December 17, 2019

SEO Mistakes to Stop Making in 2020

With a new year right around the corner, many businesses are feeling empowered to fine-tune their focus on marketing. By having the courage to make some much-needed changes, you may find yourself in an excellent position to succeed in 2020. Conversely, if you’re relying on outdated or ineffective SEO techniques, you could really be holding yourself back.

Of course, you’ll need to address search engine optimization, or SEO, when coming up with a viable strategy. But you’ll want to avoid the following mistakes when executing that strategy in the coming year. Otherwise, you might end up taking a big step backward with your business.

Focusing Only on Onsite SEO

Search engine optimization can be performed both on your own website and in other spaces online. Onsite and offsite SEO essentially work in-tandem to strengthen your authority on the web. In other words, you really do need both. While you certainly do need to optimize your own site, that can’t be the end of your efforts. You’ll also need to look at link building and other offsite techniques to ensure that you have a strong backlink profile and that your domain authority continues to rise. If you don’t, you’ll be missing some major pieces of the ranking puzzle.

Using Outdated SEO Techniques

This should go without saying, but you should no longer be using SEO techniques that are antiquated, ineffective, or essentially outlawed by Google. Some SEO services promise to give their clients desirable results through any means necessary — but if you don’t know that those tactics aren’t on the up-and-up, you might realize too late that you’ve done real damage to your brand online. Make sure that you — and any company you’ve hired to provide digital marketing help — are using the best practices for SEO. Simply put, methods like keyword stuffing, the use of link directories, purchased links, and more should be retired for good.

DIYing Your Online Marketing Strategy

Search engine optimization is ever-evolving — and notoriously complex. While you think it might make fiscal sense to take this task on yourself, this decision may end up costing you more in the long run. If you make a poor SEO choice, you’ll likely need to hire an expert to fix it. And in the meantime, you could lose out on leads and potential customers. At best, you’ll experience a sharp decrease in website traffic; at worst, Google might decide to eliminate your site from search results altogether. And since Google receives over 100 billion searches each month, that could have huge consequences. Essentially, SEO isn’t something you’ll want to figure out through trial and error. It’s much more efficient and cost-effective to hire a firm that’s totally devoted to your SEO success. With your time freed up and your SEO results improved, 2020 could become a huge year for your business.

By avoiding these big mistakes in the coming year, you’ll set yourself up for success. For more information on how we can help take your organization to the next level in 2020, please contact us today.