This is no secret that with the right SEO, tradesmen and related businesses can grow significantly.
Local services businesses like Plumbers, Cleaners, Electricians sit at the top of the list in terms of the possibility of revenue growth.
Since with SEO, small business owners gets this opportuity to intercept the customer at the bottom of the sales funnel where the customer is ready to make a purchase of the product or service.
Given all these amazing benefits, a lot of businesses try to rank their business highly on search engines like Google, but a handful make it to the top, and rest sitting with bad taste in their mouth about SEO.
But don’t throw in the towel yet. First, you need to understand what are the most common mistakes that businesses make when they try SEO for their website.
You are targeting wrong keywords
Believe it or not, this is the most common reason for SEO failure. If you optimise your website and content for the keywords that no one is searching, then regardless of where you rank for that keyword, it won’t give you the expected returns.
At the same time, if you are targeting the high competition keywords, that everyone is targeting, then you are up for an uphill battle. You would have to do SEO forever like you do Google & Facebook Ads.
There is no clear Call-To-Action
Suppose you have managed to get a customer onto your website, however they have no clue what to do next, they will bounce off, and go to some other website. Your website needs to have the right call to actions that would guide your potential customer to take the next action, or you will likely lose them.
Your website is loading too slow
let’s be honest, in today’s busy world, who likes to wait. And probably for the very reason, Page Speed or Website loading speed is placed in one of the top signals Google Algorithm uses to rank websites. Not only does slow loading websites impacts your search engine ranking, it spoils the user experience as well.
There are broken links on the website
Both incoming and outgoing links are integral part of SEO. So, when you have links from your website going to a non-exiting page, or a link that you have built coming to your website but on a url that doesn’t exist, it’s called broken link. Again, this is bad for both user experience as well as your website’s relationship with Google.
You have low quality content on your landing pages
Google earns money when more and more people search on it, clicks on ads, and that why it needs to stay as top search engine. So, to retain it’s users, it picks the website with best relevant content and ranks them high to increase user experience.
With low value content, even if you manage to rank once, users will likely bounce off, and signal the engine that this is not a great website, and lowers your authority and position.
You have over optimised keywords
When you stuff your targeted keywords too many times in the content or the anchor text, it is called over-optimisation of keywords. Not only your content loses its value and become annoying to users, it impacts your website ranking negatively.
Have you build low-quality backlinks to your website?
When a kid hangs out with intelligent or a cool kid, they get good reputation in front of their teachers and parents. While, kids with a bad company gets a bad name, Similarly, when an authorative webpage, say a new website, links to your website, it passes some authority to your site as well, and helps you rank higher. On the other side, when some irrelevant or low quality website links to you, it doesn’t look good in google’s book and it lower your site’s impression.
Meta-data is not optimised
When googlebot crawls any webpage, first thing it does is to read the meta data of the page, which tells the bots what this webpage is about. There are fields like Title, Description and a few others that need to be optimised to include your target keywords in a natural flair.
Inconsistent NAP for your business
NAP stands for Name, Address & Phone Number. This is critical if you would lke your business to rank in Local Map Listing. For this, you need to make sure that when your business NAP are consistent everywhere on the web, be in your website or any directory where you have submitted your business.
You have ignored the power of internal linking
When one page of a domain links to another page of the same website, it is called internal linking. It helps users and search engines both navigate through your website content and spread authority from one page to another. So, if you have 100 links pointing to your website home and none to the internal pages, your homepage might rank but other pages won’t.