5 Big Mistakes Businesses Make that Harm their SEO

Most business owners have no idea they’re doing things on their small business websites that specifically harm their SEO. And in some cases, it can actually blacklist them on the search engines, which can cause them to lose up to 95% of their organic traffic! Here are 5 big mistakes you could be making:

1. Duplicate content. This is one that happens a lot on websites, because it’s so easy to just copy and paste something great you’ve written to another spot on your site. The problem is that the search engines flag this as inappropriate behaviour, because it looks like there’s plagiarized copy, even when it’s on your own website.
2. Inappropriate keyword choices. Most businesses want to choose the most obvious keywords to use, because they are the ones that are searched the most often. The problem is the competition for the keyword is huge, and that means you’re competing with all the big dogs in the same category. It’s much better to choose keywords in a less competitive category that still get enough searches to support your business. Use Google Keyword Planner to find your best options.
3. Purchasing bulk Links. Backlinks are important for your SEO ranking, but purchasing hundreds or thousands of links to your site is going to get you blacklisted. Search engines want to see legitimate backlinks. You can do that in many different ways, which include using links on your social media, and directories Yelp or Google Maps.
4. Registering an excess of domains. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to purchase domains that complement organic searches. For example, your business might be 12345Company, so you might purchase the .com address and the .ca address, and then simply direct the .ca address to the .com homepage. This is just fine to do. But when you purchase 50 different domains with every possible combination you can think of, like 12345ComanyCanada, 12345CompanyCalgary, etc., and then you point all of those to the .com homepage, the search engines are definitely going to throw up red flags and put you on a backlist. So be wise when you register extra domains and point them at your homepage.
5. Leaving errors on the website. When you register with Google Search Console – which every business should definitely do – you will get feedback from Google about things that need to be fixed on the site to improve the SEO. The list will include things like broken links, duplicate content, page title issues, and so on. Be sure to fix them and get rid of all the errors that get flagged.

These are just 5 mistakes that businesses make that harm their SEO. If you want a full checklist to make sure you aren’t making any other SEO blunders, click here to download The Easy SEO Checklist.