Do you feel like your WordPress website is underperforming? Are you confident with your website’s current SEO? Wouldn’t it be nice to understand the common mistakes that businesses make on their WordPress website that impact their search engine optimization? If you answered “Yes, No, Yes” to these questions, then this post is for you!
It’s obvious that effective SEO isn’t easy. If it were, everyone would be on the front page of Google (and Google’s front page can’t just go on forever, people). It’s a very competitive marketing strategy, and mastering the basic WordPress SEO will take some time, education and energy.
Learn about the three common mistakes business owners make when tackling their SEO for their WordPress website.
Mistake #1 – Targeting the Wrong Keyword
Even if you know your target audience better than the back of your hand, you can still make this mistake. Too many times have business owners chosen keywords that are either too broad or don’t pertain to their industry.
Here’s an example: A church is trying to rank on the first page for “charity.” Little do they know, there are about 30 churches within 50 miles that give to charities, and there are another hundred websites out there with just information about charity.
What should they do? They need to think about how this keyword relates to the life of the actual visitor. In reality, the keyword is not a huge part of what the church does. Because it’s so unfocused and generic, they will not have a high rating for this keyword.
Focused keywords should be, well, focused. It must be related to your visitor’s problems and speak to your market. Perhaps they could use, “church charity near me” or “church charity (CITY, STATE)” as a more targeted approach.
Mistake #2 – Making Branded Terms a Focused Keyword
If your company is called Yahooala, don’t waste your time and effort by optimizing your branded keywords. Google and Bing both know who you are and what you sell/do. You may not realize this, but your business is unique and this uniqueness will translate into search results.
For your product/service pages, don’t focus on your terminology. Instead, optimize these pages with keyword phrases people would search for before they even know your product/service exists. When selecting keywords, think about what phrases the average user would search for if they were in need of your product/service. Write your website content for these phrases to tailor what real-world users would search for.
Mistake #3 – Repeating Your Focused Keyword/Phrase
This mistake is made pretty often, even by professional SEO specialists. As your website or blog starts to build out more content, your targeted keywords do too. If your internal webpages, blog posts and product/service pages all have the same keyword focus, they essentially start to compete against each other.
Remember, a focused keyword’s goal is to set focus for one piece of content and create a one-to-one relationship between the focused keyword and the page’s content. If the same focused phrase/keyword is on more then one page/post, search engines will not know which page is the correct one for a given phrase/keyword. This forces the search engines to choose between your pages, which ends up with you competing against yourself in ranking.
If you find yourself making this mistake, simply go back and edit your content. You may not realize you did this after publishing it, but if you catch the mistake be sure to correct it before you forget.
We’re human; we’re going to make mistakes in our lives, even when it come to websites. The beauty about digital content is that you have the ability to edit it anytime. Take a look at your website’s content and see if you’ve made any of these SEO mistakes.
If you need more help with your website’s SEO, contact GreenMellen Media today! We would love to help make your website as SEO-friendly as possible!
