SEO is a critical digital marketing strategy that has helped many businesses, whether small or big, achieve their goals. Basically, its focus is on increasing the ranking of a website on search engines, increasing the traffic and consequently the sales of a business. When it comes to SEO, content is the backbone, although things are changing as time goes by. Other factors like images, videos and the number of backlinks are also playing a crucial role in determining how the website will rank at the end of the day.

Whether you are using professionals to manage the SEO project for your website or doing it yourself, there are costly mistakes that one must avoid to ensure that the content marketing efforts are a great success.  According to pro digital marketing experts, avoiding these mistakes will be the beginning of a new trend in climbing the rankings ladder. This article will highlight eight of the common mistakes one should avoid to succeed.

Writing Short Content

As mentioned in our introductory note, content is king when it comes to SEO and content marketing in general. If you are looking forward to making it big, then consider writing long content. According to experts from Google, long content provides enough information needed by the search engine to rank the content. Almost all studies have shown that long content ranks better in Google and other search engines than short content. Likewise, the predictions show that this is not likely to change. As a website owner, you need to ensure that you publish long content more often.

Use of the Wrong Content

Google can relate what people write to what is already on the target website. If they have nothing in common, too bad for the website. It will not rise in ranking even slightly. In fact, this is likely to ruin SEO efforts as other competing websites will keep pushing your website down. Relevant information is good not only for the ranking by Google but also to keep the web visitors glued. When people find irrelevant content on your website, they are likely to have a bad user experience and not come back again. Write only what has a relationship to the website and will be helpful to all readers.

Plagiarism

Referencing sources is key when it comes to writing online content. It is crucial that your content retains 100 percent authenticity. Otherwise, your content will contain plagiarism, which is punishable by Google. The website on which the content is published ranks downwards automatically in such a case. This can be avoided by writing from experience, tests and reviews that you have done and relying on professional writers and editors who will not duplicate any content whether online or in various books.

Omitting Meta Tags

Another worst mistake you can make is to ignore meta tags or use the wrong ones. Some research indicates that there are numerous sites without the appropriate meta tags. It is a mandatory routine to add the meta tags and titles to all pages and posts that you make. The Google crawlers rely on these to get important information about the page such as what the content contains. Avoid leaving the page without these tags because it will end up with ‘’untitled page,’’ which will be costly as far as the content marketing is concerned.

Use of Incorrect Keywords

SEO is all about playing with keywords. Have you ever wondered why people make a lot of efforts to prepare the right keywords for their content? It is because keywords are very crucial. If you include the wrong keywords in content, then you will be directing the wrong audience to your site. Eventually, they will not be happy with what they get while you will not get what you intended in the first place. It is, therefore, crucial to take time to prepare keywords that relate to your content. Start with the keywords rather than content so that you can build it around these keywords.

Using Only One Keyword

While one keyword that is relevant to your content will be useful, people miss a lot when they only use one keyword. If you have considered creating long content, then it is crucial to have multiple keywords so that you can increase the search probabilities. However, one must exercise caution when using many keywords. Too many will dilute the whole point of having them and end up leading to poor performance. Worse still, unrelated keywords can completely kill the efforts of content marketing. People can research and see what Google recommends at any one particular time since this can change over time. Consider using tools that can help you find the strongest keywords in your content category.

Spamming

Whether you are spamming the keywords or the general content, the harm is equally the same. It does not matter how strong the keywords are. But, you cannot bombard your site with them over a very short time. The search engine will identify these footprints and not rank your website as you would expect. It is advisable to have a record of the keywords that you use and the number of times that they have been used in the recent past. This way, it will be easy to distribute all the relevant and strong keywords and avoid spamming. The content should be related but not similar to other content published on the same website.

A Negative User Experience

Users visit a website with specific expectations that range from finding solutions to their problems to having a smooth experience. However, a bad user experience that results from hanging pages, difficult to download images, blurred videos and the wrong content will ruin your content marketing efforts. All these call for proper planning, a professional approach to various issues and continuous testing of the experience. Owners can even conduct surveys and research on the best ways to improve the website. Additionally, it is advisable to include mobile web capability in your site in this era.

Conclusion

Your online content marketing will go a long way if you avoid these mistakes. Some of them sound easy, but they require a lot of planning and a professional approach to executing them successfully. Experts and website owners who avoid as many of these mistakes as possible have already found numerous benefits like better ranking of their sites and higher traffic. Since the bottom line of any business is to have more sales, then no one can afford to make these mistakes.