With so many moving parts and constantly changing best practices, it’s no wonder that SEO seems so complicated. Further adding to the complexity, Google is constantly updating its algorithms, which in turn causes shifts in ranking. These changes cause some marketers to sleep less and worry more.
To add to that, Google is constantly working on and releasing new technologies that offer an “alternative way” of ranking.
With all of the above-mentioned, it’s not far-fetched to deduct how complicated SEO truly is, since, on top of learning the new methods, SEO experts have to also overcome a learning curve to properly do their job.
It’s one of the reasons why SEO Jokers was built, to help businesses overcome obstacles such as search rankings, having a modern and effective UX, etc.
That is why taking a deep dive into the SEO for your website is one of the most important things for your ranking, outside of high-quality content and page speed. It’s one of the proven ways to stay ahead of your competition.
There have been so many situations where businesses accidentally ruin their website’s ranking by not following the best practices.
But, on the other hand, we have seen so much overly complicated SEO that causes a lot of unnecessary headaches. Headaches that again can be avoided by following the best practices and doing a bit of troubleshooting.
Don’t come to us if you have overly complicated SEO.
It’s sooo much easier to start fresh and build everything from scratch than to untangle a messy web of complicated SEO that would take a lot of time, manpower, resources, and ultimately a lot of missed opportunities (we’re talking about conversions for the business here, not dates).
Instead, we will help you out by providing a detailed step-by-step guide on how to fix your complicated SEO.
Think of this blog post as a guide to fixing your complicated SEO problems and simultaneously improving your rankings.
Let’s get started.
What is SEO?
Since we do have a detailed guide on what SEO is, we won’t go over it in detail in this blog post.
However, to put it simply, SEO (an acronym for Search Engine Optimization), helps clients find your website online using search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.
When looking at the “bigger picture” SEO is a lot more than just a bunch of keywords and links combined. It also includes meticulous UX/UI, high-quality content, search engine requirements, indexing factors, etc.
Although the topic of SEO is complex, that doesn’t mean that your SEO processes have to be!
Why does SEO matter?
We’ll use only one statistic to answer this question: “75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines.” Safe to say that most people find what they are looking for on the first page of the results on the search engine.
That is why it’s essential to take the time and understand your customers, business, and product/service and to shape your SEO around it.
How easy clients find you online most often translated into more website traffic, leads, and overall conversions.
Most common SEO mistakes and how to fix them
From past experiences, having worked with quite a lot of companies in different industries and a wide range of websites, we’ve compiled a list of the top most common SEO mistakes that many businesses make:
- Slow website speed
- Poor UX
- Broken links
- Using the wrong keywords
- Poor on-page retention
- URLs that are not country, region or language-specific
Some of these might be simpler, while the rest might take some time and resources to complete.
Slow website speed
In one of our previous blog posts, we talked about how page speed affects your website ranking. For the whole detailed blog post, click here.
One of the most important factors to ranking and SEO is website speed since it’s directly tied in with the UX/UI of the website.
Nowadays, most people are impatient and if they notice that it takes more than 3 seconds for the website to load, they leave. Not because your product/service isn’t what they wanted, but it’s because they didn’t reach the endpoint fast enough.
In short, the more time it takes for your website to open up, the more potential clients you will lose, and in general costs you a lot of SEO (or organic) traffic. This is also supported by the fact that the user’s average attention span has dropped in the last 2 decades to only 8 seconds.
Solution: Using Google PageSpeed Insights as well as looking at the metrics such as page load time, time to interactive, first contentful paint will give you a really clear picture of your website speed and then look into how to improve on it.
We would suggest looking at the following most common culprits for slow page speed: JavaSript and CSS code, huge uncompressed videos and images, unnecessary elements, etc.
It may take some time to clean up all of the unnecessary Javascript and CSS code, optimize the videos and images, as well as look at the initial elements that load on the website to limit the size of the files, but once it’s done it will greatly help you in the long run.
