It’s no secret that SEO is essential for small businesses that want to compete online. However, many small businesses make common mistakes that can hurt their ranking and visibility. In this post, we’ll outline some of the most common SEO mistakes small businesses need to avoid.

Making mistakes with your company’s SEO can be costly. In fact, according to one study, 71 percent of businesses report that they have suffered a negative SEO impact as a result of making just one mistake. So, what are some of the most common SEO mistakes small businesses make? Whether it be not using a digital marketing company, or not doing keyword research. By being aware of these mistakes, you can ensure that your website is performing at its best. Let’s get started!

Not Doing Keyword Research

The first mistake that many small businesses make is not understanding what it is that draws visitors to their page. While it is of course many things, using the correct keywords is perhaps one of the most important. At this point, you are probably wondering why.

When you use the best keyword, you are optimizing your content to be found, which means that you will increase the number of visitors that your site gets. By not using the correct keyword for the time, you are limiting how many visitors will see your site.

Not Knowing What Content is Trending

The second biggest mistake that many small businesses tend to make is not knowing exactly what content is trending at the time, which is where a digital marketing company, such as cozab.com for example, would come in very handy. Whilst this might not sound all that important, it is if you are content marketing, which you should be.

Not only does content marketing help your business to increase authority, but it also increases site traffic. This means that you need to know what your audience is searching for and meet their needs by delivering the latest content.

Not Studying the Competition

Another big mistake that smaller companies tend to make with regards to SEO, is not studying their competition. This probably doesn’t directly affect SEO ranking, but not seeing what your competition is doing means you have nothing to compare yourself to.

Why does this matter? Well, you won’t be able to see what type of marketing they are using, what content they are producing, and more. Without this information, you can’t compare to yourself and therefore won’t likely improve. This will affect your SEO ranking, however.

Not Using Backlinks

Another mistake that businesses make is that they will pour hours and hours, as well as thousands of dollars, into content marketing, but still, no one is visiting their site. Unfortunately, if you only depend on Google and your content to draw people in, it likely won’t work. You need to be using the best backlinks.

Backlinks are links that point back to your site, which you place in the content on other sites. Essentially this means you will have to guest post since this is the best way. Always take care when selecting sites to place a backlink on, since better sites also increase your authority.

Not Using Internal Links

In addition to using backlinks, you should consider using something called internal links. Keeping people on your site is almost as important as it to get people to visit your site; this is where internal links come in. With internal links you can keep people reading one article, then another, and another.

This means that your content has to be good in the first place, since just having internal links won’t keep people entertained. Having a static navigational bar is a good idea too since this will make it easier for people to travel around your site.

Not Improving the Website

Finally, another big mistake that small businesses make is not improving the quality of the website. The quality of the website will also determine how long a visitor stays, and what your bounce rate looks like. You could have the best content, but if your site looks like it was developed in 2003, people will leave.

One of the most important aspects to focus on when improving your site is getting site speed fixed. Visitors will leave if a site doesn’t load in around 3 seconds. You should also focus on making sure that all of the content is organized.