5 SEO Mistakes and How to Find and Fix Them

SEO and marketing on the web presents a great opportunity for cost-effective ways to drive traffic, leads and sales online. On the flip side, it can be easy to make costly mistakes if you don’t have search engine marketing expertise.

In most situations, these mistakes can be corrected easily enough – here are 5 common errors in SEO services and what to do fix them:

1. Not using keywords effectively

This can include using too much industry jargon, chasing after words that don’t convert or simply using too many keywords on your pages or too little!  Keywords ARE important and doing keyword research correctly in the early stages of building and marketing your site is important as they lay the groundwork for your site.

2. Not having unique title tags and meta descriptions

I am always surprised by how often I see this.  Every page should have a unique title for the page that is keyword focused and relevant to the content on that specific page.  This is your opportunity to tell both search engines and users what your page is about, take advantage and write compelling and descriptive page titles and descriptions for each page on the site!

3. Not optimizing for local SEO

Make sure you are including geo specific keyword modifiers in the keywords you are targeting. Also every business should claim their business listings on the top internet yellow pages like Yelp, Bing, Google Places, Merchant Circle and FourSquare. There is no reason not to do this, and not doing it can hurt your business.

4. Not measuring or acting on results

You need to monitor and measure the impact of changes you implement or strategies you undertake. If a new tactic you thought was going to drive a ton of traffic and conversions – doesn’t, move on. On the other hand if something is working really well, take note and consider increasing the amount of time or attention you spend on that strategy.

5. Not taking advantage of Internal linking

This is an easy fix, go through your site and find the opportunities where it makes sense to be linking to other pages throughout your site. This is a great place to take advantage of targeted anchor text where you can actually choose and control the anchor text of a link.  Using internal links where it makes sense not only helps users find appropriate related areas of your site but it can help spiders to navigate your site as well.