More than 75% of people don’t scroll past Google’s first page. This means – if your website doesn’t rank on the first page, you’ll be missing out on more than 75% of your target audience.
Chad Pollitt, a well-recognized author, and speaker, in one of his Huffington Post articles, delivered a powerful message – “The best place to hide a dead body is Page II of Google.”
While the source of the quote is yet unknown, it’s exceptionally popular among marketers and advertisers.
You cannot afford to rank on the second, or third, or even the fourth page.
That’s because you won’t get enough clicks and traffic that you need to make your SEO strategy a grand success.
I’ll admit – if you don’t have a well-established online presence, you’ll find it incredibly hard to rank for the best keywords. That’s because multiple high-profile websites are already ranking at the top.
However, that does not mean you should give up. With a brilliant SEO strategy in place, you can show up on the first page of Google.
While it’s important to have a brilliant SEO strategy in place, there’re a few common SEO mistakes marketers make all the time – which seriously tampers with their results.
To help you achieve the best possible results, I’ve listed down the three most common SEO mistakes marketers are making in 2021.
Let’s not wait anymore – it’s time to dive right into them.
Top 3 SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2021
Three of the biggest SEO mistakes marketers make are:
- Little-to-No Focus on Link Building (High-Quality Backlinks)
- Targeting the Topics or Keywords with Poor Search Potential
- Neglecting Technical SEO
Little-to-No Focus on Link Building (High-Quality Backlinks)
90.88% of the overall web pages don’t get any organic search traffic from Google. While the number is surely disappointing, one of the big SEO mistakes most marketers make is not focusing on link-building at all.
About 66.31% of web pages have 0 referring domains pointing to them. According to an Ahrefs study, the number of referring domains to a web page directly correlate to organic search traffic.
The higher the number of backlinks, the better will be your chances of ranking at the top – which means the more will be the number of people landing on your website.
Link building is important. Most marketers or so-called SEO gurus completely ignore this strategy – which is why they face a hard time improving their rankings.
At the same time, your focus should be on getting high-quality backlinks rather than just settling for low-quality ones.
Google as well as other search engines focus on delivering the best possible results to their users. Getting high-quality backlinks from top publications or websites with 50+ domain ratings will help you position yourself as a credible source of information.
So, how can you get high-quality backlinks?
Let’s look at one of the strategies we personally use. Here, we will be stealing links from the top 10 ranking pages for the keyword you’d like to target:
- Step I: Hop onto SEMRush
- Step II: On the left, select “Keyword Overview” under “Keyword Research Section”
- Step III: Type in the keyword you’d like to target. Our primary keyword for this article is “common seo mistakes.” So, let’s look at the top 10 ranking pages for this keyword.
- Step IV: Keep scrolling down to the “SERP Analysis” section. Here, you can look at the top-ranking pages as well as the number of backlinks for each of them.
- Step V: Click on one of these pages’ backlinks’ number to review their backlinks.
- Step VI: Now, you can reach out to these companies or publications and ask them to link back to your website page as well. Or, if you find any top publications, you may even submit a guest post and ask them for a backlink.
Targeting the Topics or Keywords with Poor Search Potential
Imagine spending your top dollars and valuable time producing a blog post that nobody’s searching for.
I know – it sucks.
Another big mistake most SEO professionals make is targeting the topics or keywords with poor search potential.
Let’s assume you run a pest control business in Boise. While building a blog posting strategy, you’d want to cover a keyword like “do you have to leave the house for pest control.”
It makes sense to produce a blog post targeting this keyword, right?
My answer is no.
While this keyword’s SEO difficulty stands at 15% (as of this writing), its US search volume is 90. This means only 90 people are searching for this.
Honestly, I believe that it doesn’t make sense to target this keyword.
On top of this, the companies that have published this blog post as part of their content marketing efforts have zero referring domains pointing at them – so duh, no backlinks.
The results will not be the same for all the companies. But the main point is you shouldn’t target the keywords with low volume.
Recently, we published an article titled “How Google Ads Can Help You Advance Your Business Goals in 2021.”
Why did we cover this blog post?
Simple – the keyword “how can google ads help you advance your business goal” has a 1.6k US volume with its keyword difficulty standing at 17% – which means it’s fairly easy to rank.
I’ll repeat – targeting the keywords or topics that people are not searching for doesn’t make sense. Hence, I’d advise you to conduct thorough SEO keywords research while building your content strategy.
Neglecting Technical SEO
By neglecting technical SEO, you’re directly or indirectly putting your business on shut-down mode. It doesn’t matter if your web pages have more than 50 or 100 backlinks; ignoring technical SEO will take you nowhere.
One of the most common misconceptions around technical SEO is that only businesses with large or complex websites should focus on it.
Most SMBs are under the impression that they don’t need to work on their technical SEO – just because they have a small website.
That’s wrong. And if anyone says so – don’t believe them.
It doesn’t matter if you have a single-page or 1000-page website, you can’t afford not to focus on your technical SEO. That’s because focusing on your website’s technical SEO will make things easier for Google.
Google search engine crawlers will find it extremely easy to crawl your website. And as you’re making Google’s life easier, they would love to reward you.
Some of the Technical SEO elements you need to focus on include:
- Website Security
- Mobile-Friendliness
- Website Speed
- HTTP Status Codes
- Indexation
- JavaScript
- Duplicate Content
- Site Architecture
- And more!
Website Speed:
Make sure your website loads fast. While producing this blog post, I hopped onto PageSpeed Insights to check our website speed. And here are the results:
Bravo Nate (Website Developer) & Mary (SEO Specialist)!
Click HERE to check yours.
Mobile-Friendliness:
At the same time, we reviewed our website’s mobile friendliness and here are our results:
Click HERE to check yours.
Avoid Making These SEO Mistakes!
You may have the most brilliant strategy yet fail to achieve the desired results if the implementation isn’t up to the mark.
Trust me on this – you’ll make mistakes. There’s no denying that. But what you need to do is identify them in a timely manner and capitalize accordingly.
And if you are wondering how much time it’d take for your website to rank at the top, there’s no concrete answer for this. The short answer is about 6-12 months, whereas the long one is – it depends. You need to do it right. From keywords research to brilliant implementation, you need to get everything right. And most importantly, you need to capitalize on the mistakes you’re making.
Now that we have discussed the most common SEO mistakes most marketers make, we are pretty confident that you will try to avoid them.
And if you need any help, feel free to knock on our doors☺
Or, if you just want to put your business in hyper-growth mode, you may just schedule a free consultation with our SEO experts or dial in our number.
Don’t wait around!
Hire the #1 SEO Agency in Idaho today.
Also, feel free to consume more of our high-performing blog posts:
