Editor’s Note: Here at Dispatches, we are always looking for ways to help our readers do things. For some of our readers, that means helping navigate the working world, for others, it means assisting in the ever challenging question, “what’s for dinner?” For still others, it means figuring out how to balance family life with everything else. In an effort to aid in all of these endeavors, we have collaborated on this article written specifically for our readers.
You can pay an SEO expert all the money you want – there are still several ways in which their tactics will end with you not gaining that many visitors at all. We’re going to take a quick look at the errors that can kill any off-site SEO campaign. Give your business website a thorough review and ensure you haven’t left a plethora of SEO-suffocating problems lying around!
Bad content
No amount of SEO is going to help you much if the content on your website isn’t that good. But if we’re talking about search engines here, then a decent question is raised: how exactly do a bunch of dispassionate search engine bots (or web crawlers) judge the quality of a given bit of content? They’ll judge it by several things. Word count, relevance to given search terms, use of keywords, references from trusted websites, references to trusted websites… sure, none of these things guarantee that the user will get really good content, but those are the metrics Google use. So focus on them!
Lack of relevance
Not all SEO experts are the same. And I don’t just mean that some are better than others, although that is true. The fact is that some SEO experts are better at serving particular clients than others. So let’s say you’re running a dermatology clinic. You could work with the best rated and more popular SEO company out there, and you’ll probably get decent results. But your competitors might blow you out of the water with their SEO tactics. How are they beating you? It’s possible that they’re working with an SEO company who are experts in the field of dermatology marketing! Make sure your SEO approach is relevant to your specific business.
Spreading your net too wide
You need to make sure that the SEO targeting for your business isn’t too widespread. Let’s take the example of the dermatology clinic again. If your clinic is in Los Angeles, then you need to ensure that your SEO techniques aren’t catching people who live in New York City. What good is your website to them? To reel in the net and keeps things a little more local, make sure you’re getting cited from other local institutes (and vice versa), as well as ensuring you get reviews from users on websites that focus on the area in which your business is located. You would need to look into local SEO for dermatologists.
Long load times
A lot of new businesses use drag-and-drop website builders, or cheap (see: low-quality) web hosts. You may think this is a good way to start, seeing as it saves a lot of money, but not only does it risk frustrating the users that visit your website – it actually makes it less likely users will even see your website. That’s because the speed of your website affects the efficacy of your SEO. Google and other search engines don’t take too kindly to slow websites, and they can tell how slow your website is because their bots track response times!
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