5 Easy to Avoid Small Business SEO Mistakes

When advertising your brand and businesses it can be tempting to jump onto the SEO marketing train in full force. SEO marketing is a fantastic tool to use within your marketing to improve your Google ranking, organic growth, and click rate. Unfortunately, if SEO is used the wrong way, it can be detrimental to your business. Here are the five top SEO mistakes made by businesses and how to avoid them.

The top five SEO mistakes small businesses make are forgetting to write for their audience, neglecting to optimize images, focusing too much on traffic, neglecting social media, and expecting a large increase of traffic immediately.

Write For Your Audience, Not Google

When writing content to keep your website up to date, it is important to remember your audience. Many small businesses get so focused on inserting keywords and internal links that they go a bit overboard and begin to keyword stuff. 

Keyword stuffing is not a good SEO practice. If a keyword is thrown into every sentence at random, just to try to increase rank, it will lose its relevancy. Google uses relevance and keywords together to make a ranking determination, so there should be a balance.

Stuffing internal and external links is another practice that is frowned upon. While adding three external and internal links to relevant information can be helpful, placing a bunch of links all over that has no relevance has the opposite effect. Relevance and balance are key.

Your Pictures Need Optimization Too

When including pictures in blogs, websites, and newsletters, it is important to optimize them. Many small businesses forget to do so which can hurt their SEO rankings. Pictures should always include ALT text and captions with your pictures. The ALT text and captions should also try to include relevant, well-placed keywords to give them even more weight with Google’s SEO algorithm. 

Traffic Shouldn’t Be Your Only Focus

When you focus on SEO and traffic growth, you can lose sight of other important pieces of your website. For example, are you regularly addressing frequently asked questions within your content? Are you structuring your content off of seasonal experiences and current trends? While SEO will help your website grow, staying on top of clients’ needs and interests is another good way to grow your business and brand.

Social Media Is King

Social media has rapidly become a key marketing platform in the marketing business. Small and large businesses are scrambling to open accounts to produce content. If your small business has been hesitant to hop on the social media wagon, its time to push your worries aside and get out there. Major platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook have taken the marketing world by storm. Choosing not to produce well-written SEO content for these platforms can result in a lack of growth.

Patience is a Virtue

Another common mistake small businesses make when implementing their SEO marketing plans is expecting too much too quickly. While SEO can assist businesses and growth this growth may not happen overnight. 

Many times, it takes a few months to see a steady increase in audience, engagement, and clicks. This is a completely normal circumstance and should not lead you to feel discouraged. Instead, sit back, relax and wait. If there is no noticeable change within three months, rethink your plan.

When In Doubt Hire Out

Navigating SEO marketing can be complicated. Sometimes the best solution is to hire a marketing agency such as Mystic Media , to assist you with your SEO marketing needs. Marketing experts are highly trained individuals who can make implement a marketing plan tailored to your business needs.