Whether you are a marketing company or just a business that wants to drive more traffic to your site, good SEO practices are crucial. Getting the right kind of traffic to your website and more quality leads starts with Search Engine Optimization. Just like everything in life, there are good and bad SEO practices that can either help improve your business or tank your online rankings.
At Performance Driven Marketing, we believe in getting you tangible and real results not just clicks. By avoiding bad SEO practices and keeping up to date with marketing trends, our team can help you avoid low rankings on Google and other search engines. In this blog, we will share the most common bad habits you can have when it comes to SEO and how to avoid them.
1- Keyword Stuffing
The most common mistake you can make in SEO content is keyword stuffing. Having enough keywords inside your content will help that page populate in search queries, but too many and Google or other search engines could flag your content.
Keyword stuffing often looks like putting the keyword in every sentence or every paragraph. Your keyword or keyphrase should be sprinkled evenly throughout your content. It should sound organic when you read it and each instance should be intentional.
2- Duplicate Content
Quality content is kind when it comes to getting your business seen by searchers, but overdoing the content or creating duplicate content is one of the bad SEO practices you want to avoid. Posting multiple blogs with the same title, having duplicate webpages, or pages with different titles but the same body content are all examples of this bad practice.
The best way to avoid this is to spend time coming up with ideas for content ahead of time. Brainstorming with your team will help you generate quality ideas and have plenty of time to execute them. Even if you have written on a topic before, don’t just republish the same blog. Try to put a unique twist on it or show how things have changed since the previous blog was posted.
3- Paid Links
Link building when done correctly, can be extremely beneficial for your business. Paid links can be flagged by search engines, so including them sparingly is a better SEO practice for your website. You should be vetting the individual links you put into your blogs, web pages, and other content. You should prove to Google that you are not buying links directly and that any paid links were changed without your knowledge.
Using Google’s Disavow tool can help you determine what links could be toxic or “spammy” to your site. Using this could help you find proper links that will increase your business’s credibility.
4- Writing For Search Engines
While SEO practices focus on appealing to search engines, you should write your content with a focus on real humans. Your clients and potential customers are the ones who will be reading the written content on your site, so robotic or choppy content will not rank well. If you start pumping out spammy content with a high amount of keywords, Google will flag your site. The best way to avoid bad SEO practices is to space out the posting of the content and avoid keyword stuffing.
Make sure your content reads naturally and avoid putting your target keyword in every paragraph. Try putting keywords in headers or alt-text instead of stuffing it throughout a blog or webpage. When your content helps readers solve a problem or find an answer you will drive more traffic to your site. Customers want to be able to trust you and rely on your content for help, so if your blog title offers that, you better deliver.
5- AI Generated Content
With more and more AI generators coming to the market, it is tempting to use these services to build out your web content. Google may not flag AI content now, but in the future, they will be cracking down on this content or images. Search engines will always prefer original creations because they better serve the needs of the people.
While AI is impressive, it is not perfect. The research that can be done and the wording that a human creates will always be better than a robot-generated piece. Using AI-generated content can lower your engagement rate because of bad writing or misinformation.
6- Cloaking
Using a trick of deception to create different subpages that are shown to Google while other pages are shown to your clients is another bad practice that businesses should avoid. Cloaking is when a web page is programmed to show an HTML to the search engine while viewers see images. Google or other search engines that find sites that are spamdexing can penalize them by a complete ban or site deletion.
Avoid Bad SEO Practices With Help From Performance Driven Marketing
Performance Driven Marketing has a team of skilled content writers and SEO specialists that help to ensure our clients don’t fall victim to bad SEO practices. We don’t ever use AI-generated content, we go through your content consistently to ensure your rankings are good and optimize other parts of your site to ensure that searchers can find what they need.
Our team serves clients in multiple industries and has helped them gain more clients in just one year. Let us handle the tedious tasks of SEO so you can focus on other needs inside your business. Contact us for a free website audit and to learn more about our SEO packages.
