Skills and effort influence the success of organic research. But a number of actions can hinder search engine optimization efforts. In this post, I will describe 13 SEO mistakes that I’ve seen over the years. Avoid them to ensure constant improvements in natural search traffic.
How to Kill Organic Search Trafficking
Delaying a redesign in the high season. Delays are common in migrations and redevelopment of sites. Management is putting tremendous pressure on teams to launch new sites as soon as possible, usually in anticipation of a major event or sales season. However, when launch dates encroach on peak sales seasons, the result is invariably a decrease in organic search performance precisely when you rely on it the most.
Avoid that this leads to constant improvements in organic search traffic.
Launch of a version without deletion of the robots.txt file. Generally used to ensure that development and development sites are not indexed, robots.txt prohibit from time to time accidentally triggering with a new site launch. The result is a complete removal of all pages from the Google index and the elimination of all natural search traffic.
Waiting for a mobile indexing to update your m.dot site. Dedicated mobile sites are more difficult to optimize than reactive sites. But with Google’s mobile index update being implemented now around the world, a mobile web presence is more important than ever. Pay special attention to m.dot sites (for example, m.yoursite.com) and mobile experiences that only host a part of the desktop experience.
Killing valuable SEO content for immediate sales. SEO generates traffic at the top of the funnel, which typically converts at a lower rate than transactional traffic. However, judging content solely on its ability to generate immediate sales is a mistake. In a multi-attribution model, you can see that organic search visits to your site’s informative content ultimately help to close more sales or to collect more leads.
Launching new URLs without 301 redirects. All search engines know your content and are linked to different URLs. Link authority, relevance, trust, history – everything is linked to an individual URL for each content page. Editing this URL removes the ability of search engines to associate these performance tuning attributes unless you implement 301 redirects to link the old URL to the new one. And an added benefit is that redirects will also allow your visitors to find the content they’re looking for.
Switching to HTTPS without verification in Google Search Console. Each domain, subdomain, and protocol must be registered separately on the Google Search Console to track performance data that you can not obtain in any other tool. Migration to HTTPS should be followed closely in the Search Console, where you will also receive messages from Google about its ability to crawl and index your site.
Disabling the auto-tagging setting in Google AdWords. Primarily a paid search issue, auto-tagging in AdWords is also essential for SEO. If this simple feature is disabled, all traffic from AdWords appears as organic in web analytics, making performance tracking impossible. Data for the relevant period can never be retrieved.
Noting that a product recall dominates brand search results. Somewhere on the line, a bad business decision has caused this issue, and now SEO staff, social media, and public relations have to clean it up. To move negative results, post fresh, branded content that offers a more balanced view of the problem and what your company is doing to help you.
Using the A / B test as an alternative to optimizing your home page. Test platforms offer alternative content on a URL to a subset of users. When these tools are used to provide an alternative experience to 100% of your customers 100% of the time, they meet Google’s definition of cloaking, which violates webmaster guidelines and is punishable.
Assuming that organic research is free. SEO is far from free. Costs, however, are sometimes hidden. SEO requires the efforts and expertise of internal staff or external agencies. Implementing SEO recommendations usually requires the assistance of staff in web development, graphic design, creation, user interface, strategy, and more.
Buy a burned estate. There is no reset button for a domain, according to Google. When you purchase a domain for your site, pay close attention to the domain’s history to determine if it has published spam content. Unscrupulous people will spammate, burn and sell domains cyclically as part of an ultra-aggressive SEO strategy. Over time, with good content and fresh and clean backlinks, a domain can be recovered. But do you really want your business to be the only one to bring this area back to SEO health?
Link an advertising campaign to a microsite. They are (potentially) fun and memorable, but microsites are expensive for organic research. Any new site or domain that rivals the primary domain on which your business bases its livelihood cannibalizes resources, link authority, and mentions that could be attributed to improving the performance of your main site. .
Forgetting this user experience affects SEO. Google promotes the importance of the customer experience. This can lead SEOs to forget that UX does more than produce satisfied customers. This also has an impact on SEO efforts. The SEO-friendly architecture – optimized taxonomy, navigation, templates – improves the contextual relevance and flow of link authority across the site. These two aspects are the foundations of each major search engine algorithm. Happy buyers can buy more when they are on the site, but to bring them to the site in the first place, you need relevance and authority. Focusing solely on the user experience is not enough. There must be a marriage of UX and basic SEO to generate income.