The Top 3 SEO Marketing Mistakes You’ve Been Making

Search engine marketing has quickly become a focal points for the typical digital marketing strategy; in fact, SEM strategies have become so important that the average business can increase its sales by about 40% just by adopting a content marketing strategy.

But let’s get one thing straight: despite the popularity and the importance of search engine optimization services, it can be pretty tricky to understand exactly what this marketing strategy is all about.

Even worse, one small mistake in your SEO marketing plan could cause your entire campaign to work against your business. So how do you make sure that you aren’t making any terrible SEO mistakes? Here are a few of the most common reasons why businesses mess up their SEO marketing strategies — often without even realizing it:

1. Buying backlinks. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book — and it’s also one of the easiest tricks for Google to detect. You want to have as many backlinks as possible in order to get your rankings up, but stay far, far away from any links that you have to purchase; Google will find these quickly and will actually kick your website out of the network.
2. Stuffing keywords Once upon a time, you could write “professional web design” 300 times on your page andbam! your page would skyrocket to the top of the search engine rankings; not so much anymore. If you stuff in too many keywords, your site will be detected as “spam.”
3. Ignoring quality. At this point, you know that you want to have one thing: as many backlinks as possible, and ones that aren’t purchased or duplicated, so that you can get your “link juice” as high as possible. It can be tempting to work with an SEO marketing service that promises dozens of content pages posted each month — all linking back to your website, too — but chances are, you aren’t getting the quality your business needs with these pages. There are two types of Google algorithm updates, and one of them applies specifically to quality measures. The better quality your content, the less your website will be hurting when there’s an algorithm update.

Of course, it’s important to remember that this list is just the beginning. (Trust us, there are plenty of mistakes a business can make when it comes to SEO marketing.) You’ll need to pay attention to mobile web design, since 50% of consumers already consider their smartphones to be their primary internet source. You’ll need to think about how each page of content should be organized, and when it’s appropriate to use other media like photos and videos.

Even if you consider your online marketing campaign to be a secondary source of brand awareness, around 70% of businesses state that their website and SEO marketing strategy really helps their overall marketing message.

But now we want to know what you think: are there any other mistakes you’ve seen way too often with SEO marketing? We want to hear what you’re thinking!