Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential marketing strategy every business owner must understand in today's digitally-conscious business climate. SEO has proven effective for driving traffic, boosting sales, and enhancing brand visibility. However, SEO is constantly changing and can be challenging to keep up with. Although studies have shown that 50% of all website traffic is from organic sources, many businesses do not benefit from their various SEO strategies. Does your company fall under this category? What factors are hurting your SEO efforts? Here are a few to consider. 

Ignoring your page titles and meta description

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Fixing your page titles and including some metadata is simple yet essential to your business's SEO strategy. Many small business owners overlook this, although most website CMS can change this. While page title is vital for your SEO, you have to keep it concise and reflect the actual page content. The meta description should also provide a short description of the page to content to benefit users. This also makes it easier for your business to pop up in search engine results.

Slow website speed

For several years, page speed has been a crucial factor for ranking websites, especially with Google and other search engines' continued emphasis on improving website user experience. For this reason, having a fast-loading webpage has become even more significant than before. If your website receives feedback of being slow, you can employ Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to help check and provide effective ways of improving it. Other tools like Jetpack Boost can also help enhance your website’s SEO performance without requiring expert or developer support.

Focusing on only on-site SEO

It is a common misconception that SEO is an on-site strategy only. On the contrary, it involves optimizing the key website components on and off your site. While you need to create engaging and original content, you also need to invest time to have your content placed on another quality website to send links to your site. According to the digital marketing experts at Outreach Monks, this will further help in generating qualified leads and achieving higher search engine rankings. However, it is essential to avoid linking to the poor or lousy website since it violates Google guidelines. People used to pay for links to rank high in searches and gain more authority. Links that appear dubious won't only cost you in search rankings and penalize you by search engines.

Broken links

Website users follow links from your website, trusting to see vital information. However, this will not be possible if the link is broken. Broken links do not only affect your user experience but harm your search rankings as search engines will only provide users with valuable links. Broken links are common, especially when you rename or move a site page without changing your internal links. You can also create a broken link to another website by not thoroughly ensuring that you place the correct URL or that the page exists. 

Duplicate content

Content that is entirely similar or has an appreciable amount of content identical to others on the website is duplicated content. Duplicated content can cause your website's ranking on search engine results to drop significantly. New website pages containing content blocks similar to those on other pages can also affect your search rankings. Fortunately, several online website audit tools can help you quickly identify these duplicates and remove them immediately.

Poor internal linking

Internal linking is crucial for your SEO strategy. It doesn't only help search engines efficiently crawl your website but helps users find helpful related content. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to appreciate the need to create internal links intentionally. For this reason, they make no efforts to identify those related content and link them to other content elsewhere. Internal linking can help you instruct Google about your most important pages and rank them for better website performance.

Irregular website audits

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Running a website audit can help view your website's performance from the perspective of a client and search engine. It can help determine whether your website navigation is user-friendly, the ease of access to information and if your website is mobile-friendly. With a careful analysis, you can figure out various ways to improve your website. Website auditing considers many factors that affect a site, including loading speed, user-friendliness, content quality, design, and so on.

It can be hard to convince yourself to invest more in your SEO, especially when your current strategies don't seem to be yielding any results. However, this article should guide on some of the mistakes harming your SEO efforts to take the needed steps to address them.