Choose a too affordable SEO plan
SEO is difficult to do well. It requires analysis, experience, planing, and constant monitoring to be optimally managed. There are no shortcuts to get to the desired results and cannot be immediate. The web is full of “super advantageous” SEO offers and mythical SEO professionals ready to bring your website to the top position in no time and with a ridiculous investment. In short, don’t be fooled by offers that are too good to be true. If you really want to invest in SEO, remember that it requires the right time and the right long-term planning.
5 – Do not monitor results with attention
There is nothing worse than doing something and then not checking if it was done well. To know if your SEO efforts are giving the expected results, you need to create targeted and detailed tracking processes to analyze the information you need. Google Analytics is free and surely a great starting point for data analysis. Install it, connect it to your website, and set goals according to your needs, such as conversions, website visits, session duration, newsletter subscriptions and so on. If the indicators you care about are improving, and the overall organic traffic is increasing, you are probably going on the right way. If you’re doing SEO correctly, you should be able to find some consistency between the actions or changes you make and the practical results you get.
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