Technology has played a vital role in making marketing easier for business owners. In the past, products can only be bought from a brick and mortar store. At present, customers have plenty of marketing channels to explore, making brand recognition a breeze. Digital marketing has significantly reduced the time required to establish an online reputation.
Due to the fact that every business considers a website as their lifeblood, creating strategies is essential in creating a strong online presence.
SEO is the secret sauce of ranking high on Google. In a bid to stay ahead, business owners explore SEO practices without realizing that some of them do more harm than good. Once Google senses that you are following bad practices, they will penalize your website, causing it to nosedive. Before implementing strategies, be sure to check if they are good for your website.
5 Factors That Push a Website Down in Search Engines
1) Unrelated Keywords
SEO experts spend time on keyword research to ensure that a website ranks high on Google. When choosing the keywords to target, consider key phrases or keywords that are related to the product you are promoting. So, if you are selling car accessories, your target keywords can be something like “cheap car accessories” or “cool car accessories”. Relevance can greatly impact your rankings. If you are targeting the car niche, but choosing keywords for the beauty industry, Google will not like it.
2) Publishing Plagiarized Content
Another SEO mistake to avoid is producing duplicate content. Writing requires a great amount of time, skill and effort, but hard work pays off once your website gains better rankings. Original content is an essential SEO practice because it also increases engagement. It creates a ripple effect as higher engagement can convert to leads. It also gives your product or service more value on your website. If you do not have the time or skill to write an original content for your website, outsourcing the task to a writer is a good decision to make. However, this requires spending a lot of money. Some who are not willing to spend on hiring a freelance writer will resort to another option, which is publishing duplicate content. Google detects plagiarized content and will penalize websites that follow this practice. These days, there are tools you can use to make sure content is 100% unique and original.
3) Website Is Unresponsive on Mobile
People used to access websites from desktop computers, but times have changed. Our technology has made life easier than ever. Now, you can access websites on your mobile device. While there are business owners who have continued to keep up with the changes in technology, a lot is still lagging behind. Unresponsive websites can affect your ranking and will even increase your bounce rate. According to IMPACT Design & Branding, at least 80% of users have internet access and a smartphone. As mobile devices offer flexibility, more people are using mobile devices than desktop computers. If you have not made any changes to your website to make it mobile-friendly, then you are definitely missing out. Indeed, Google has been aware of the changes in technology that it is now prioritizing mobile-friendly websites.
4) Bad Links
Link building is significant to rank higher in Google. However, the game does not focus on the number of backlinks you have, but on the links’ quality. Compromising quality is a mistake, people often make. This is why websites end up at the bottom of the rankings. In SEO, less is more. Google determines the link’s validity. Google also determines the site’s current rankings. It considers links from reputable websites as good links. If your links come from untrustworthy websites, Google tags them as negative links. These links create a negative impact on your website, or worse, your ranking.
5) Too Many Ads
Advertisements may appear unsightly on a website when they almost dominate the entire web page. While advertisements are important, seeing too many will only distract visitors. Minimize advertisements as they can affect your website’s credibility. These ads make the site questionable and untrustworthy. They can also affect your visitor’s experience especially if they keep on popping up. The visitor’s primary purpose of visiting your website is to explore the products or services you offer. If these ads are overlapping content, their purpose is instantly defeated. Keep advertisements to a minimum. Make sure they do not interfere with your prospects’ navigational experience. Popups can direct your visitors away from your website and this leads to losing the opportunity to pitch a sale.
Search engine optimization, when not done in the correct way can have a serious impact on your ranking. Google penalizes bad SEO practices and reduces your chance of ranking higher. Now that you know these common SEO mistakes, the next thing to do is to consider making adjustments to your SEO strategies. If you are still using old SEO techniques, it is time to make a change to receive Google traffic. Madison SEO implements an effective strategy to score better and rank higher on Google. We make our strategies simple but meaningful.
