7 Costly SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2020

Hi! Today, I’ll be explaining some SEO mistakes, that’s keeping you in the last pages of google search rankings.

You have to learn to avoid them if you want to get a space on the first page of Google.

Make sure you read this article to the end because SEO mistake No 7 can completely devastate your SEO performance.

1. The very first SEO Mistake made by most business owners, entrepreneurs, digital marketers wannabes is thinking SEO is dead: I’m sure if you have been on this journey of trying to figure out how to get more traffic to your site, you’d have probably encountered the idea that SEO is dead.

But here’s the truth; SEO has changed but with its change, it has become more alive than ever. I’ve written here proofs that SEO is more alive than ever.

• Visit Google Trends and compare SEO as a “search term” to any other channel online.

Yeah, That’s the graph result of SEO soaring far ahead.

Do you get the point? No channel online is more popular than SEO.

• The second is Traffic.
• So here’s a quick pop quiz for you:
  Where’s the best place for your potential customers to find you organically online? Is it
• A. Social media
• B. Search Engine
• C. Emails?

Well, if your answer was B. Search engine, then, nice work, because there’s data to prove this. Just go to SimilarWeb and examine the top five websites with the most traffic, what do these sites have in common?

They are either a search engine or feature a prominent search engine and Google is by far the most popular website and search engine in the world. On average, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, That’s 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year. Second to that is Youtube, which is by far the most popular video search engine in the world. In fact, according to Forbes, youtube is the second largest search engine in the world; with over 3 billion searches per month.

After these two, we have Amazon, which is also by far the most popular e-commerce search engine in the world. And lastly, you have Yahoo (bing), which used to be the second-largest traditional search engine before it was overtaken by youtube.

So you get the point.

Understanding how to get organic search traffic is a good use of time and resources, but if all these are not convincing enough…

• Industry growth: According to Barrel Associates, over 65 billion was invested into the SEO industry in 2016 alone, and this number is expected to rise to 79 billion by the 3 quarter of this year — 2020. More and more capital is flowing into the SEO industry because companies are discovering how powerful it is for revenue growth.

To cut the long story short, the time for you to start using SEO for your business growth is NOW.

2. The second mistake you have to avoid is not performing an SEO audit before you start trying to do SEO.

I truly believe that the number one thing you need to do, if you want better SEO results, is to perform an SEO Audit. SEO Audits are one of my favourite activities because it reveals all the issues holding your SEO performance back.

You’ll also get the intel you need to make better decisions, and by better decisions, I mean that you’ll be able to prioritize your actions based on what will have the highest impact on your overall rankings.

3. The third mistake is not mapping out your site architecture. The truth is that: a well-designed site architecture can have a positive SEO impact for several reasons.

• First, a strong site architecture helps Google crawl your site more efficiently, which as a result helps Google index your pages faster.
• Secondly, a strong site architecture will grow your site’s overall authority, which makes ranking much easier. In other words, you won’t need as many backlinks to rank.
• Lastly, an effective site architecture can help you drive more conversions because you direct your users to your most important pages.

4. The fourth mistake is not prioritizing user experience or Ux: One of the best ways to improve your SEO performance is to simply optimize your site’s UX.

In fact, Adobe discovered that 38% of users will stop engaging with a website if the content and layout is not well arranged and inconsistent (unattractive). This alone should make you value UX and UI optimization even more.

But how do you optimize UX?

There are obvious UX optimization actions like increasing your website loading speed, making your site more mobile-friendly, not using aggressive interstitial pop-ups, not using disruptive ad placements, just to mention a few.

But there’s one UX optimization factor that matters for SEO more than anything else, and that is — optimizing for user intent. Now, what does this mean? This means that your page should satisfy the intent of the keyword that brought the user to your page. more of this in a second…

5. SEO Mistake number five is targeting the wrong keywords. This is a really bad idea because if you don’t have the website authority to target keywords with mid to high-level competition, it is going to be extremely hard.

