Don’t Neglect Your Inner Pages
One of the most common mistakes we see when assessing prospects and new clients’ websites is that they almost always neglect their inner landing pages.
Common errors we see with inner pages:
⇒ Duplicate meta tags, same as the home page. This is a big point since not creating unique meta tags for each landing page means you’re not taking advantage of all the potential keywords that can drive in additional traffic and sales to your website
⇒ Leaving the content bare-bones. Many times, there is too much emphasis is being put on home page content, but landing pages are what sells your individual services and products. There should be more emphasis placed on enriching the inner page content.
⇒ Lacking conversion-marketing layouts. One of the most common errors I see is landing pages that are missing call to action buttons and forms for people to take the next step. By the time the user scrolls down to the bottom of the page, there is no way for them to make an actionable decision. They are left twiddling their thumbs, and reassuring your searchers/shoppers on how to take the next step simply means a higher chance of getting a new client.
Don’t Overlook Website Metrics
Websites such as Hubspot’s website grader, SEMRush, Ahrefs, Majestic are great places to take a fully comprehensive look at your site and fix errors/do an analysis.
Hubspot’s Website Grader is a free tool, it gives a pretty in-depth analysis of your website and what it needs SEO wise, finished off by a somewhat arbitrary grading, which is why looking at your site with paid tools is equally important.
SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar types of tools, Ahrefs has a much better backlink aggregator than SEMRush, but SEMRush has the better website audit tool to see all your errors such as 404 pages and the like. SEMRush also has the better keyword tracker, it’s able to show you a more comprehensive keyword list of where your website is ranked on Google, you’ll find keywords you had no idea you ranked on Google for, which is a great starting point for some, and can be capitalized on by more savvy SEO enthusiasts.
SEMRush is also better for surveying your competitors, you can see their paid ad copies on Google AdWords for example, which can prove quite useful.
Majestic SEO is another key tool. Once you have compiled a list of your backlinks from tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs, you can place backlinks into Majestic and assess their quality with extensive background metrics.
Thinking Content Trumps Backlinks
A misconception I hear so often is the repeated mantra ‘Content is king’, I’m sorry, but content doesn’t work without the technical aspect of backlink building. They work in symbiosis. Content is needed to drive forward all of the important long-tail keywords and let Google know what your website is about, but building backlinks is the foundation and backbone which drives forward all of your content to the 1st page of Google.
Not Testing Your Website (Speed, Usability, 404 errors)
A common on-page SEO error is not doing enough testing. Dead pages means lower rankings, so making sure you don’t have any 404 (not found pages) is a must.
Additionally, page speed can provide a great boost to your keyword rankings and presence on Google. Google doesn’t like slow loading websites. Websites like GTMetrix.com give you a full page speed report and tell you how to fix errors to make your website much faster, for example image optimization can result in quicker loading times per page.
Aside from Google, it’s also for your customers, no one wants to sit and wait for a page that takes forever, so speed things up and that will mean more purchases!
Lastly, look into your website usability. Are all of your forms working? Are your phone numbers clickable on mobile devices? How does the website look on mobile? These things may seem minor on the surface, but can make a huge difference for your website visitors.
So, there you have it, can you think of any other SEO issues that come to mind? Feel free to let us know!
