You may find yourself hearing the term Digital Marketing more and more these days as opposed to just plain old “marketing”. This is no surprise given the uptake in eCommerce and the advantage a digital marketing strategy can bring.

In today’s blog post, we will tackle the top 5 SEO mistakes, based on the whitepaper performed by Ignite Digital. These mistakes include: lack of keyword research, Sitemap.xml not found, quality backlinks, not having any meta descriptions and title tags.

Digital marketing managers may feel as they are behind on planning, with lockdowns bringing many plans to a halt over the Summer months but avoiding these SEO mistakes is the difference between an effective and a poor campaign.

1. Not doing keyword research


Keywords have been considered a crucial part of marketing strategies for some time. However, with updates to the Google Algorithm, some companies believe that they may have lost their power.

Keywords are an essential ranking factor and business owners cannot grow their SEO campaign setup without using them. The use of keywords can damage business visibility online in two ways: keyword stuffing and the need to do accurate keyword research.

How to do keyword research in a proper way?


Keyword research is a critical aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Avoiding it will make it impossible for a business to succeed in the digital sector as keywords are necessary for a website to rank in Google SERP.  When a user is searching for a specific term in Google, he’s using specific keywords. The keyword research evaluates these keywords and their chances to rank in Google SERP.

The most important thing is to do the correct keyword research.

Understand the Particular Types of Keywords


Many business owners are unaware of the various types of keywords utilised. Generally, there are nine types of keywords including short and long-tail, product and customer defining, short and long term, geo and intent-targeting, and LSI. All these keywords belong to two main categories: including generic and niche-based.

What are generic keywords?


Generic keywords are the ones that usually describe a business, product or service. The reach of these keywords is general and is designed for individuals who search without typing a specific brand or service name. The second category is that of niche keywords. These are more specific and generally comprise of long-tail keywords. These keywords target an audience that does specific research on a search engine. In comparison with the generic keywords, the niche ones are difficult to rank for, regardless of the history of the business. 

Using Effective Tools


The most critical aspect of keyword research is finding the most effective tools to enlist the top generic and niche-specific keywords.

There are a plethora of keyword finders and tools, such as Google Keyword Planner, which makes the process of identifying high-quality keywords simple and productive.

For a business that focuses on digital marketing strategies, appearing on the front line of competition is a consistent end goal. In order to accomplish this, keyword research must be implemented properly and using the proper tools can help to assign this process.

2. Sitemap.xml Not Found


Understanding crawlability and website ranking methodology by Google

Measuring millions of websites is an unrealistic manual task for anyone to carry out. There are hundreds of ranking factors that should be acknowledged when it comes to SEO. It extends beyond human capabilities to assign ranks to websites by personally reviewing them.

The ranking of a website is influenced by the significance and value it offers the customer. The tedious approach taken by Google establishes equity through all the sites and grants that every website that ranks on top offers value to the consumers.

Crawlability is a demanding factor that businesses need to consider Often neglected by online business owners is the incorporation of the sitemap.xml. Unfortunately, the definition of sitemap. XML is not something that many companies are aware of.

Yoast states that the crawlability factor is primordial for the ranking of a website on the SERP.

3. Not having any title tag or meta description


SEO efforts to achieve a top rank on SERP

While businesses focus on producing top-quality content, managing keywords user-friendly websites, they often forget about an essential element – title tag and meta descriptions.

Importance of Meta Descriptions 


One of the reasons many businesses ignore meta tags is that they are unaware of its existence. For eCommerce managers who do not know what a meta description is, it is a form of an HTML attribute that contains a summary of a web page. These descriptions appear below the URL of a website when it appears on a Search Engine Results Page.

Meta descriptions are one of the factors that boost click-through rates on a website’s URL. Their length should not exceed 160 characters. The secret is to keep meta descriptions long enough for a reader to understand them, but it should be short enough to be read in just a single glance.

Example of how it looks a meta description on Google SERP

Meta descriptions do not solely contribute to boosting a website’s rank. They enhance SEO efforts by increasing the click-through rates on a website URL and help in allowing SEO  experts to place keywords into the description.

Meta descriptions are summaries of a web page that pave the way for high click-through rates, that in return, helps enhance the rank of a website. It is an important part of SEO and digital marketing that plays a vital role in boosting visibility on a SERP, indirectly!

4. Too many 404s errors


 A 404 error is the most common HTTP error which can cause consumers to leave the website. The message displayed on these web pages is ‘’404 Not Found’’, which is sent from the webserver of a website to the web browser, which can display an error message.

Not many businesses pay much attention to these pages and continue to do their business their way until they begin to lower a website’s rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It is essential to know that error-containing web pages can negatively affect the quality of SEO.

How do 404 pages appear?


The cases which lead to an error 404 include when a page was deleted or moved. Other situations include incorrectly written URLs during the creation phase, incorrect linking or incorrect type in the browser, broken connections, inability of the requested domain to be converted to an IP or entering a non-existent domain name.

In any case, a single error 404 page or multiple pages with an error message, 404s shouldn’t be on a website. Running a 404 checker to locate pages with an issue and then 301 redirecting them to the correct relevant page on your website is the correct way to address it.

Error 404 also proves that the content on a website is out-of-date and it shows a search engine That the owners have abandoned the website as no maintenance has been done. As Google’s primary aim is to satisfy its customers, such web pages don’t have any real value in terms of search engine bots.

For example, if an error 404 message appears on the website, given that the website owner missed it, the page should be customized and can include a CTA as well. The result is that the error page will become valuable for the users.

5. Quality backlinks


In SEO, domain value is very important. Google assigns ranks to every website based on the value they offer to the users. Therefore, quality is the basis on which Google’s algorithm analyzes a website.

There are several factors that work together to maximise the SEO efforts of a company. Quality content with appropriate usage of keywords, website structure (Schema), loading speeds (below 3 seconds) and backlinks are the important factors that a marketer needs to consider.

There is no doubt that backlinks are essential. However, the debate of quality vs quantity of backlinks has existed since the very beginning. Many business owners are struggling with it and in fairness, nobody knows the ‘’right’’ answer to it.

Before diving into the subject, it is important to understand precisely what backlinks are, as it can help businesses understand the correct factor to prioritize, quality or quantity.

The Verdict


In this case, the ideal situation is to get a high quantity of backlinks from high-quality domains. However, in practical terms, it is not possible for every business. What business owners can do is that while they work to get high-quality backlinks for their website, they should update their title tags and meta descriptions. Getting high-quality backlinks takes a lot of time and patience. Reaching out to websites individually is tedious. But this approach protects your website from getting penalized from Google.

Conclusion:


As we have seen in this article, it is important that we know how to avoid the top 5 SEO mistakes and what we can do to support eCommerce businesses come out on top in Google SERP, conducting increased traffic, managing quality leads and bringing a company towards profitability.  Stay tuned to the Kooomo blog to keep up to date with the latest SEO news.