This is especially important if you have a new website, you want to focus on keywords with low competition, so you can get some easy wins out of the gate. Then once your site has built some authority, you can target higher volume and higher competitive keywords.

6. The sixth mistake is not satisfying search intent. The best way to understand user intent is through user categorization. There are four types of user intents:

1. Informational queries: If a user searches “how to build backlinks”, you serve them informational content, because that’s the intent of the user. He hopes to get more information on how to build backlinks.
2. Comparison queries: If a user searches “Moz vs Ahrefs”, they are looking to compare and contrast two or more products, so they can make an educated buying decision, a page explaining the Pros and Cons of these products would satisfy this intent.
3. Transactional intent: If a user searches “Buy Prerit Digital SEO Course”, they are ready to transact or make a purchase.
4. Navigational intent: If a user searches for “Prerit Academy login”, you know exactly what they are looking for, so satisfying user intent is simple. Just try to get into the searcher’s mind every time you are deciding a target keyword. What do they want when they enter their search query? It’s a time well spent trying to figure this out, and the truth is getting it right will improve your page’s user experience — UX.
   This invariably means that users will stay on your page longer, to consume your content.

They may visit a second page on your site or they may even complete a goal like subscribing or submitting a form or even buying a product. So I recommend using a combination fo google analytic and heat map technology such as Hotjar, Sumo, Optimizely, to test and optimize your UX.

7. This mistake is one of the deadliest mistakes made by most businesses online. If you will take away one thing from this article, it has to be this; The mistake is not creating unique value.

Whenever you target a keyword, you should always think about how you can add unique value. Don’t try to emulate what’s already ranking completely, instead, think about how you can create something radically different and even better. Different can be using unique data, making your content more storage-driven, using better multimedia, using better design, or even just having way better readability. There are unlimited possibilities for making your SEO content different.

If you focus on how to be different than your top competitors, instead of trying to be better, you will see monumental results.

8. Mistake number eight is not upgrading old content, most people think about how they are going to target new keywords and create new content, mind you, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but you can have a huge and better return on your investment as well as your time when you focus on improving existing content on your site.

9. The ninth mistake is not injecting long-tail keywords. Although it is important to target a primary keyword phrase, most of your traffic will actually come from long-tail keywords, and that’s why you need to optimize your page accordingly. For example, the on-page SEO blog post I published is obviously targeting the keyword phrase “on-page SEO”, but I’m also targeting many other long-tail variations. Look at it this way, My primary phrase — “on-page SEO” has driven 84 clicks overall to my page, but this page has gotten around 1,500 total clicks, that means that 95% of the organic traffic I got on this page comes from the long-tail keywords.

Of course, this equation will flip once I’m ranking higher for the primary phrase, but it’s still a strong demonstration showing why you need to inject long-tail keywords in your pages.

10. Another SEO mistake most sites make is no internal linking from your most authoritative pages. So whenever you publish a new content asset, you should immediately look for internal linking opportunities. Not only will this help with indexability, but it will also drive link equity to your new page, which makes it way easier to rank. So all you need to do is throw your domain into Ahref’s site explorer and click on best by links, then look for opportunities to place an internal link on your most-linked pages.

11. Lastly, most websites owners make the mistake of not building backlinks. Backlinks are the fuel of every successful SEO campaign, don’t get fooled by these ideas that backlinks don’t matter because they aren’t grounded by facts or data.

According to Brian Dean’s massive study, the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.

Semrush had a similar conclusion, they found that the higher the domain’s position on the SERP, the more referring domains it has.

Backlinks matter and will continue to be critical to Google’s algorithm now and into the future.

So those are the 11 SEO mistakes you must avoid if you want to achieve SEO success this year.

I know, I said seven (7), but then 🤷🏻‍♂️; If I can come up with 11, why not just share it all 😉

If you have any questions whatsoever, kindly leave a comment below.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and be sure to be on a look out for my other articles on SEO and Page Rankings.