How Companies Hurt Their SEO
Although it’s important to keep investing in SEO strategies to help boost your company’s rankings, that’s only half the equation. You also need to make sure you’re not inadvertently shooting your site in the foot. A lot of companies spend good money on boosting their SEO without realizing they could save money and see better results by simply avoiding common mistakes.
4 Reasons Your Search Engine Rankings Aren’t Better
Are you becoming frustrated with Google’s disregard? If you’re positive you’ve been following their playbook, consider these four ways you might actually be causing the problem:
1. Neglecting “Boring” Information
The About Us, Privacy Settings, and the Terms and Conditions pages tend to be fairly boring. At the very least, they’re not nearly as much fun to create as an impressive homepage or blog posts that really boost your authority.
That said, Google likes them, so you absolutely must include them on your page. The same thing goes for your company’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) information, if applicable.
Scam sites and/or companies with short-term outlooks (e.g. dime-a-dozen affiliate sites) generally don’t have these “boring” pages because their owners just want to set up shop and sell as quickly as possible. The only things they care about are pages that convert. Don’t look like a scam site – have your “boring” pages set up right away.
2. Nonexistent Backlinks
In the age of content-driven marketing, many companies are obsessed about pumping out blog post after blog post after blog post. Then, following months of doing this, they’re dismayed to find that they have no traffic.
The reason for this is that none of this content is generating backlinks from other sites. That could be because the content isn’t very good.
It could also be because the company isn’t taking the time to put the blog in front of influencers who could provide those links. This means thinking long and hard about what kind of content influencers would want to link to, and then emailing these authorities to share this content.
Guest posting on high-quality sites can go a long way toward this goal, as well. This is another time-consuming endeavor, but it will have much greater results than churning out copy every day.
Just remember: Even if your content is good, if no one is linking to it, you’ll lose ranking to a company with a tenth of the posts that makes backlink-generation a priority.
3. Paid Backlinks
The only thing worse than a lack of backlinks is the presence of paid backlinks.
If you’re hiring someone to handle your SEO needs, it’s important to have some idea of how they plan on doing it. That’s not to say that you need to micromanage them, but you want to avoid paying someone to go out and buy backlinks for your site – a black hat SEO method that is more common than most people think.
At first, you might be impressed with the person’s results, but that will eventually come to an end as Google becomes wise to the tactic.
Even if you’re handling your own SEO needs, it’s smart to audit your backlinks every couple of weeks. Competitors will sometimes buy low-quality backlinks and point them to rival companies knowing that this will grab Google’s attention and trigger their wrath.
4. Unpopular Content
Simply publishing tons of blog posts could hurt you in an unexpected way.
That’s because Google takes a comprehensive look at your posts to see just how popular they are as a whole. If all of your posts receive a consistent amount of engagement, you’ll be in good shape. However, if some posts don’t perform well, they’re going to hurt Google’s opinion of your entire site.
This is why annual content audits have grown in popularity over the past two or three years. Even though it can be difficult to completely erase a post you spent a lot of time and/or money on, if it doesn’t boast any engagement, it’s holding you back. Get rid of it.
Improve Your Site’s Rankings with Good SEO Habits
Don’t sabotage your SEO efforts. Make sure you include the “boring” information on your website. Focus on quality backlinks, not paid, low-quality ones. Finally, conduct a site audit regularly to remove old content that might be holding your site back. Then, going forward, make sure that anyone involved in your SEO follows these guidelines.