Harnessing the world of search engine optimization (SEO) for the benefit of your small-medium business (SMB) can be a baffling, lengthy experiment in discovering what works and what negatively affects your website’s and webpages’ rankings, which can result in committing SMB SEO mistakes. If your business’ current SEO plan seems to be failing no matter what adjustments or new approaches you or your team employs, you should examine the following 8 SEO mistakes that your SMB is likely making.

1. A website that is unfriendly to spiders: Make sure the spiders of search engines can crawl the entirety of your SMB site. This means you should not have an excessive amount of pathways, a uselessly tremendous amount of pages, pages that are inaccessible or a large amount of outbound links.
2. Shallow content: Do not post a great amount of low quality content. Write content for users, not just crawlers. Having the most content on the block is acceptable if the content is of a high quality and related to what your website offers.
3. Lack of updates or uploads: It is important to consistently improve your website and upload quality content on a regular basis. If your website sits without any noticeable changes being made, its ranking will decrease as other websites will rise that continue to offer valuable information to online users.
4. Undescriptive or inaccurate page titles: For a search engine’s spiders to properly and fully evaluate the pages of your business’ website, each page should have a clear title of 70 characters or less, which is directly related to the page’s content.
5. High expectations in the short-term: Search engines will reevaluate websites and listings periodically to assess ranking, which does not mean weekly or even monthly. Be patient and consistent before tossing out a new SEO plan.
6. Guessing what works without learning about SEO or using SEO tools: There are many valuable tools that should be employed to determine the effectiveness of any SEO plan, but you must first understand how SEO works.
7. Unfamiliarity with Google AdWords: When an online user conducts a search, the top listing is typically an ad that has been purchased by that company to increases visibility. These listings are pay-per-click ads for which the advertising company pays each time a user clicks on the ad and navigates to the company’s website.
8. Entrusting a SMB’s SEO plan to an inexperienced employee or unreliable agency: A great deal of SMBs are fooled into believing that effective SEO is as easy adding in tons of repetitive keywords to the website, purchasing inbound links versus working for quality inbound linking, increasing the website’s size with low quality content and many more SMB SEO mistakes.

Wondering if your making the right SEO decisions for your company? Local Search Titan is prepared to take your SEO campaign to the next level.  If you’d like to improve your SEO strategy, contact our local SEO team by calling (503) 468-3269!