Effective marketing is one of the best tools available to a business, and finding a professional, expert marketing agency can elevate not only your business’s image but also your sales. There are marketing service providers and SEO experts that still make critical mistakes when it comes to creating and promoting web content. Here is a list of some of the biggest mistakes that marketing agencies often make.
Poor page speed
Holding the attention of your target audience is an essential part of marketing – you want them to listen to what you have to say. Having pages that load quickly is one way to ensure your target audience stays on your website. According to a Time article, the average reader will remain on a web page for 15 seconds. If your website has poor page speed, the readers are less likely to stick around: they may even get angry or frustrated at the waiting time, which could hurt your business image. This means also having pages that load quickly on smartphones and tablets, not just computers.
Forgetting Internal Linking and Page Hierarchy
Another factor that many marketing service providers and SEO experts forget to consider is the importance of internal-linking and setting up an effective page hierarchy.
Fast page speed means your target audience is more likely to stay on your website, but now that you have their attention, the next step is to make sure they can find the information they’re looking for. An audit of 30 top marketing companies conducted by Reboot Online revealed that over 60% had poor internal linking: that is to say, not linking to related and relevant content within the website. Good page hierarchy comes hand-in-hand with internal linking. Many marketing agencies don’t consider the necessity of having a well-structured page hierarchy and navigation system. While some people might find a site-map helpful, it’s better if your website has a clear, logical page hierarchy through which your audience can find relevant information intuitively.
Valueless pages indexed by Google
Having your website indexed by Google makes it possible for Google to show your website in search results. The more your website shows up in search results, the better the web traffic to your site will be.
So if more of your pages are indexed by Google, it has to be better for business, right? Actually, wrong! And this is the mistake that other marketing agencies and SEO experts tend to make. The algorithms that search engines use don’t just read that you have pages and put them in the search results. They look at your content to see if it’s something their users would find useful or valuable. If you make low-value pages available to Google for indexing, you run the risk of not being indexed at all. Providing fresh, relevant, quality content is the best way to make sure your website is showing up in Google search results, which leads us to the fourth big mistake often made…
Thin content, duplicate content
As stated above, Google doesn’t index every single page and website. It discerns between quality and quantity. So do the people visiting your website, and so should you. It is easy to think that producing a new page every day will keep people visiting your website but that isn’t the case.
In fact, having thin or duplicate content can have the opposite effect on your web traffic. Thin content can include, for example, pages that don’t really have any information on them, pages that contain mostly affiliate links, ‘gateway’ pages that rank highly for keywords but tend to just contain a lot of internal linking, or pages that have a lot of content but none of which is useful to the audience. Plagiarized and duplicate content is also a big no-no. These are some of the inefficient and unsuccessful methods that some people use to try to boost web traffic and push their websites to the top of search results.
So what does work? While it’s important not to produce new content for the sake of it, keeping fresh and up-to-date is a good thing. Investing in quality over quantity produces great results.
Pages poorly optimized for keywords
Fifth on our list of common mistakes is having pages that are poorly optimized for keywords. Keywords are what search engines use to match webpages to search results. Three examples of poor keyword optimization are page stuffing, having mismatched content, and using the wrong keywords.
Page stuffing is when a website includes lots of keywords in the hope that it will increase the likelihood of the website showing up in search results. Stuffing is using far too many keywords, not always relevant to the page, that are often not included logically within the text (generally as a big clump of words at the bottom of the page). This is actually more likely to cause search engine algorithms to mark the pages as spam and not include them in search results.
Poor keyword use is also having keywords that don’t match the content on your page. People do not want to use a search engine to get information about something in particular, only to find that the page they are linked to is actually about something else. Likewise, you don’t want anyone missing out on your pages because they don’t include keywords that correspond to your content!
Another example is using unusual keywords or choosing keywords that people are less likely to search for. Very specific words or fancier terms may sound good but they don’t work well for reaching a wider audience.If you want a reliable digital marketing agency that knows what they’re doing and stars clear of these errors, choose Surgeon’s Advisor. Surgeon’s Advisor is a team of digital marketing experts that will bring the best results for your plastic surgery business.