To achieve growth and profits, every online business, no matter the size, needs to optimize its website for search engines. Search Engine Optimization provides online visibility to businesses boosting their ability to attract more visitors organically. It has great benefits in store for businesses that take the right approach, however, certain mistakes in SEO can lead to major losses.
At some point, a business may launch a new website to update its hosting, messaging, and design. In the process of migrating or launching a new website, sometimes things can backfire from an SEO perspective. The result of these common SEO mistakes is a loss of organic traffic and keyword ranking in Google or any other search engine.
Let’s have a close look at these 5 basic SEO mistakes that one needs to avoid-
Slow loading speed
There are times when businesses give more emphasis to the logo, image, and video loading on the website. This surely will increase the overall appearance of the website but there’s a need to balance all these things along with the website’s loading speed.
One crucial SEO mistake that many people do while launching their business’s website is ignoring the loading speed. If you’re overlooking the consequences of the slow page loading speed then this might lead to a high bounce rate.
It’s a fast-paced world and visitor wants quick loading of the website. If the page doesn’t open in a few seconds (ideally within 3 seconds) then the user can leave the webpage. Ultimately, there will be a negative impact on the website’s performance and new visitors. In Google results, you might also see a drop in your website’s keyword ranking. You can test the loading speed metrics of a website by using different tools and software such as pagespeed insights and gtmetrics.
To resolve the speed issue, make sure you’re using well-optimized images, reduced javascript, and CSS coding. Sometimes a slow server and heavy plugins can also cause a slow loading speed.
Google launched its Core Web Vitals algorithm in 2021 that emphasized website loading speed metrics and user experience on the site. In case, your website speed metrics do not match Core Web Vitals (CLS, FID, LCP) then you are unlikely to reap the benefits of SEO marketing.
Short and poor content
There’s a correct saying- “Content is king” especially when you’re about to launch your new business website. Failing to provide unique, genuine, and high-quality content on the website is a common SEO problem. Ignoring the importance of informative content decreases the site’s performance.
It is important to focus on the length and quality of the content because they can have negative effects on your website’s SEO. Whenever visitors visit your website, they search for information about the service or product you are dealing with. Be it a large, medium-sized, or small-sized business, the main aim of any visitor or potential customer is to know about the product. Before buying your products or services, they want to make sure that they’re making the best deal.
Content is the main thing that will attract them and keep their interest intact on your page. If visitors are not finding anything relevant and informative content then they won’t spend much time on your website.
SEOs and webmasters who are new to SEO often over-optimize their content with keyword stuffing to gain SEO benefits. It’s a bad SEO practice and can harm your website’s ranking in search engines. The content written by AI tools also has a chance to be penalized by Google. Google likes content written by people for people not for search engines.
So, keep in mind that SEO requires informative, unique, and fresh content. Before launching your website, avoid this SEO mistake and upload creative content.
Missing Keyword Strategy
Those days are gone when a website use to rank higher even by stuffing keywords randomly. Google algorithms keep on updating and signaling that you’ve to be careful with the keyword strategy. Not using the right and relevant keywords can sometimes disrupt the website’s performance.
As the right keyword can attract visitors, you need to focus on improving the keyword strategy. Thus, you need to focus on a few crucial points:
- Avoiding unnecessary stuffing of keywords
- Using LSI keywords and search terms
- Tracking of the trending relevant keywords
- The inclusion of long tail keywords should be precise to your business.
With this, it’s clear to make proper research before you start optimization with the correct set of keywords.
Unplanned website structure and theme
If we’re talking about SEO mistakes then we cannot ignore the unplanned structure of a website and its themes. Not focusing on the website structure is one of the common SEO mistakes that businesses make often.
Poorly planning of website structure impacts SEO the most. Right from increasing the visitor’s time on the site to the ranking of the page, all these things depend on how well you’ve planned the structure of your website.
So, your complete emphasis should be on how to design a website for an excellent user experience. A properly structured website can help visitors to find all the crucial information easily on your site which also increases conversion rates.
Missing ON Page Optimization
Many times, businesses think about why they’re not getting conversions, sales, and visitors regardless of giving so much effort into website design. Well, this happens because of one common SEO mistake that is missing ON page optimization.
Optimizing your business website in terms of image size, meta tags, and heading tags can help search engines to better understand the website. As Google constantly keeps on updating its algorithm, you need to focus on all the on-page SEO elements. Optimizing title tags, meta description, image size, and, internal linking are some of the keys that can help in maintaining an on-page strategy.
Publishing regular blogs on the website with internal linking is also a good on-page SEO practice. Writing new content in the form of blogs signals Google that your website is active and provides valuable content to visitors. In this way, you can see some good improvement in the keyword positioning of the website in search results.
To sum up
It’s always crucial to have a strategy so that you can manage SEO well during a new website launch. Along with this, avoiding these above-mentioned mistakes can make a huge difference in ensuring a successful launch of the business website that can attract more traffic.
As an SEO agency, Triwacko can optimize your website from both a technical and on-page perspective. Feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
Naveen Sharma specializes in SEO and organic growth marketing. He has extensive experience working with startups and established companies. As an SEO expert, he has helped businesses increase organic traffic and conversions.