Your ranking on Google searches can be a determining factor in your business’ success. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become a important way to increase your Google ranking and get more traffic to your website but it can be difficult to figure out the Google algorithm.
If you’re a small business owner it can be difficult to find the time to really nail down your SEO strategy, leading you to make simple mistakes that you think are helping but are actually hurting your SEO ranking.
1. Too many Keywords
Google’s algorithm is always changing and improving, getting better and better at differentiating between websites with quality relevant content and ones that are stuffing their pages with unrelated keywords. Google has begun to penalize the sites that “keyword stuff” and reward those that use relevant keywords in moderation.
2. Duplicating Content
A lot of businesses try to increase the number of webpages they have in order to appear more on Google searches. They do this by duplicating content or having very similar content on a number of different pages. This is a big no-no. Having the same content on more than one page can lead to those pages competing against each other for Google rank, or to Google penalizing the website.
3. Content not related to keywords
Sometimes we can focus too much on getting traffic to a website without thinking about what kinds of traffic is coming. This way of thinking can lead to high bounce rates and end up lowering your ranking on Google searches.
4. Too many headings
Having too many headings can confuse the crawlers that go through your website and help determine your search rankings. If there are too many heading and subheadings and it isn’t entirely clear what the main subject of the page is then your rating will go down.
5. Bought Links
It’s common knowledge that the more links to and from your website you have, the higher your Google search ranking. This has led to some websites and companies selling links in order to boost a websites ranking with claims that Google won’t be able to tell they’re paid. The Google crawlers are always updating and improving so even if they work for a while, you will eventually get caught out and pay for it with a lower Search Ranking.