Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a practice that purposefully sets up a website for search engine results pages (SERPs). A good position on the SERPs pushes traffic and earns leads, thus allowing businesses to convert traffic into customers. Local SEO marketing targets online presence and ranking in localised SERPs and traffic within the bounds of the local area where a business serves.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO emphasises ranking for geo-specific keywords in local areas rather than worldwide. Local SEO begins with a superior website that is user and mobile friendly and incorporates beneficial content, adjusted with geo-based keywords. Picking the right business listing, improving your business description, and adding photos will aid your SEO
and your business profile well.
Common Mistakes and Their Workaround
Did you know you can boost the efficacy of your local SEO campaign with off-page SEO game plans such as generating listings in local directories, acknowledging customer
reviews, and establishing backlinks?
That is true.
Hence, to help you, we have gathered five leading SEO mistakes to avoid and a few tips to help you get more out of your local SEO efforts and upgrade your website's rank in the
SERPs.
Not Being Strategic About Keywords
Consider how people search for your company. The words people put in the search bars act as the keywords they might use to find you on a search engine such as Google. Your website has no prospects of ranking on the first or second page if you don’t choose the right keywords. By choosing the wrong keywords or using popular and highly competitive keywords, you lower the rank of your website.
To avoid this mistake, conduct keyword research, limit the use of too competitive keywords, not focus on just one keyword and rather have secondary keywords too, and steer clear of using mainstream keywords and show up the names of gigantic companies.
Not Optimising Tags
It is very important to use appropriate tags on your website. For example, the page’s meta description tag is of extreme importance as it is present not on your webpage but on the search result pages. It aids those searching on the web in figuring out what kind of content you have on your web pages and whether they can ascertain their answers on your webpage. The best length for a meta description is 50-160 characters.
To avert this mistake, let’s take the example of a meta description tag again. You should use targeted keywords and ensure they are within the optimal length so Google doesn’t shorten your summary and keywords. Also, make your meta description and other tags unique for each page.
Slow Speed
In today’s fast-paced world, most people don't want to wait for a website to load, given that they have other alternatives at their disposal. Your web page should load fast to serve your audience quickly since delays can cause you to lose potential customers. Google will downgrade your rank if visitors on your site start leaving within a few minutes due to the slow speed of your website.
To prevent this issue, work on the speed of your webpage by setting image size to 72dpi to decrease the bandwidth, fix your redirects by doing a site audit of all your internal URLs, and compress JavaScript and CSS code to reduce size.
Low Quality or Unoriginal Content
Your blog posts and web pages control your site's functionality to your audience. Both are key to your search rankings, so producing peripheral, badly written content will overshadow your website’s great potential. Additionally, search engines, such as Google, have smart and advanced algorithms that can expose copied or duplicated content on the website. If it finds that your content is antiquated or copied, your site will be filtered out and not ranked at all.
To refrain from producing low-quality content, make sure to post well-written, engaging, high quality and relevant content. And if you do copy content from other websites, ask for permission or give credits to the respective webpage.
Mobile Unfriendliness
With the surge in usage and reliance on smartphones, many users rely on mobile phones instead of computers to visit a website. More than half the search results on Google are done using mobile, so it’s more likely that you will have a low viewership and lose a big lump of traffic if your webpage is not mobile-friendly. Consequently, your website’s bounce rate will increase and make search engines such as Google lower the rank of your webpage on their pages.
Dodge this mistake by having a mobile-ready site, and you can do this by opting for a good web host, optimising your site’s loading time, implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and modifying your pop-ups because a mobile-optimised website will rearrange itself thoroughly for different devices allowing your audience to search for your page with ease.
Key Takeaways
A successful local SEO campaign can only succeed when they circumvent the most common mistakes discussed above, expanding its online visibility and growing website traffic. We hope this blog article assists you in pinpointing local SEO mistakes that may influence your ranking in the SERPs.
Use the tips shared in this blog post, or better yet, work with our SEO wizards at BOSH International. Bosh delivers local SEO services and much more to aid you in growing your business’s online visibility and improving your rankings in the local search results.