An SEO Horror Story: 4 Tricks to Avoid this Halloween

Using good SEO tactics is a great move for any small business marketing strategy as they can help you rank higher on search engines and ensure that you are generating organic traffic to your site. This traffic can lead to more people engaging with what your business offers, increased conversion and if you are creating valuable content, client retention. 

 

Of course, due to the benefits that SEO can have on your business, there are a lot of organisations who adopt certain tricks to try and get fast results. Whilst some of these tricks can work in the short term, Google’s algorithm recognises that pages filled with irrelevant terms or misleading articles will not be of value to consumers. As such, if Google picks up on businesses using these tricks, they can make it so they do not rank at all and even penalise them. It goes without saying, these tricks are certainly ones that you should avoid this Halloween. 

SEO works so well as a form of online marketing because of the use of keywords that pertain to a business’s industry. This means that when consumers search questions or queries that pertain to your industry, it will be your organisation that pops up as an answer to those questions. 

 

Because of this, there are some businesses that choose to stuff their content with keywords, rather than simply put them in a way which is appropriate and reads naturally. If you are creating content that solely focuses on keywords, then you will be emphasizing the terms that generate a high search volume, but the fact of the matter is that consumers don’t care about your content if it is incomprehensible and simply keyword after keyword after keyword. 

 

This is bad for trying to get customers to engage with your brand because they won’t stay on your site but also, they will know to avoid your site in the future and so the idea of retention goes out the window too. Not to mention, if Google works out your content does not provide genuine value, it will ensure that you do not rank highly. 

 

There is an ongoing argument over what is more important in SEO: quality or quantity. The fact of the matter is that it is a balancing act between the two. You need to ensure that the content you are creating is good quality and provides value to customers as this is going to help conversion, retention and ranking; however, consistency is crucial for a small businesses marketing strategy as well. 

 

When you create content consistently then you are also helping yourself in terms of ranking and client retention because you will be establishing yourself as a voice of authority on a topic. If you are providing value for people that are consuming your posts and they are coming across new posts that do this on a regular basis, then you will be able to gain the trust of consumers as they will look to you for frequent updates. 

 

Your content should cover the likes of new insights on the market, different strategies that businesses could try to innovative ideas. This will need to be published often enough that it is clear you understand what you are talking about. Think about the sites that you visit the most in your daily life. If you were to keep going back to these sites but nothing had changed and the content had not been updated, then you would simply stop visiting it. 

 

Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like, simply posting the same content or copying a block of text and then reposting it as a means to get the same keywords repeated on your site and rank higher as a result. Sure, having some similar content on your site is unavoidable but duplicate content should be avoided at all costs. 

 

Why is this? Well, again it all comes down to the Google algorithm. Google will filter identical content, which isn’t strictly a penalty but works in a similar way. Google will be forced to choose one of the blocks of text to rank higher than the other and the duplicate copy never tends to get picked. 

 

A lot of businesses get offered SEO link building services and they bite off people’s hands for these opportunities as it all sounds a bit too good to be true. Essentially, the premise is that when sites are linked to by other reputable sites, Google recognises the linked site as one of authority and therefore ranks it highly. Whilst this sounds good in principle and having people link to your site is a positive, the fact is, as far as online marketing is concerned, paid links are a waste of money. 

 

Google is very smart and therefore it is able to filter out bogus links from the legitimate ones. It no longer focuses on the quantity of those links but instead focuses on the quality of it. This means if the link is poor and clearly just a paid plug for SEO purposes, Google will no longer consider it when ranking and your business will have simply wasted money. 

 

This year, ensure the only trick you are engaging with is trick or treating, don’t try to implement tricks into your digital marketing strategy. Instead, you should try to enlist the help of professional web design agencies such as the team here at it’seeze Twickenham. We're Twickenham based web designers who are proficient at creating easy to use and SEO friendly websites for businesses big and small. 

 

We also offer ongoing expert support to our clients, so we're able to help with publishing relevant and high-quality content onto your site. If you would like to talk more about how it’seeze Web Design Twickenham could help your business grow, then do not hesitate to get in touch.