SEO is one of the most important aspects of your online marketing strategy. It’s the most effective way to improve your search rankings on Google and other search engines, and it can help you reach more people with your products and services.

Of course, Google should be your primary target in this regard. That’s because Google owns over 90% of the search engine market share. Various other services offered by Google account for over 90% of global traffic too. Thus, SEO is done primarily to cater to Google. 

However, doing it wrong can also hurt your business. Here’s how that might happen.

Poor Planning

Planning is the most important part of your SEO strategy. If you start with the technical aspects without a solid plan, it is almost guaranteed that you will fail. Here are some things to consider before diving into SEO:

• What are my goals?
• Who is my target audience?
• What keywords should I be targeting?
• How can I improve the quality of content on my site?

Unless you’re asking yourself these questions before getting started with the technical aspects, you’re doing it wrong. You’re likely to face many problems along the way if you’re not approaching with a proper plan, and that could impact your rankings without you being aware of it.

Bad Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

The title tag is a snippet of text that appears on your website’s search engine results page (SERP). The meta description is another snippet of text, which appears below the title. These are two very important pieces of content on your website that can actually impact how many people click through to your site from a search engine result.

The reason it’s so essential to get these right is because Google uses them as signals for determining what information about your company should be included in their ranking algorithm. If you have bad titles or descriptions, it will reflect poorly on your brand and may cause potential customers to choose other options over yours. Besides, even Google will fail to recognize your business as something worth suggesting to people who’re searching for it, or something related to it. 

Insufficient Content or Keyword Stuffing

Approximately 82% of marketers focused their efforts in content marketing in 2021 to drive more traffic to their websites. However, not all of them were successful. The answer to why that happened is obvious – their content lacked credibility, material, and were stuffed with keywords.  

The practice of repeating keywords in your content is called keyword stuffing. It does not work, and it can get you penalized. 

Keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO practice that goes against Google’s guidelines for search engine optimization (SEO). Believe me, you really need to avoid these black hat seo techniques. Repeating keywords excessively in your website copy is NOT meaningful to users and does not help improve rankings for those terms. In fact, keyword stuffing often results in lowered rankings or even a penalty from Google if they find out about it.

Keyword stuffing may seem like an easy way to rank higher on search engines such as Google, but think about what people are looking for when they visit a webpage. They’re looking for information on whatever topic they searched. They don’t need endless lists of phrases repeated over and over again on every page. They just want some helpful info that can answer their question quickly.

Bad Reviews

You can end up with bad reviews for different reasons. Usually, if your business itself fails to provide quality service, it will end up receiving bad reviews. Because of this, search engines will push your website down in the rankings. Thus, it’s vital to maintain quality service and good SEO practices to ensure good reviews.

Your local SEO companies can help you improve your reviews, but how do they do so? Let’s analyze the case of Orlando’s Clean N Dry carpet cleaning company as an example. 

Clean N Dry has been around for a while, but their online presence has not been that noteworthy. Then, an Orlando-based local SEO company came in, and helped Clean N Dry receive multiple reviews within a short period. That in turn helped them climb Google’s rankings. So, when you search for ‘Clean N Dry, Orlando,’ the business will appear at the top of Google’s rankings. 

Broken Links

Broken links can be a big problem for your business. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! penalize you for broken links because they look at them as a sign that you don’t care about creating an organized website. 

Broken link-building tactics are considered spammy and can lead to your site being removed from search results altogether.

Unoptimized Content

To optimize web pages for search engines, you must use specific keywords throughout your website. That way, Google can read these words and understand what kind of information is being presented on the page. 

We already talked about keyword stuffing and how it’s bad. At the same time, a lack of keywords can also harm your website’s rankings. Not optimizing your content means you’re making it hard for Google to push your page or website to the top of the rankings. Doing so will bring no benefit as your competitors are likely doing the opposite, and optimizing their content just enough so that Google can rank them higher easily.

Slow website loading speed is also damaging to your rankings. For full SEO optimization, your website should load within two to three seconds. It’s been found that for every additional second wasted in loading the website, website conversion rate drops by 4.42%. This is something you must avoid if you don’t want your website rankings to drop. 

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by all the technical aspects of it. However, you must stay up-to-date with the latest industry trends and keep your website optimized.