SEO Mistakes You’re Still Making

My previous posts on SEO have been popular so I thought I’d put together a list of common SEO mistakes in bloggersville.

As always, I’m just going to put a disclaimer in: I work in digital marketing and know a lot of things but I don’t claim to be an expert and SEO is generally best practices and not fixed rules.

On to the list!

Your titles are too creative

It’s hard. You want a title makes someone click but, without telling Google what your content is about, searchers aren’t going to find it anyway. Yes, Google is pretty smart and it’s not about stuffing every possible keyword into your title but if you’re posting a product review, you need to say that! Titles like ‘The only lipstick you need this summer!’ are catchy but they won’t do you any SEO favours.

You split your content into multiple parts

This only really applies to content that has a search market like reviews. You won’t need to worry about your empties posts or anything like that. When you have two posts about the same topic, it confuses search engines. If your posts have themes that might target different keywords, you can get away with it but in general, longer, more informative posts perform best in search.

Your internal links use the wrong anchor text

With this one, it’s best to try a combination of both so it doesn’t look spammy but I see so many people using ‘click here,’ ‘read it here’ etc. type text to insert links. If you can slip a link in the natural flow of your text, do it! Try to avoid things like: “this reminds me of the L’Oreal Pro Glow Foundation- read my review here” when you can just say: “this reminds me of the L’Oreal Pro Glow Foundation”

You’re wasting time optimising pages with no search market

There’s no harm in employing best practices in everything you write but you’ll see better results if you start thinking like a searcher. Every googled for eyeshadow palette swatches? Sure. But ever googled for July makeup favourites? Probably not.

I think it’s a common misconception for those just starting to learn about SEO that if you’re writing a favourites post, for example, and mention a product like ‘Soap & Glory Supercat Liner,’ that makes it a keyword and you need to spend time optimisng to rank for that when a quick Google search will tell you that only shopping results and the odd dedicated review are going to come close to that all-important first results page.

You’re not updating older content

Google likes to see that a site has been updated but most of us don’t have time to post fresh content every day. Your old posts might benefit from a cleanup in terms of updating information, adding links to new content, fixing mistakes etc. If you started your blog with no knowlesge of SEO and search marketing, you might find this useful to go back and optimise older posts.

You’re ignoring SEO for images

Beauty blogs in particular are often rich with images and they can be used to drive search traffic if you optimise them effectively. There are plenty of articles on the internet that explain this better but images essentials are things like making sure the filename and alt text align with your keyword and also making sure you resize them to prevent slow loading speeds.

You don’t do any keyword research

I’m going to be writing a post on content marketing soon that explains keyword research a bit better but I think it’s definitely an important factor in search marketing as it allows you to see what people are actually searching for rather than trying to force keywords into blog posts you’ve written without any research.

I hope you found this useful. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like me to cover! x