As technology advances, customer preferences and expectations intensify. While traditional marketing strategies still have their place in the marketing realm, entrepreneurs must find more creative ways to stay relevant in the industry. Therefore, business owners need to leverage websites to attract their target market.
Although building a website for your business can be done quickly, the challenge begins when marketing your brand. These obstacles include audience retention, lack of competitor knowledge and driving traffic to your website. Thus, you must partner with a professional marketing agency to assist you in maintaining your online presence.
If you wonder why your business page isn’t generating enough audience interaction, you’re probably still using old search engine optimization (SEO) tactics. This article outlines the most outdated SEO practices you should avoid using.
1. Unhealthy Usage of Internal Links
Whether you have already established a business website or you’re just planning to do so, link building assists in ranking it higher on search engines. Link building plays a vital role in driving organic traffic to your website, especially if you’re in a competitive industry. Creating excellent content, improving your user experience and adding high authority links ensure traffic attraction to your site.
While adding internal links to your web content is your competitive advantage, connecting spammy and low-quality links will decrease page value. So if you want your brand to stay relevant and enhance brand reputation, you should avoid saturating your website with too many links.
A great way to disregard this unhealthy SEO technique is by making your website link-worthy. You can continually improve your web user experience, enhance customer service and produce high-quality content. In addition, you can utilize various link building strategies to expand your web authority to gain organic traffic from search engines.
2. Duplicating Content
Duplicate content refers to similar content that shows up on more than one webpage, whether the page is within or outside your website. This situation poses a risk for your SEO strategies because search engine bots have the power to hide web pages with similar content on the search engine results page (SERP). Duplicate content includes the following examples:
- Copying the same product description
- Use the same page in different parts of your website
- Mishandling your website’s worldwide web (www) and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)
- Utilizing another blog’s content on your page
- Sharing the same content to multiple domains
Although there’s no penalty for duplicating content, your page might not be as visible to audiences as it should be when they search for a relevant topic. Instead, search engines will show other, more original and relevant blog posts to the users, causing potential customer loss for your business. So, leave this outdated SEO technique as you move forward with growing your website.
Rather than continuously duplicating content, you can outsource a professional content writer to help you create high-quality blog posts. You should also leverage plagiarism-checking tools like Copyscape to ensure 100 percent content originality.
If you do not have access to those tools, you could copy and paste a short sentence within your content to a search engine to see if any duplications show up.
3. Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing happens when a website overuses the same target keyword to increase the chances of ranking higher in search results. Although webpages still use this tactic to improve their web visibility, keyword stuffing provides a poor user experience. In turn, you naturally drive away potential customers and hurt your bottom line.
While taking shortcuts to attract traffic is tempting for SEO, low-quality techniques like keyword stuffing aren’t going to improve your competitive edge. In fact, this could be considered a black-hat strategy, which might even severely hurt your website’s visibility and overall brand reputation.
Here are a few examples of keyword stuffing:
- Unnecessary repetition of phrases
- Out-of-context usage of unnecessary words
- Adding keywords that aren’t related to the topic of the blog post
While trying to maintain relevancy in your content may seem challenging, you should always aim to educate your audience. And you can’t fulfill this purpose by stuffing your content with irrelevant keywords. While taking shortcuts ensures consistent blog posting, making sure you don’t end up spamming keywords helps optimize your webpage.
4. Not Checking Broken External Links
Have you ever experienced clicking a link and being directed to a broken page that says “page not found”? If so, you already understand how frustrating it can be not to receive your expected search results. As a website owner, you should always check content links to improve user experience.
Here are several reasons links could end up as broken:
- Committing a typographical error when creating the link
- Erasing a whole page
- Renaming a webpage and not updating external links
- Linking to removed files, videos or images
- Replacing domain names and activating the site to a different uniform resource locator (URL)
Without checking broken external links, users who view your page are likely to click on the exit or back button – you already lost a customer after an awful user experience on your page.
While this scenario may seem daunting, you can still save your website from possible harmful events. Disregard this practice and replace it by consistently checking every webpage link before showing it to the public. Thus, you should never ignore broken links in the future, considering all the possible damage this tactic brings.
5. Mismanaging Website Downtime
Since building a website is already a challenging activity, entrepreneurs don’t usually understand the cost of website downtime. However, if your website is crucial in your business processes, it’s crucial to be mindful of its uptime and downtime.
If you keep on mismanaging your website downtime, your business will still face negative impacts, such as:
Productivity and opportunity cost: For online businesses, increasing overall business operation productivity provides enough goods and better customer service. This benefit will translate to higher profits, ensuring a more significant market share. Continuous mismanagement of website downtime will hinder your organizational productivity growth as you lose your page visitors.
Harming brand perception: As you continue to ignore your website downtime, this issue can severely damage your brand reputation. For example, if your webpage is down when a new page visitor arrives, that customer will immediately perceive poorly of your website. In turn, you’ll lose another sale and erode your competitive edge.
Damaging SEO effectivity: Regardless of your website downtime, your search engine ranking may be directly affected. A short duration of website mismanagement can have a long-term effect on your site’s visibility, including getting outranked by a more dedicated web page.
While the load times of a website are a separate issue, quickly finding ways to counter your website downtime can save user experience. One way to understand how to foresee a page’s potential downtime is by understanding the issue’s risk. Next, choose between risk acceptance and limitation instead of avoiding the obstacle. Lastly, measure downtime probability to prepare for the troubleshooting process.
6. Slow Website
No matter how aesthetically pleasing your webpage is, your primary focus should be providing an excellent experience to page visitors. Underestimating a website’s load time may substantially impact the organic traffic and revenue of your business. Causes of slow pages include large images, sub-optimized browsers, irrelevant plugins and low-quality web hosts.
While you’re still growing your online presence, you should manage your website traffic properly. The bigger the audience, the more opportunity to increase brand awareness. Therefore, an excellent user experience helps promote your product offerings, leading to additional sales revenue.
Since your website showcases your brand value, improving your website’s load times will help you gain positive feedback from customers. While developing and designing your website retains the visitors’ attention, continuous speed enhancements help ensure user loyalty. So look for a reputable web service provider who can accomplish your page demands.
7. Content-Length Surplus
Writing blog content with more than a thousand words each post seems like a good SEO move. Unfortunately, too much word count likely decreases reader retention and causes visitors to leave your page.
Instead of sticking to a certain length, focus on effectively communicating with your audience, regardless of word count. Writing an advice piece with a single tip will make your audience feel like they wasted their time. Preferably, the length of each topic must correspond to the knowledge you’re trying to share. For example, if a commercial product page could stand at 750 words, a more informational page should have 1,000 words.
8. Unplanned Guest Blogging
If you want to communicate your brand’s message to ensure customer loyalty effectively, begin submitting quality content to various blogs. This strategy increases your website, boosting product sales by instant exposure to different audiences. Moreover, guest blogging grows your network once you start interacting with comments and messages from your prospects.
However, unplanned guest blogging might annoy your customers and audience. For example, guest blogging is useless without creating high-quality content, properly optimizing anchor texts and checking backlink accumulation.
An excellent way to get out of this unhealthy practice is by identifying high-authority websites and writing posts that add real value. Indeed, taking SEO slow ensures website productivity over time.
Key Takeaway
While getting rid of unhealthy SEO practices takes time, it’s never too late to unlearn them and follow new, more effective techniques. You ensure website success by planning how to use external links, add keywords and identify the correct content length. This action plan will boost your user experience, increase organic traffic and increase your bottom line.
