Dynamic Business

Three Common Business SEO Mistakes

1)     We should be #1 – One of the common mistakes that commonly arise in discussions is the assumption that Google should rank you because you believe you are number #1 at what you do.  SEO requires more effort than just claiming you have great content on a particular business or service, you need to prove this to the search engines, SEO doesn’t work on belief it works on hard work, focus and patience.

2)     Rank us for anything – Another common mistake is focus on ranking for unrelated terms on the chance that it might deliver enough business to make it a profitable product or business in the future.  This doesn’t often work well because your SEO strategy is not focused and you are competing with fewer resources, less relevant material and more focused competitors. You need to stick to a niche and dominate it and expand it from there to cover complimentary products.

3)     We pick the keywords – The final nail in the coffin is that you pick the keywords based on gut instinct as it is common that you will use industry specific terminology and acronyms that your clients may not understand.  The caveat is that insight from a business owner is often accurate but there has to be a commercial focus and not just that’s what I want to be found for or that’s what I would search for.

How to rank better?

Everyone who is involved in your business can contribute towards helping you building quality content you need to also measure your actions and understand how particular actions improve your search results.  You need to put in the hard work to rank in competitive areas but a number of businesses just have to do a little bit more than the bare minimum to get results.

Don’t Forget Bing!

While Bing has a smaller portion of the Australian market with around 5-10% of traffic when combined with Yahoo it also offers far less competition for being #1.  To provide webmaster with a better insight on how their website is performing Bing also offers Bing Webmaster Tools.

Just like Google Webmaster Tools these are provided free to help you better understand how the search engines crawl your site, what pages are included in the index and some insight into what keywords are driving traffic and estimate what portion of that you receive.

Don’t forget measure everything!

One of the key parts for small business to remember is to measure everything within reason using platforms like Google Analytics Goals, AdWords Conversions, links attained, articles written and social media interest.  As you can import your Google Analytics data into your Raventools account you are able to provide it with more data and simplify reporting on campaign results quickly so there is no reason not to get results.