Lucy - BQ Magazine EditorSearch engine optimisation (SEO) will always be a thorn in the side of many businesses. You’re aware that this is one of the biggest aspects of a digital marketing campaign, yet you’re also guilty of falling into the same SEO trap as everyone else.
What does this trap look like?
You spend massive chunks of your marketing budget on SEO strategies or ideas that don’t work. All the while, you’re missing the main ideas and concepts that will help your business. Why do so many companies fall into this trap? It’s mainly because they take general SEO advice and don’t look at their specific business. What works for one company may not work for yours!
Reflecting on that, let’s examine where businesses often fail with SEO and how you can avoid becoming the next victim.
Mismanaging Keywords
Keyword mismanagement is the largest SEO failure out there, and it comes in two main forms:
- Targeting the wrong keywords
- Keyword stuffing
You target the wrong keywords when you try to incorporate keywords or phrases that don’t relate to your business – or the content on your page. This will generate bad traffic as you appear in the wrong searches. Wrong keywords may also include extremely competitive ones that you have no hope in hell of ranking for. Conduct proper keyword research to ensure you’re targeting relevant keywords that are competitive enough to rank for.
There’s also the issue of only targeting specific words or two-word phrases while ignoring long-tail keywords. Longer phrases are extremely powerful because we’re seeing a rise in voice searches, both now and in 2025. People are searching for things using longer sentences, so you need to target long-tail keywords to appear in voice search results.
As for keyword stuffing, this is the practice of throwing lots of keywords into your content without any of it making sense. Search engines pick up on this and will give your site a black mark – that’s just an expression, by the way. It basically means that you won’t rank well because they notice the keyword stuffing and push you down the ladder.
Overall, you can improve your keyword management by finding the right words/phrases and incorporating them more naturally into your content.
A Lack Of Technical SEO
When you’re introduced to SEO, you typically only focus on some of the more obvious aspects of it – like keywords. Small business owners will become tied up in trying to make content with great keyword usage and then wonder why their website fails to rank.
You could target many killer keywords but still fail because your website lacks technical SEO. Some examples of technical SEO include:
- Website loading speeds
- Mobile-friendliness
- Site structure
- Alt tags
As you can tell, all of these things are hidden aspects of your site that are not immediately obvious to the naked eye. They go on behind the scenes, yet technical SEO is the backbone of every good SEO strategy. Search engines want to direct users to the best sites based on their queries. In their eyes, the “best” site isn’t just one that gives the desired info; it’s a site that’s easy for the user to navigate and use.
Therefore, you need fast loading speeds, a responsive website and a solid site structure. The good thing about this is that most website builders and web designers will handle technical SEO for you. For instance, if you build a website using Wix, it will automatically include a sitemap to improve your website’s crawlability and structure. It’ll also be optimised for mobile devices and designed to load quickly.
Neglecting technical SEO is easy as it’s not something you always see. However, focus on making your website as user-friendly as possible. If people enjoy using your site and don’t find it annoying, then this means it has great technical SEO.
Neglecting Local SEO
When SEO first became a key marketing tactic, all the focus was on one thing. You wanted to rank in search engines when people searched for things online on their computers. The birth of mobile smartphones meant that people had internet access in their pockets, which changed the way they searched for things.
As a consequence, it led to the rise of local SEO, a subsection of SEO dedicated to presenting users with local search results. Local SEO is particularly prevalent in mobile searches, as many users have their location data turned on, which means their searches are based on their physical location. In other words, if someone searches for a service or product on their phone, they often get results from local vendors or businesses.
Local SEO also exists on desktop devices and is largely used when someone wants to find a specific business or product close to them – or in a certain location. Your business won’t appear in any of these local searches if you neglect local SEO! It’s something many small companies don’t recognise, which is especially damaging when your target market is a local audience.
Targeting local SEO is all about knowing which areas and regions to focus on. Local marketing agencies are your best bet here, as they know how to attract the local audience. If your business operates in Exeter or the nearby area, you need to work with a top Exeter SEO agency to focus on location-specific keywords and content. If you’re trying to capture an audience in London, then you need a London SEO company to help, and so on.
A local SEO strategy will help you reel in the right people and thrive in your local market. It often doesn’t matter if you perform badly in general search results as long as your local search presence is amazing!
Not Building Quality Backlinks
The next SEO failure revolves around link building. To be more specific, you’re not building quality backlinks to improve your website’s authority. In fairness, this is a rather advanced piece of SEO knowledge that you won’t know about unless you’ve done extensive research or worked with an agency in the past.
Link building means you get other websites to link to your web pages. This is called a “backlink,” and it tells search engines that your website is trustworthy. From the search engine’s perspective, other websites are only going to link to yours if they deem it a useful information source. This builds what’s known as domain authority – a way of judging which sites are the biggest authority sources for certain topics.
The easy detraction from this is that more links = more authority, though that’s not the case. You need to build quality backlinks from other good sources. If websites with a high domain authority point back to you, then this gives your site a huge boost. So, develop a link-building strategy, but be sure you’re not spamming links or getting poor-quality ones.
Only Optimising One Page
Small business owners will make the mistake of only optimising one page for search engines. You design a website and then focus on the homepage. Everything looks great, but you neglect all the other pages on your site, so their SEO sucks.
Why is this an issue? Because there are only so many keywords your homepage can rank for. You can’t target loads on one page, or you run the risk of keyword stuffing and making horrendous content. Other pages let you target different keywords to cover more bases and be seen in more searches.
Therefore, you need to optimise these pages for search engines as well. Don’t forget about them, or you’ll be solely reliant on generating traffic from your home page. Follow the same principles and processes for each page on your website to get as much traffic as possible from search engines.
Not Staying Updated With The Algorithm
Did you know there’s an algorithm that dictates what makes a website SEO-friendly? Every search engine will have its own one of these, though most business owners and marketers only pay attention to Google’s algorithm.
Why? Because Google holds an over 81% global market share, meaning only 20% of searches are carried out on other search engines. That’s kind of crazy, but it shows there’s no point wasting time and energy on other search engines. Instead, you need to know about the Google algorithm to determine how to make your site more SEO-friendly.
As such, the big error is not staying updated with the algorithm and missing out on key changes. For instance, Google made a huge change a few years ago that emphasised quality content over anything else. It also altered the importance of things like meta descriptions – if we go back even further, you’ll see that link spamming was used to improve SEO, but it quickly got outlawed.
Staying updated with the algorithm helps you spot new ways to improve your site while also ensuring you don’t do things that are no longer viable.
Avoid The SEO Trap And Start Seeing Results
There’s a simple way to stay clear of the SEO trap: avoid making the mistakes listed above! Learn how to manage keywords, improve technical SEO, focus on local SEO, build quality backlinks, optimise all of your web pages and stay updated with the Google algorithm to see genuinely impressive results.
Save this on Pinterest to read later