Poor User Experience
Closely related to slow website speed is the entire user experience that the client has with the website and the brand. Although page speed heavily affects the user experience, things like not being mobile-compatible, having too many CTA’s or not enough, disproportional text, poor transition from one page to another, etc.
Some of the components of the UX on the website might seem silly or unimportant, but the truth is that even the smallest of things can deter potential clients from our business and go to our competitors.
Solution: The solution to this is mapping out the ideal customer journey for your business, then scanning and updating the website to suit that journey. You might need to hire a company or UX designer to help you out with that.
Broken links and “dead” pages
It might seem like a no-brainer in hindsight but having broken links and dead pages on the website is one of the most common SEO errors we have seen clients make.
During development or improvements, you or your developer might have created pages that they forgot to delete or left old links live without updating them.
Needless to say that if clients see this, it’s going to impact their trust in the brand, potentially push them into going with the competition and affect search rankings.
Solution: In any case, that is why it’s important to set some time frequently (or hire a company to maintain the website) to make sure that we quickly sort the links that are broken and dead pages that are inaccessible before it affects our SEO and bottom line.
Using the wrong keywords
Search engines use keywords among other factors to rank the website and present the most accurate results to users. It’s the easiest way to connect the client with your brand.
Additionally, to broken links, we often see businesses that optimize their web pages with generic and broad keywords. This is especially detrimental for small businesses that try to compete for broader keywords that have a lot of competition.
Solution: It’s important to scan through your website and check to make sure that every page has the relevant keywords. Optimizing for location and niche-specific keywords tends to raise the chances that the page will rank organically.
For example, instead of bidding for the “vacuum cleaning” keyword which has a lot of competition, you can try “best carpet vacuum cleaners in Miami”.
Just keep in mind that of course, the search volume for specific keywords like these would be lower but you can use this to your advantage by optimizing for different pages with different niche-specific keywords. With a combination of all of those keywords, you would be able to gain a lot more traffic and rank higher organically on Google for the individual pages.
Poor on-page retention
Once someone lands on our website, the follow-up goal is to keep them on it as much as possible.
On-page time is important for a couple of things, one of them being that the more a user is exposed to your brand, the higher the chance that they will trust your brand and convert either right now or sometime in the future.
And if the user immediately bounces back to Google after briefly visiting your website, that can hurt your entire SEO.
Solution: That is why we need to make sure that we find ways of keeping the user engaged and encourage them of clicking through the website.
The tried-and-tested way of doing this is using call-to-actions (or CTA’s), which is usually a button that lets the client know what kind of action we want them to take and what they will get if they perform that action. The most common CTA’s are “sign up to the newsletter”, “buy now” and “learn more” buttons.
Another way is by adding relevant internal links to other pages on your website. By including internal links (like you can see in all of our blog posts), visitors and Google will know which additional pages are related to that page, especially when discussing a lengthy topic.
Make sure to also include relevant internal links to keep users on your website.
URLs that are not country, region or language-specific
Just like the content on your website, the URL itself that users click on to open your website needs to be also search engine friendly.
For example, the most common issues we have seen that international businesses make that affect their search engine rankings are:
- The searchers in a specific language/region aren’t shown the URL that is tailored to them if it exists (for example, “www.website.co.uk” for the United Kingdom, “www.website.ca” for Canada)
The reason for that is if search results display 2 identical or similar URLs from your website, search engines might not be aware of all of the language variations. It’s going to confuse both your users and search engines, and negatively affect your SEO.
Solution 1: Before expanding internationally, it’s important to answer these questions (the answer to these questions will hopefully set expectations for the business). Is my team:
1. Committed to developing an experience tailored to users of different regions/languages?
Experience is important, not just translating it to a different language. We also need to take into account the culture, market, and language we are trying to expand in.
2. Committed to creating, reviewing, and maintaining newly written content for different users of your sites?
Content creation alone isn’t enough to build a successful international site. The team needs to make sure that they review the content to make sure that it’s in the local user’s language and maintain the content over time.
