SEO Success: Are You Getting in Your Own Way?

Written by Nick Stamoulis

Smart business/website owners know that they don't want to get on Google's bad side since SEO success translates to business success. So, they do everything to "play nice" and follow Google's SEO best practices. They optimize their website content in a natural way, look for relevant inbound link opportunities and pursue them, and write content and share it in social media. While, at a high-level, these are the SEO basics, there are SO many things that factor into not only SEO success, but overall website conversion success. We find that there are plen ty of website owners that are essentially getting in their own way and stalling or preventing SEO success by doing these things:

Optimizing a bad website

The best SEO work in the world is somewhat useless if it's supporting a bad website. Whether the content isn't great, it's not user-friendly, or looks like a blast from the past, it's going to be a turn off to anyone who visits. Problems also arise when a company's products or services are confusing or the branding isn't consistent. SEO is only going to help when a company "has its stuff together" and a modern website that is easy to navigate and conversion friendly. The first step of an SEO campaign is to make any website updates that might be necessary. In most cases it doesn't have to be a complete re-design (although sometimes that's helpful).

Confusing the purpose of the website

What is the website for? If the website is used as a means to sell product or to generate leads, a website visitor shouldn't be bombarded with ads. All too many website owners think that they might as well make some ad revenue off of their website and plaster it with banners and pop ups and even embedded affiliate links. This is a huge turnoff to a website visitor and is even a search engine algorithm ranking signal. Any website with too m any ads "above the fold" is penalized accordingly.

Publishing bad content

SEO is all about content. Without optimized content there's nothing to rank in the search engines and nothing to earn natural inbound links. But the web is flooded with content. Does yours stand out at all or is it just adding to all of the noise? Good content helps your target audience in one way or another, adds a fresh perspective, and helps build your authority in a niche. Spend some time looking at popular content in the industry and determine how you can enhance what's already out there.

SEO has come to be a well-known marketing strategy and any smart website owner is investing in SEO to improve their organic search engine presence. That means that in almost any niche, it's competitive. You need to get out of your own way and follow every single SEO best practice to find SEO success.

Categorized in: SEO

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