Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is quite clearly one of the most effective online marketing strategies a business can use. The benefits of SEO are numerous and you will miss out on a lot if you don’t ensure your online content is optimised with SEO.
But as well as there being plenty of good practices and strategies you must use, there are also many bad practices you need to avoid. Here are the SEO practices that your business shouldn’t start using.
Copy/Paste SEO
There are surprisingly many businesses out there that take the lazy way out when it comes to SEO. They can’t really put the effort in optimising their content and material and so they just copy/paste someone else’s efforts and use them.
This is not a good strategy and could make you lose customers.
So instead of sending out those big copy/paste e-mails for your customers try to come up with original content. If you feel like you are out of ideas then hire a freelance writer from online platforms such as Upwork. These can help you find great writers that won’t cost you a fortune.
Keyword Stuffing
Keywords are an essential part of good SEO practices and you should make sure to use keywords in your content. But just stuffing your content with a multitude of keywords is not a good idea.
Not only will it make the website look bad, the search engines will penalise against it. The best way to use keywords is to make them naturally fit the context and the content. Also, keep in mind that adding keywords at the bottom of your webpage and changing the colour to make them invisible is an absolute no-no. this is one of the “black hat” techniques and won’t help your SEO efforts.
Wrong Tools Usage
A lot of businesses have understood the importance of using SEO tools as part of their marketing strategy. But the problem seems to be that these tools are used in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. Make sure that you understand what the specific software does and carefully think whether you will need it.
Don’t buy into the idea that you are able to achieve first page ranking overnight by using a specific tool. This isn’t going to happen and anyone promising this is fooling you.
For small businesses the best software to use is something that helps with localisation. There are plenty of good SEO companies to help you out and you could test Bright Local for local SEO tools, for example.
Stagnant Content
SEO is also all about lively content and regular updates. If you just use it to optimise your content and only keep switching a few things on your website to fool the search engines then you are making a mistake.
Start blogging immediately. It is the best way to improve your search engine ranking and will help maintain this position. Your customers will also appreciate a blog and it can help keep them coming back to your website much better than anything else.
Emmanuel Page wants to ensure that businesses use SEO the right way. When he isn’t reading different SEO blogs and following what the big search engines are doing he likes to go to theatre with his wife.
