If you want your businesses to see a boost in sales or to give your brand a better position in its market, maximizing your digital marketing campaign is one great way to go.
After all, businesses can pull a higher ROI from their cheap blogging and social media activities than they can pull from a big ad-buy campaign.
No doubt, SEO plays a significant role in this.
To become more competitive (in terms of getting a higher share of the target audience), more focus must be put on improving the online visibility of your properties through search engines such as Google.
According to a 2018 report by HubSpot, at least 61% of marketers say that “improving SEO and growing organic presence” is a top priority in their inbound marketing campaigns.
For this, it’s vital that businesses be able to drive better results using the right strategies. Noting the impact it provides, it’s safe to say that SEO can be a powerful channel for driving revenue and business expansion.
But just like other digital marketing channels, SEO has its own range of problems to deal with. If you want to get ahead of the competition, it is crucial to identify and resolve these seo problems early on.
Using the right approaches, you can prevent common SEO problems from damaging your online efforts.
Let’s look at some of these problems and the practical ways you can do to resolve them.
404 Errors
Nothing turns off a site visitor more than clicking a link only to be redirected to a page with the number 404 plastered over it. Indeed, 404 errors are a bane to brands that want to build a strong online presence. These errors can increase bounce rates significantly and, as a result, diminish your search rank.
Fortunately, just like the common cold, a 404 error can easily be treated. First thing you need to do is to list down all the broken links you have in your website by testing the pages in your navigation menu.
Once you have identified the affected destinations, you can now update these broken links. For best results, you can perform a thorough site audit yourself, or you can save time by hiring an SEO consultant to do it for you. Not only will you be able to locate broken links, but you can also identify other SEO-related issues as well.
The simplest trick in this case is to change the URLs of the affected links so they can direct users to a relevant landing page. On the other hand, if you’re using WordPress with Yoast as a plug-in, you can update your links automatically through 301 redirects.
Missing Alt Image Tags
Nowadays, it is recommended that businesses include images in their blog content. Some, however, just place an image while overlooking the alt attributes.
Visuals provide greater value for businesses that want to educate and influence their audiences. The lack of alt attributes such as meta-tags and titles can diminish the value of your content.
After all, alt attributes provide context to your content. Other than that, alt attributes can also give your products and services even greater visibility on Google image search results.
Solving image tags is easy. If you’re using WordPress, you simply browse through your image gallery and manually enter the data you required on each image. Make sure to use the title of the corresponding blog article as the title of the image.
It can be a time consuming process, but it’s worth it!
Unoptimized Content
Over the years, Google has updated its algorithms to provide search visitors with the best experience. Value is important, and Google is making sure that vendors with a considerable presence online can help audiences find what they are looking for.
For this reason, Google has become a lot stricter, requiring businesses to focus more on creating value for their audiences and penalizing anyone still trying black hat operations.
If your SEO efforts are not doing well in terms of generating higher organic traffic, then there’s something in your content that Google doesn’t like. Performing a full content audit can help you identify website issues that are pulling your site ranking down the drain.
Once you have done a content audit, it’s only a matter of making sure that the content you churn out:
- is between 500 to 1,000 words;
- has images with their proper alt attributes;
- makes proper use of H1 and H2 tags;
- contains both outbound and inbound links to relevant landing pages; and
- is readable and has the right keywords that people are looking for.
A good rule of thumb here is to consider providing value to your audience and making sure that what they read on your website can help them decide whether to buy something from you.
