Common SEO mistakes that cost you traffic

SEO is the process of increasing organic traffic to any site by improving the website’s visibility in the SERPs. Learning SEO tactics to increase your order is essential to achieve top ranking for your target keywords. You can find many online resources on how to improve SEO practices. Many people also implement on-page and off-page SEO strategies. 

Given below are some of the most common mistakes people make that cost them traffic-

1. Slow site speed

A slow site speed can deter people when they try to access the content on your webpage. It will also cost you hard-earned SEO traffic. If your webpage takes too long to load, all your time and efforts to drive traffic from SERPs are futile. You can also measure your page speed by taking a look at the below performance metrics-

Page load time

The total time passes between when the browser sends the request to the server and when your page loads and renders. Several factors can assess the page load time.

You should run your webpage through Google Pagespeed insights to check the performance of your page to help you understand the speed of your website. It is also essential to fix the redirects as it increases the serving speed.

2. Bad reviews on Google

When it comes to having reviews about any product, a person can expect positive as well as negative reviews. The number of reviews increases social proof for your SEO business. It also contributes to the search ranking factors. Positive reviews improve the credibility of your site. If several customers are dissatisfied and leave a bad review about your service, it might impact your rankings.

3. Possible fix

You can make use of negative reviews to build relationships with customers. It helps you understand your target audience well. You can also gain a new audience. Posting on social media and public forums about the kinds of issues you face and the measures you take to handle them increases your site’s credibility.

With the help of review sites, one can encourage people to post reviews about your services and acknowledge their questions.

4. Faulty Google My Business verification code

You might encounter issues with the verification PIN you receive for your Google My Business account. This is a widespread problem you can face. A possible fix for this is changing your private profile to public. If this does not work, requesting a new PIN is possible. This problem may arise after you have updated your NAP details. To avoid this, ensure your contact information is consistent with your listing.

5. Lack of location-specific pages

According to a Google report, searches which consist of location-specific keywords have seen a meteoric rise in mobile users. According to a survey, 76% of people who use their mobile device to search for something nearby visit the related business within a day. Most of them also end up availing of the service.

Many individuals avail of the services of SEO Company Australia, which is a digital marketing company that provides different kinds of SEO services to its clients.

When people associate your brand with a local presence, it increases your rankings in the local search results. You should have well-optimized locations and specific unique pages to help you improve your rankings.

6. Duplicate content

It is known that content is king for any website. Having unique content that enables the audience to get the exact information about the products helps you establish yourself as a trustworthy player in the industry. Before you publish your content on the webpage, it is very essential to ensure that it is not repeated anywhere.

7. Broken images and missing alternative texts

Alt tags are the HTML attributes of the images which help describe the content. Alt tags need to be adequately addressed. There are many instances when the image component on the site does not render well owing to the improper filename and the incorrect file path. One should also make sure that they do not use the wrong extension. Broken images are common errors made.

In the HTML Code, you ought to find the image component and also add an alt tag to it. 

8. Outdated content and information on the website

We are familiar with the fact that the old content on the site can drag down the authority of your website. There are many search results found on the SERP for a particular query. Not everything is relevant to your readers. If the search engine finds that your content is outdated, your website is likely to get filtered out. It can cost you the traffic leading to your website as the bounce rate for such web pages could increase to a great extent.

To fix this, you should ensure that the content you post has high quality and relevant information.

9. Not optimizing your website for mobilE

Many users rely on mobile phones rather than computers. There are many advantages to having mobile-friendly websites. They make half of their search results on Google. If your page is not optimized for mobile, you can also lose your viewers.

Having a website which is mobile-ready enables you to rank higher on the SERPs. Site speed as well as its structure gets improved when you optimize your website for mobile.

10. Contact form is not converting

Following are the reasons why contact form is not converting-

• There are too many form fields.
• Too many options are there in the drop down.

For optimizing your contact form, it is important to make it engaging and simple to fill out. 

11. Broken links

When the users access your website through a search engine and encounter a 404 error, it leaves a very bad impression. The broken links on the site will cost your crawl budget to a great extent. The Google bots will crawl on your webpage in a given timeframe. When the search bots encounter multiple broken links, they will also move to other websites and leave some of the most important pages neither indexed nor crawled.