Top 3 Biggest SEO Mistakes Small Businesses Make

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral component of digital marketing; however, its implementation can be tricky and lead to reduced online traffic and revenue for your business. A poorly executed SEO plan may result in less online visitors and revenue for your organization.

Understanding the biggest SEO mistakes so that you can avoid them is crucial, and this article focuses on five of them that many businesses make when optimizing their content.

1. Not Having a Mobile-Friendly Site

Since April 2015, Google began rewarding mobile-friendly websites in their search rankings while penalizing those that were not. Since then, mobile friendly websites must now exist if they wish to rank well in search results, especially for near me searches.

Making your website non-mobile-friendly is one of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make, compromising both your search engine rankings and hindering customers' ability to locate and interact with your business online.

Maintaining a mobile-friendly site shows your customers and prospects that you keep up with technology and care for their needs, while not offering this feature creates the impression that you're living in the past. This is particularly true if competitors boasting mobile-friendly websites are more modern and trustworthy.

2. Not Having a Contact Form

Contact forms are an integral component of any website, enabling visitors to easily reach you and strengthening brand recognition. Unfortunately, many small business owners make the mistake of forgoing their presence on their site altogether.

Missed opportunities and decreased traffic can result in missed conversions and wasted visitor experience on your website, which may prove frustrating for visitors. By adding a contact form to your site, user experience will improve along with conversion rates.

Another often-overlooked SEO mistake is creating long URLs that are unfriendly to readers or search engines, like Google. URLs (uniform resource locators) serve as unique addresses for web pages on the internet and should be short enough to avoid being cut off by search engines like Google and rendering issues with browsers.

Keyword stuffing used to be an accepted SEO technique, but search engines now frown upon it. Instead, keywords should be integrated naturally into your content in order for search engines to better understand how relevant your pages are to user searches.

3. Not Having a Blog

No matter which SEO best practices you employ, they won't work without quality content. A blog offers Google an opportunity to crawl your site for fresh material while helping to increase its rankings in specific searches.

Keyword research is an integral component of SEO, whether conducted alone or outsourced to an SEO company. Beginners often make the mistake of targeting generic keywords instead of targeting local or service-specific ones for optimal SEO results.

As previously noted, some websites fail to regularly update their content, leading to a drop in rankings and organic traffic over time. To prevent this from happening, create and publish blog posts regularly in order to stay fresh and relevant with your visitors' needs; additionally, update old blog posts once every year or so so as not to lose relevance altogether and fade into obscurity.