Resolve to avoid these 4 SEO mistakes in 2020

If you’re anything like us, you’ll relish the prospect of a New Year. It’s a chance to take stock on what you’ve accomplished in the last 12 months, set new goals, take on new challenges and hit the reset button. If SEO is already topping your list of New Year priorities, let us help you set off in the right direction with four mistakes you should resolve to avoid as 2020 gets underway…

1. You don’t create a tailored action plan It’s true that SEO involves a range of activities – you need to create good quality content, you need to optimise your landing pages and build links. Approaching your SEO activity with a cookie-cutter to do list simply to tick off each of those actions is a mistake.SEO is a complex science and there is no one size fits all solution. It’s important to first take the time to understand where your site sits specifically, what you’re doing well and where your domain’s specific weaknesses are. From there, you can create a tailored plan which sees any weaker spots fixed and strengths built on. 2. You buy links Link building gets harder and harder. That’s just a fact. Building good quality, relevant links is a long term undertaking and it’s easy to get disheartened when your efforts seemingly come to nothing. Buying links is a quick fix on the surface – but it’s not all that it may appear. Any link you can buy, your competitors can too meaning they tend to be of a poorer quality, from poor quality domains and may not even be relevant. That means the link won’t do much to bolster your SEO profile and certainly won’t drive relevant traffic to your site. Put that budget and resource into an organic link building campaign while understanding that the best links an take months and months to accrue. 3. You don’t invest in content Many websites tick off the quantity box when it comes to content creation but it’s a mistake to think that simply publishing a blog like clockwork is sufficient. The quality and usefulness of your content also matters and the better you can make it, the better your SEO results will be. On the back of investing in good quality, very relevant, topical and informative content, you’ll also be elevating the user experience. 4. You focus on Google, not your audience SEO is about pleasing Google to some extent – you need to tick its boxes to ascend through the rankings. But, it’s a mistake to think that’s all SEO is. Google’s algorithms have become incredibly sophisticated and at its heart, the search engine wants to sort the best quality results for a user to give them the answer to their search query. You too also want to give your website visitors the best experience so that the hard work you have done to get them to your site isn’t wasted. The very last thing you want is to focus on Google to the extent that you don’t consider who your customers are and how you can delight them; ensuring that those who arrive on your site convert into customers.