3. Committed to supporting customers in a new region and/or language?
Customers may want to email or call for support. Native speakers are always a plus, although you could also hire staff that knows the language and culture well enough, understand the customers’ concerns, and is available in their time zone.
Although any kind of business success requires the staff to be dedicated, that is significantly more highlighted if global expansion is the goal.
What would also be useful is watching this video as well:
Solution 2: Additionally to the above mentioned, we would recommend the following:
1. Regional variations of the same language (and different websites)
Some specific regions use different wording and it’s important to capture that if you have a specific website for that region. Psychologically, your brand would appear closer to the local audience because of the regional translation and website, which can give them the extra nudge to convert.
2. Full translation (and different websites)
Even worse than not having a website in the language of the target audience is translating only portions of the website. This can cause distrust in the local audience, so we would recommend a full translation on the website for the country we are targeting.
3. Country-based variations of the same language
Just like regions, different countries have different variations, although the official language might be the same. For example, “a flat” in the United Kingdom is “an apartment” in the United States.
Regarding multiple domains and websites per country, region, or language, we’ve included 2 really useful videos. The first one is related to multiple domains and how search engines know that they are related:
While the other video, since this part is more so on the topic of targeting clients depending on their location, or geo-targeting, we have included a useful video about that as well:
All of this to say that the most tailor-made you make your brand, product, and website to the customer, the higher the chance that they will convert and build a long-lasting relationship with your business.
For that reason, we at SEO Jokers have translators on our team for most languages to and from English.
Top 4 ways of improving your search rank (and reducing complicated SEO)
In our experience, these are the most common things that we have noticed businesses can improve upon to up their chances of showing up higher or on the top page of the search results for the set keywords:
1. Structure and organized HTML code
This blog post isn’t meant to be an HTML coding tutorial but what we would recommend is smartly using page titles, meta and alt image descriptions, headings, subheadings, etc. Make sure that you or the company you hire designs the website to effectively do so.
2. Creating relevant content frequently
Writing a lot of useful content on your blog post in a consistent manner, as well as working with keywords that readers might search for is one of the ways of organically improving your search rankings. And, by consistently publishing content with different keywords, you can attract the exact target audience that your business is aiming for.
3. Links back to the website
It’s another way of building social proof, hence why search engines value this factor so much. If some other website that the target audience visits have links to your website it subconsciously lets them know that your brand can be trusted. Getting other businesses to place links on their websites that link to your website will “catch the eye” of the search engines and in turn improve your SEO.
4. Deleting duplicate content
There are some cases when we create double content that is unnecessary and is affecting our SEO. That is why it’s important to scan through the website and delete the duplicated content to avoid hurting our search result factors.
Related to the topic of duplicate content, we would recommend also watching this video as well:
There are a lot of other things that can be improved upon (you can take a look at the most common mistakes above for reference) but we would recommend starting with these 4 above.
Conclusion
SEO best practices constantly evolve and our website must evolve accordingly as well. We need to make sure that we keep up to date with the latest updates for the sake of our future optimization efforts.
Now that we think about it, it does sound crazy that given the amount of information about SEO we would forget to practice good HTML, check and update the website to reduce slow page speed, etc. Having said that, we do see certain mistakes repeated constantly and we have provided solutions for your website in this blog post.
To start, focus on the page speed, write high-quality content and optimize for the right keywords.
Attracting and keeping users on the website, having great CTA’s, linking internally, and having a mobile-friendly version is a pathway to having a well-optimized website.
It does take a lot of work, especially when dealing with complicated SEO. It isn’t something that you can set and forget. It doesn’t help that there are many moving parts to keep track of. But, it is important to do so regularly.
That’s why we at SEO Jokers are happy to have a chat with you on how to set up your website, especially for SEO. To learn more, click here.
English 
English 
Japanese 
German 
Hebrew