Ok, so you have decided to start writing a blog for your website in an effort to improve your search engine rankings… Great!

While in the past, writing and stuffing a blog with a few keywords may have been an effective strategy. Search Engines have come such a long way in returning high quality, local results by weeding out the spam, having a high search engine result page has become very beneficial to businesses, especially local ones.

There are many factors that balance out good SEO practice. However, the margins are so fine, mistakes are easy to make and are difficult to address which will undo all your hard work.

Inside our latest web grower blog, our Cheshire web-design team will take you on a journey and help you avoid the pitfalls of how you could potentially loose or kill traffic to your website. We provide 6 essential tips on what to avoid when writing content for your website.

6 mistakes that may kill your local search traffic

1. Ignoring Your Audience For Search Engines

It’s true, well optimised website content can attract both traffic from search engines and provide content for your audience such as services or solutions which could lead to business but you need to find the right balance between the two.

Perfecting the art of well-optimized content is tricky and it is easy to go off on a tangent and start writing content in the effort to improve search rankings. However, what you have to be aware of is risking alienating your audience by overstuffing your content so it doesn’t sound natural or by not being clear on what they achieve from reading your article.

Outline and understand your digital marketing strategy then look to implement your content based around your findings.

2. Internal, External & Missing Hyperlinks

Broken hyperlinks are surprisingly a common mistake amongst content implementation and sometimes can be out of your control. When re-designing your website, changing domains or wanting to re-direct pages, content pages can always get left behind. If your website has gone through any recent changes, it best to contact your web-design agency.

What is in your total control is checking through your content posts and checking to see if your internal and external links are still in full effect. Let’s thing about this from a customer’s point of view, there’s nothing worse than being led to a call to action to click on a link which no longer works right? If a customer struggles to navigate to any internal or external link, the trust and credibility of your website instantly fails.

Be sure to check through old content entries and look to address any links which direct internally around your website and those that are external to other websites. If any external link no longer exists, there is nothing wrong in removing them.

3. Failure to add contact information or call to action

Before you even begin to write content for your website, you need to have a full-proof online content strategy. You need to identify what actions you want your readers to take and where they can easily get in contact with you. Failure to do so will lose all credibility.

You may want to promote a new product or service, collect contact information or just want more social shares, regardless of what your call to action is, you need to take your reader on the journey with your blog and give them clear guidance on what they need to do next.

By presenting a call-to-action, you remain in control and give the reader the option to follow your call-to-action. It is all vital to have contact information accessible on every page on your website. If it doesn’t appear, look to add the information at the end of the blog post. Remember the easier you make the call-to-action, the more likely they are to follow.

4. Neglecting Social Media Duties

So you have just written the perfect blog for your website, excellent! It ticks all the boxes for your desired target audience so what happens next, do you wait for the traffic to come?

Whilst social media continues to divide the SEO industry, social media can have a tremendous impact in extending your social reach and more importantly drive more traffic to your website. It’s completely free to have a business profile on every social media platform, so look to take advantage and spread your brand, your message and your content!

I understanding that social media can become time consuming, it’s usually the lead cause in neglecting social media but there are tools out there such as hootsuite who will organise and schedule your social media activity. The fact that social media is completely free means there are no risks or costs, so have a go and who knows, maybe your content may go viral?

5. Page Loading Speed.

Although you may not have any control over this, the page loading speed actually has numerous factors from both a user and search engine point of view. Let’s say you are a customer, you are searching for ‘Cheshire Web Design Agency’. You are far more likely to get frustrated and abandon your search with a particular website if it takes an age to load right?

Search engines, and in particular Google, have openly started to use website speed as a factor in website search rankings. If you take a look at your website and feel concerned, there are tools such as Google Page Speed Insights that will indicate how fast or slow your pages take to load.

6. Still Not Mobile Friendly

Earlier this year, Google made a worldwide blockbuster announcement which would see search engines reward websites which are ‘Mobile Friendly’. Statistically, more searches are now being done from mobile devices than any other including desktops so the question is why isn’t your website mobile friendly? Along with more searches, mobile users are far more likely to abandon your website if they cannot gain the information they need from your website without ease.

If you are not sure if your website would benefit from being mobile friendly, my best suggestion would be to take a look at your Google Analytics and see what percentage of search traffic is coming from mobile devices? Need a mobile-friendly rebuild? Take a look at Our Promotional Offer!

Call To Action

There are thousands more SEO mistakes that you can find out there. If you would like to discuss the art of SEO driven content and it’s advantages, please do get in touch with the Cheshire web performance experts. We are only a phone call away on 01565 653616 or send us a quick email admin@untitledtm.com

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