SEO is an art that cannot be learned or perfected overnight. To get the best results you need to keep on top of the latest techniques, be creative and spend time perfecting your skill.
However, it is never an exact science and there are many mistakes waiting to be made. Here we’ll take a look at some of the most common SEO pitfalls and how they can damage your SEO efforts.

Lots of Traffic, No Conversions

Finally, with plenty of research and effort you have published and optimized your pages with your first batch of keywords. Your analytics start to show lots of traffic coming in. Great! The only problem is that your conversion rate hasn’t increased. This could be down to the keywords you have chosen not being targeted to your audience, being too generic or not being competitive enough.

Duplicate or Shallow Content

It’s one thing getting visitors to your website, but it’s quite another keeping them there. One of the best ways to hold their attention is with meaningful and highly targeted content. If your content is shallow at best and holds no relevance, your visitors will leave in their droves. Duplicate content is another big no-no and could get your website penalized. You should always ensure that every page you publish has unique content that doesn’t exist anywhere else online.

Poor Link Building Strategies

When somebody else links to your site, whether they do so from social media or another website page, Google sees this as a recommendation and will boost your ranking as a result. Problems can arise when websites that are completely irrelevant to your offering start linking to you. Google’s smart algorithms recognize relevance and could ignore irrelevant links over time. Aim to manage your own link building strategy with guest blog posts on relevant sites and quality content on your own site that attracts relevant and authoritative links.

Not Using Analytics

If you can’t measure your efforts you can’t measure success or failure. SEO works largely behind the scenes. If you don’t analyze what is going on with tools like Google Analytics you won’t be able to see the areas of SEO that are working well or the areas that need work.

Final Thoughts

SEO should be an essential and ongoing part of your digital marketing strategy. As you navigate your way through the wealth of advice online, it is only natural to make a few mistakes. By using and building on the basic principles above you will also build a solid SEO strategy that goes on generating traffic and conversions for many years to come.