4 SEO Mistakes That Are Costing You Traffic (And How to Avoid Them)
Do backlinks still matter in 2018? What’s with all the hype surrounding internal linking? Should you spend more time publishing long-form content?
If you’ve pondered over these questions while doing your recent site audit, then we’ve got some answers for you.
Optimizing your website for search engine result pages (SERPs) still remains a priority for most marketers. With new search engine algorithm updates and changing user perspectives, it’s important that we as marketers stay on top of the trends and constantly evolve our SEO methods and practices to rank higher in SERPs.
Having said that, some optimization techniques tend to do more harm than good, especially in the long run. To that end, here are 4 most common SEO mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.
1. Prioritizing Social Media Over Link Building
Many publishers turn to social media when they’ve just published a fresh piece of content in an effort to get more clicks, likes, and upvotes. Once the article gets the desired number of shares, it’s often tempting to abandon the link building quest completely and move on to the next piece of content.
But sadly, despite social media being a highly useful tool to promote articles, there is no proven correlation between social media shares and improved search rankings.
On the other hand, link building takes time and effort, but can help you gain more organic traffic in the long run. In fact, backlinks from authoritative sources continue to be one of the primary factors to rank high in search engines.
According to a recent study by Backlinko where they analyzed over 1 million Google search results, it was revealed that the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor.
How to Avoid it?
The quality of backlinks play a huge role in determining search engine success. If you’re able to earn backlinks from high domain authority sites, your organic rankings can improve in a matter of days. On the other hand, if you obtain links from bad neighborhood or indulge in black hat practices, your site may get penalized by Google into obscurity.
