In digital marketing we see a constant evolution with algorithms that keep changing and so much misinformation surrounds us. SEO mistakes are often happening without bloggers even realizing that this is the case. Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand but in many cases we see blogs with incredible content that do not rank as great as they could. This sometimes happens because of the following SEO mistakes that are so easy to miss and that can practically appear on any blog.
A Keyword Structure That Is Not Optimized
Keyword research is still one of the most important things in search engine optimization. It has to take precedence as you build your entire content marketing campaign. Be sure that you thematically link the content through keywords and topics with business objectives. If you just think about topics and you do not think about keywords, your entire campaign will have low results. Also, you do not know who the content is written for, which automatically means that you do not know what the best content is for your audience.
Content that is keyword optimized will position the web pages so that they can organically rank higher while driving impressions from highly targeted searches. The blog content thus because a very strong and effective lead generator.
With blogs the main focus has to be put on long-tail keyword phrases that are informational. A blogger often does not optimize meta tags, content and headers with the targeted phrases. If the keyword research is inadequate, bad results will appear.
Always keep in mind that you should not overdo it. Content that is over-optimized can easily lead to pages being labeled as spam. At the same time, keyword stuffing is going to obstruct readability, thus leading to bad signals for the users.
While your focus may be to write for the audience, you still have to perform keyword research.
Overlooking Internal Links
In SEO optimization we often see internal linking being overlooked. This even happens when the work is done by some of the top SEO agencies. In an attempt to get great SEO backlinks, the internal links are forgotten. When thinking about search engine optimization, internal linking has many functions, including:
- Making crawling reach deeper web pages.
- Increasing crawling rate.
- Establishing a path for the user to properly navigate the website, according to your wishes.
- Distributing authority and link juice.
- Defining the architecture of the site and the web pages that are the most important.
- Indexing web pages that are linked to the homepage.
Backlinks stand out as the most important of the search engine ranking factors but you do want to amplify them through something that you already have access to: internal linking. In an ideal setting, you want around 3 internal links on each post and a well thought out navigation menu.
As an extra tip, for most blogs the highest authority is seen on the home page. This is where you want to seriously consider adding some featured posts, those that are the most important for your business. Obviously, you do want to optimize anchor text.
A Bad Page Copy
Whenever talking about digital marketing, one of the very important things to remember is that you want to write content for the readers instead of the search engines. Content needs to be light. Never try to use excessive jargon when you show your knowledge and try to write at an easy-to-understand reading level.
Content marketing is always related to branding so content production has to build authority. Never sacrifice your authority by using bad body copy. Remember that average attention span is just a few seconds. If you do not manage to catch the attention of the reader in that time, your SEO campaign will not be successful.
Final Thoughts
Basically, blogging is all about writing high quality content and doing all the extra required SEO work. It is not going to be easy, especially in the beginning. Start with content written for your intended audience and then making changes based on your keyword research before you publish the blog post.
