There is no online marketing campaign without SEO. At least there can be no successful campaigns without a well-thought-of and executed SEO strategy. How you approach your website and online marketing optimization will invariably affect how well it performs. That is the deciding factor between you making loads of money and barely scraping by. The issue is that SEO is not easy. Everybody can learn a few basics, but that would hardly be enough to execute a successful digital marketing campaign. The fact that there are hundreds of ranking factors and that Google continually changes its algorithm (without any announcements, by the way) makes things substantially more challenging. Plus, many mistakes can earn you penalties and devastate your efforts. A slight miscalculation is all it takes for your campaign to be shattered. Therefore, knowing about SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 is critical.
- Not using keywords
Keywords are the base of any SEO, and one of the most common mistakes marketers make is not using them. Keywords are what search engines use to determine what your content is about. Based on them, they will decide whether to present it to prospective customers.
However, you can’t just pick any word or phrase to incorporate into your website content. You have to perform serious keyword research to learn what will help you compete with leaders in your niche and rank high on result pages. This is no easy task, which is why many business owners decide to employ the services of professionals.
Not doing keyword research is one of the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022.
Still, if you wish to do it yourself, you need to have some tricks up your sleeve. Here is how you should approach this:
- Consider the products and services you offer
- Think about what people search for when they look for these services and products or when they look for information about them
- Make a list of topics that appear among the top results
- Use SEO tools, such as Google Keyword Planner and Moz Keyword Explorer, to determine which keywords will rank better
- Create content that naturally incorporates these keywords and phrases
- Using too many keywords
Keyword stuffing is very much frowned upon by search engines. They consider this practice spamming and will penalize you for it. As is usually the case, too much of anything can’t be good. So, be careful with keyword density on your pages and avoid black hat SEO techniques, such as adding a bunch of keywords at the end of the text and making them invisible by using the same color as the background. Website visitors may not see them but trust that search engines will, and they won’t look at them approvingly.
- Not making your URLs SEO-friendly
Clear URLs also help search engines understand what your pages are about. Consider them as SEO shortcuts – even before Google crawls your age, it will recognize the URL and direct traffic to it when someone searches for something related to the topic.
Help search engines understand what your website is about by optimizing every aspect of it.
To make your URLs SEO-friendly, follow these tips:
- Use keywords in the URL
- Add hyphens as word separators
- Make URLs short
- Don’t use the entire blog post title
- Stick to lower case
- Don’t add dates
- Not using images
One of the SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 is not adding images to your content. Although images can affect your website speed if you aren’t careful with their size, they have several advantages, as they:
- Break up the text and make it more readable
- Make your website more appealing to visitors
- Can be optimized for specific keywords
You can use image optimization tools, such as Smush and Kraken, to help you.
- Not optimizing metas
Besides URLs, metas also help search engines crawl your pages and understand what they are about. Metas include:
- Meta descriptions
- Meta titles
- Image alt descriptions
You need to make sure that they are relevant to the topic of each page and that they are optimized using keywords. Of course, pay attention not to use too many exact keywords because search engines can consider it spamming. Instead, think of variations and different terms for the same thing.
- Adding duplicate content
Duplicate content is the text that appears on multiple pages. This content can be exactly the same as content on other pages or substantially similar. Also, duplicate content can occur within a single domain or across multiple domains, and it’s equally detrimental. If you are just developing content on your website, you may want to speed up the process and copy bits of text. But you need to know that this comes with some risks. Search engines will consider it plagiarism and penalize it. All content on your pages must be unique, and it has to provide value to visitors.
- Not structuring your content well
Heading tags are mandatory in 2022. You have to use H1 for the heading of your posts and H2s and H3s for sub-headings. This will make your content easily readable and better structured.
Such an organization helps visitors scan your posts and quickly find the information they need. Google will reward your efforts to make your visitors’ lives easier.
Besides headings and sub-headings, you should also break up blocks of texts with:
- Graphics
- Bullet lists
- Numbered lists
- Tables
You will also help readers find what they need faster by bolding and italicizing the most important bits.
- Failing to optimize your website for mobile devices
More than 70% of all searches happen on mobile devices. If your website is not mobile-friendly, Google and other search engines will recognize it and not present it in the results.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, the user experience is compromised.
User experience is one of the most critical ranking factors. Thus, if you make it difficult for users to navigate your website on their phones, you will lose potential clients, increase bounce rates, and ultimately miss out on an opportunity to earn. You will also receive a penalty from Google.
Avoid common SEO mistakes, and you’ll be just fine
SEO is like an alive organism. It changes continually, which can make your life more difficult. However, if you stay in the loop of what current trends are and apply some of the basic SEO principles, you will always have an excellent base to build upon. And just as it’s important to know what trends to follow, it is also crucial to understand what common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2022 and later. If you find this hard to manage, you can always contact a digital marketing agency and outsource this part of the business. After all, as a business owner, you must have other more pressing issues to tend to.