11 Deadly SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Key Takeaways

hey in this video I'm going to show you 11 SEO mistakes you have to avoid if you want to rank on the first page of Google and make sure you watch until the end because SEO mistake number seven can devastate your SEO performance so before we get started make sure you subscribe to this channel because you'll get notified when I publish new videos just like this one so the first SEO mistake is thinking SEO is dead now I'm sure if you're trying to figure out how to get more traffic you've probably encountered the idea that SEO is dead and here's the truth SEO has definitely changed but it's more alive than ever and here's the proof that SEO is more alive than ever number one is trends just go to Google Trends and compare SEO to any other channel online here's SEO versus content marketing here's SEO versus Facebook Ads here's SEO verse social media marketing now you get the point no channel online is more popular than SEO number two is traffic so quick pop quiz for you what's the best place for your potential customers to find you organically online is it a social media be search engines or see email well if you answered be search engines the nice work because there's data to prove this just go to similar web and examine the top five websites with the most traffic what do these top five websites have in common they are either a search engine or feature a prominent search engine and Google is by far the most popular website and search engine in the world on average Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second that's 3.5 billion searches per day in 1.2 trillion searches per year so then you have YouTube which is by far the most popular video search engine in the world after that you have Amazon which is by far the most popular e-commerce search engine in the world and lastly you have Yahoo which is the second biggest traditional search engine so you get the point understanding how to get an organic search traffic is a good use of time and resources but that's not all number three is the industry growth according to Borel associates over 65 billion was invested into the SEO industry in 2016 and this number is expected to rise 279 billion by 2020 more and more capital is flowing into the SEO industry because companies are discovering how powerful it is for growing revenue in short the time for you to use SEO to grow your business is right now so the second SEO mistake you have to avoid is not performing an SEO audit before you start trying to do SEO now I truly believe that the number one thing you need to do if you want better SEO results is to perform an SEO audit SEO audits are one of my favorite activities because it reveals all the issues holding your SEO performance back plus you'll also get the Intel you need to make better decisions if I better decisions I mean that you'll be able to prioritize your actions based on what will have the highest impact so SEO mistake number three is not mapping out your site architecture so truth is a well-designed site architecture can have a positive SEO impact for several reasons first a strong site architecture helps Google crawl your site more efficiently which as a result helps Google index your pages faster secondly a strong site architecture will grow your site's overall Authority which makes ranking much easier in other words you won't need as many backlinks to rank lastly an effective site architecture can help you drive more conversions because you direct your users to your most important pages so SEO mistake number four is not prioritizing user experience or UX one of the best ways to improve SEO performance is to simply optimize your site's UX in fact Adobe discovered that 38% of people will stop engaging with the website if the content and layout is unattractive now this alone should make you value UX and UI optimization much more but how do you actually optimize UX well there are obvious UX optimization actions like increasing your website loading speed making your site more mobile-friendly not using aggressive interstitial pop-ups and not using disruptive ad placements but there is one UX optimization factor that matters for SEO more than anything else and that's optimizing for user intent now what does that mean it means that your page should actually satisfy the intent of the keyword that's being searched more on this in a second so SEO mistake number five is targeting the wrong keywords now some people jump into a niche and try to conquer every keyword there is and this is a really bad idea because if you don't have the website authority to target keywords with mid to high level competition it's going to be extremely hard so if your website is new accept that back and focus on keywords with low competition so you can get some easy wins out of the gate then once your site has built some Authority you can target higher volume and higher competition keywords so SEO mistake number six is not satisfying search intent now I won't go too deep into this but the best way to understand user intent is through categorization just memorize these four types of user intents number one is informational so if the user searches how to build backlinks you serve them informational content because that's the intent number two are comparison queries if a user searches Moz verse hrs they're looking to compare and contrast to products so they can make an educated buying decision and a page explaining the pros and cons of these products would satisfy the intent number three is transactional intent so if the user searches by GOC SEO Academy they're ready to transact and number four is navigational intent so if a user searches GOC SEO Academy login you know exactly what they're looking for so satisfying user intent is simple just try to get into the searchers mind every time you decide to target a keyword what do they actually want when they enter the search query it's time well spent trying to figure it out and the truth is getting it right will improve your pages UX that means users will stay on your page longer they won't pogo-stick as much they may visit a second page on their site or they may even complete a goal like subscribing or submitting a leave form or even buying a product so I recommend using a combination of google analytics and heat map technologies such as sumo hot dryer or Optimizely to test and optimize UX so SEO mistake number seven is not creating unique value so if you take anything away from this video it has to be this whenever you turn a keyword you should always think about how you can add unique value don't try to emulate what's already ranked think about how you can create something radically different and better different can be using unique data making your content more story using better multimedia using better design or even just having way better readability there are literally unlimited possibilities for making your SEO content different trust me on this if you focus on how to be different than your top competitors instead of trying to be better you'll see monumental results so SEO mistake number eight is not upgrading old content now most people think about how they're going to target new keywords and create new content and there's nothing inherently wrong with this but you can have a huge return on your investment in time when you focus on improving existing content on your site for example I completely scrapped my content that was targeting the keyword on-page SEO and replacing it with updated information and new design now keep in mind this page hasn't ranked for on-page SEO ever not even in the top 100 and it's been there for years so that said I republish this post on November 7 2018 and it reached the first page on March 10th 2019 now there are a lot of changes that I made to achieve this goal but the biggest was simply upgrading the content and making it substantially better so SEO mistake number 9 is not injecting longtail keywords so although it's important to target a primary keyword phrase most of your traffic will actually come from longtail keywords and that's why you need to optimize your page accordingly for example the on-page SEO blog post I published is obviously targeting the keyword phrase on-page SEO but I'm also targeting many other longtail variations think about it this way my primary phrase on-page SEO has only driven 84 clicks overall this page is driven around 1,500 total clicks that means a 95% of the organic search traffic for this page comes from longtail keywords now this equation will flip once I'm raking higher for the primary phrase but it's still a strong demonstration showing why you need to inject longtail keywords on your pages so su mistake number 10 is not internal linking from your most authoritative pages so whenever you publish a new content asset you should immediately look for internal linking opportunities not only will this help with index ability but it'll also drive link equity to your new page which makes it way easier to rank so all you need to do is throw your domain into HOF site Explorer and click on Best Buy links then look for opportunities to place an internal link on your most linked pages so now SEO mistake number 11 is not building backlinks so backlinks are the fuel of every successful SEO campaign don't get fooled by these ideas that backlinks don't matter because they aren't grounded by facts or data according to Bryan needs massive ranking study the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor SEMRush had very similar conclusions they found that the higher the domains position on the SERP the more referring domains it has backlinks matter and will continue to be critical to Google's algorithm now and into the future so those are the 11 SEO mistakes you must avoid if you want to achieve SEO success this year so if you enjoyed this video please like it and make sure you subscribe to my channel because you'll get first access when I publish any new videos and also if you have any questions whatsoever please leave a comment below so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video