Are You Making These SEO Mistakes?

Are You Making These SEO Mistakes?

Are you disappointed with your Google ranking?

If your site is stuck in a low position on search engine results pages (SERPs) or dropping steadily, you may be making one or more common SEO mistakes.

To help you understand where you might be going wrong, our Orange County SEO experts share four common mistakes below.

Overlooking Mobile Users

Is your site optimized for mobile devices? If not, it should be. A Pew Research Center survey found that around 90% of Americans own a smartphone, and 15% are “smartphone-only” when using the internet.

A lack of mobile optimization could have a severe impact on your SEO performance. Not will it make your business harder to find online (due to Google’s mobile-first indexing), but it will deliver a weaker user experience that could cost you leads and conversions.

Producing Weak Content

Well-written content that offers value to readers is essential for strong SEO performance. If you regularly publish content that’s badly written, inaccurate, or hard to read, you may make it harder for your business to achieve a solid ranking.

Invest time and effort into producing relevant, high-quality content that offers useful insights and advice. Make sure you understand who you’re targeting in each piece of content you publish and how it will benefit them (this is where personas can help).

Underestimating the Power of Linking

Proper internal linking will help search engine crawlers find their way around your site as they move from page to page. Internal links connect pages (e.g. linking to a product or service covered in a blog post) and establish a clear site structure.

Backlinks are critical for good SEO too. When other sites link to yours, that indicates to search engines that your site is of high quality and considered a valuable resource. When used with other effective SEO techniques, this can contribute to a much better ranking.

Underusing Meta Tags

Meta titles and meta descriptions tell search engines what each page on your site contains. This helps them provide users with relevant search results.

As for your potential customers, meta tags can determine whether they click on your site or go for one of the other results. Your meta tags should be engaging and compelling enough to attract clicks.

If you don’t create a dedicated meta description for each page, search engines will use a snippet of your content instead. This may not be as appealing as a proper meta description and could cause you to miss out on clicks.

How to Improve Your SEO Performance and Reach Customers

Everyone makes mistakes, but some can be more costly than others. If your business consistently makes any of the mistakes covered in this post, you may not appear as high on SERPs as you know you should.

One of the simplest and most efficient ways to avoid common SEO mistakes is to work with a team of experts. Our Orange County SEO agency is ready to create a tailored strategy for your business and help you improve your ranking. To get started, contact us today!

Content Marketing Strategy Do's and Don'ts for Better Results

Content Marketing Strategy: Do’s and Don’ts for Better Results

A solid content marketing strategy will help your small business increase brand awareness, generate valuable leads, demonstrate thought leadership, and build trust. But if you’re not sure where to start, creating an effective strategy that suits your company, goals, budget, and resources can be difficult.

In this post, our Orange County SEO specialists share four do’s and four don’ts to help you get your content marketing strategy right.

Do Create Content for the Right Audience

Whether you’re working on a blog post, press release, whitepaper, or anything else, understand who you want to read it before you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard).

Otherwise, you risk publishing content that has no clear purpose and fails to make an impact.

Don’t Put SEO Above Value

Optimizing content for search engines is essential to ensure it’s indexed and ranked properly. A key part of this process is peppering keywords throughout your content, but don’t take it too far.

Why? If you’re too eager with your keywords, you could affect the quality of the reader experience and be penalized by search engines.

Do Explore New Formats to Reach More Customers

If your content marketing strategy mainly focuses on blog posts and articles, a little experimentation could bring you to a bigger audience.

You can choose from plenty of content types, including:

  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Guides
  • Infographics
  • Social content
  • Case studies
  • Ebooks

Some types are more popular than others — for example, 42% of people surveyed in the U.S. had listened to a podcast in the previous month. But creating a podcast is one of the more complicated, time-consuming options, so it may be best to experiment on a smaller scale initially.

Don’t Focus on Your Own Products and Services Too Much

It’s fine to mention your own work, but don’t let your content become a thinly veiled promotion. If you push your business too much, people may leave your site without converting to look for content that offers more value.

Do Invite Feedback

Encourage readers, listeners, and viewers to share their thoughts on your content. Feedback could reveal flaws and oversights that help you continually improve your output.

Don’t Post New Content Sporadically

Publishing new content regularly helps maintain audience engagement, gives search engine crawlers fresh pages to index, and demonstrates your dedication to producing quality material.

Stick to a content calendar and prepare each piece in advance. This will make it easier to publish new material frequently and check its quality before publication.

Do Monitor Performance

Track performance to identify your strongest and weakest content. You can learn from your best posts, understand where you went wrong in others, and continually hone your work.

Don’t Forget to Promote Your New Uploads

How is your audience going to consume your new content if they don’t know it exists? Take to social media to promote your latest posts and encourage followers to check them out.

Conclusion

Building a great content marketing strategy can improve your visibility and help you reach the right prospects.

Along with high-quality content, a comprehensive SEO strategy will help you achieve a stronger position on results pages, too. Our Orange County SEO agency will create a tailored SEO strategy for your small business that aligns with your goals.

To find out more, contact our SEO experts today.

Why is Mobile SEO Important to the Customer Experience?

Why is Mobile SEO Important to the Customer Experience?

Optimizing your website for mobile is critical to deliver a positive customer experience and keep shoppers coming back to your small business. Google research shows that users who have a negative experience on a mobile device are 62% less likely to purchase from the business responsible again.

How does good mobile SEO improve the customer experience? Our Orange County SEO team shares four benefits below.

Cater to Users on Different Devices for Added Convenience

Responsive design is a crucial part of an effective mobile SEO strategy. A responsive website will adapt to fit screens of all sizes, so visitors can enjoy a seamless experience when switching between devices.

If your site isn’t responsive, it’s unlikely to look right on a smaller screen. Images may not load fully (or at all), text might be too big or small, and trying to navigate pages could become a chore. If visitors can’t find their way around your site, it will be more difficult for them to convert.

Ensure Fast Page Speed to Avoid Wasted Time

If people are leaving your site without converting, slow load times could be one of the major causes. Users may not wait around when pages take too long to appear fully on their device, and that will cost you valuable opportunities to win new customers.

The ideal load time for a page on mobile is less than two seconds. Making your page speed as fast as this isn’t easy, but it can make a huge impact on the customer experience.

Cultivate Smooth, Satisfying Navigation on Small Screens

Simple and logical navigation is crucial for a positive customer experience, especially on mobile. Users want to find the information or products they’re looking for in as few steps as possible.

Here are a few tips to improve navigation when working on mobile SEO:

  • Add a hamburger button with a drop-down menu to help users find key areas of your site
  • Make buttons big enough to touch on smartphone and tablet screens
  • Use clear page titles to avoid confusion and frustration

Optimize your site navigation to help visitors find exactly what they need with minimal effort, from arriving on a landing page to making a purchase. They’ll be more likely to come back after a positive experience.

Contacting Your Business is Quick and Easy at the Touch of a Button

When customers visit your site on desktop and want to speak to a member of your team by phone, they’ll need to switch to another device.

But on mobile, you can provide them with a click-to-call button that lets them reach out to you directly. That gives you a chance to make a positive impression and move them along to the next stage of the customer journey, possibly just moments after they find your business for the first time.

The Simple Way to Optimize Your Website for a Positive Customer Experience

Good mobile SEO is vital to deliver a strong customer experience. From streamlined navigation to fast load times, there are numerous steps in optimizing your site for smartphones and tablets. That complexity can make it daunting for small businesses.

At Nett Solutions, our Orange County SEO experts will optimize your site to suit users across devices. To find out more, get in touch with our team today!