Many digital marketers and business owners fail to get results from their search engine optimisation efforts. Frequently, it’s because they’re falling prey to common SEO mistakes.
The demands on SEO are growing every single day and so are the opportunities in SEO. Not only is the SEO discipline expanding rapidly but so is the size of the market. The SEO market is predicted to reach $1.6 billion by 2027 (in rand terms, this is about R22.9 billion). SEO has expanded over the last couple of years from being a siloed practice to a massive revenue channel. A channel which is becoming integrated into content marketing practices as well as overall digital strategies.
From shifting marketing circumstances to changes from search engines and customers’ main concern, marketers always have to stay on top of many changes. As a result, SEO methodologies are constantly evolving owing to search engines’ developments and consumer behaviour changes.
It is never quite that straightforward to stay on top of the most successful optimisation techniques. And when done incorrectly, recovering can be difficult and even more time-consuming.
Not Setting Clear SEO Goals
It comes as no big shock that you need clear goals in order to succeed with SEO. However, many business owners and digital marketers run SEO campaigns without having any clear-cut goals. They believe that doing SEO will boost their traffic, which in turn will boost their sales.
The problem is that things are not always quite that straightforward.
For your SEO efforts to pay off, it is necessary for you to understand what you want to accomplish. Is it better quality traffic, increased numbers of organic leads, or – alternatively – more sales you’re trying to get?
For instance, let’s say you’re getting 10 000 monthly organic users to your website however only 1% of them end up purchasing from you. If that’s the case, there are two possible reasons, either:
- You’re driving the wrong type of traffic to your website, or
- Your website does a poor job of converting visitors into customers.
Without clear goals, you’ll end up with a bunch of vanity metrics and not much else.
Not Understanding Your Audience
One of the underlying tenets of SEO is to understand your target audience. This means knowing your audience at the most minute as well as granular level. SEO is the customer’s voice.
While many marketers think that they know their audience, they frequently fall into the trap of not fully understanding how consumers behave in their market and then further at a granular level. Simultaneously, as consumers expect instant responses and results to their questions they frequently want this in real time.
While historical data still gives SEO great insights into seasonal trends, marketers’ methods to understand their customers need to be holistic. One of the most widespread errors in selecting keywords is not taking into account the preference of search engines – as well as users – for long-tail keywords. While you might define your products and services in a particular way, it’s more important to understand what words your potential customers would utilise to refer to them.
