When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), application of SEO techniques keeps utmost importance for your changing marketing goals. Google changes its algorithms frequently and keeping yourself amended to the guidelines and regulations is extremely important to boost your website rank in Google’s SERPs. 

Google’s ever changing algorithm has led to a very competitive business environment. Latest SEO techniques are frequently evolving due to user’s varying perspectives and search engine development. You should learn to apply recent SEO techniques in order to boost your site rank in search engines (Google). And most importantly you should avoid making the most common SEO mistakes in 2020. It is high time to give your competitor a tough fight and outrank them by implementing proper SEO guidelines and stop making common mistakes that can take you backward.

The 7 Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2020 and Improve Your Business

• Wrong Keywords Selection 

Picking the wrong keywords and optimizing it is a common SEO mistake that many can’t avoid. While promoting your products or services, it is important to interpret what words your potential customer can type to get their desired ones. Using analytics tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Planner or Google trends can help you find out what are the most suitable keywords for your business.

• Avoiding an SEO audit is Irrational

Several businesses out there make the same common mistake of not running an SEO audit. If you are sick, only a doctor can say what is the problem and how to counter it. The same way if you don’t run an analysis of your site, you would never know what mistakes are creating major obstacles to rank your site on SERPs. An internal audit of your website can give you insight of your page loading speed, content quality, backlink competitive analysis, technical problems that restrict the search engine crawler to recognize your site or understand the content and recommend you fixes and other opportunities to skyrocket your site.

• Not Creating Quality and Fresh Content

We have always heard of the phrase” Content is King” and it is completely true in every sense. You should focus on creating more quality and unique content that serves the purpose of your consumers and give them a good experience. It is high time to come up with content that your audience can relate to and serve what they are looking for. Google algorithms work on user engagement, so if your content is fresh, engaging and relative to that of visitors, Google crawlers will understand that it is providing importance to your audience and helping them in every sense. Start creating informative and educative content and try putting visuals like micro-videos, animations and infographics to keep them engaged in your content.

• Neglecting the Website Speed

Some may be unaware of the fact that your page loading speed is one of the most needed factors to rank higher on SERPs, so start checking your page speed or you will start losing your potential customers. According to a study done by skilled.co, more than 47% of customers hope a webpage to load within 2 secs or less. So if your pages take more than 2,3 seconds to load, potential customers will start abandoning your site and the conversation rate will start decreasing. 

Improved page load speed can increase conversions by 2 % Walmart found out. So check your page load speed and enhance it.

• Missing out on Quality Backlinks

The quality of external backlinks has always been important rather than quantity.

Link building is an extremely vital part of off page SEO. While building links you should make sure that you link to relevant websites with higher D.A (domain authority), not just any websites. Quantifying your links is probably not the best idea when it comes to quality links, as these links can determine how strong your off-page activities are and how search engines analyze backlinks.

• Quality links can draw traffic from other linked websites.
• It boosts the visibility of your website.
• Quality link building helps generates organic traffic
• High quality links establish the reliability of your website.

• Ignoring Meta Tags & Meta Description

Most of the businesses do not take meta-tags seriously. Meta tags are basically embedded in HTML codes that provide information on the webpage and that information is known as Metadata. These are hidden for the users while surfing on the web but are visible for Google crawlers and it plays an important role in ranking a site or a blog.

On the other hand meta descriptions are essential components for search engine optimization. Meta descriptions play an important role in boosting Click Through Rates. And ignoring it lessens down the chance of linking the search query with the users.

• Concentrating on On-Page SEO

As, we discussed earlier that running an SEO audit of your site can reveal several errors that need to be fixed. Those errors can be short title tags, meta description, broken links, missing internal or external links in your web pages 404 error or missing H1 heading. And even if you fix all the problems and optimize your website accordingly, your website is missing out on promoting, less credibility, increased authority and organic traffic. 

Off-Page SEO increases the chance of exposure which will result in more visitors and more traffic and conversions ultimately. Link building is said to be the most suitable and efficient off-page SEO strategy. Building more quality links means gathering more “votes” from higher ranking websites which will build credibility and trust. And this way you can definitely outrank your competitors.

Take Away 

Though this may seem a lot but it isn’t when it comes to SEO. The above discussed 7 most common mistakes should be avoided from now on in order to maintain your SEO health and get a higher return on investment. The market place is quite competitive and keeping yourself updated to Google guidelines is quintessential in 2020. It is high time that you should take your site SEO in your hand and optimize it without running these kinds of mistakes in the future.