I have made plenty of SEO mistakes in my time – in fact, I had no idea what SEO even was when I first started blogging! I started blogging 5 years ago and wrote what I was passionate about – which is not necessarily a bad thing.
You should never start a blog with the intention of making money or getting freebies, but equally, you want it to be a success. Whether that’s hitting a goal of page views or making money.
It’s all a learning curve, and due to this, I made some huge SEO mistakes. I’m sure you have too, but I thought I’d share mine with you in case you’ve missed a few!
Using generic keywords
I had no idea what this meant and so I picked a few words that were ‘key’ to my blog and used them everywhere. The words ‘beauty blog’ were everywhere.
What I should’ve done was some thorough keyword research so that I could find more specific ones that I could have ranked for!
Read: 9 Blogging Mistakes I Have Made
100 Word Posts
Someone, somewhere told bloggers circa 2015 that 7 posts a week, 100-200 words a pop was a great way to build a blog.
That might have worked for some, but now, to really stand out, your content needs to be packed with value.
300 words is a minimum for SEO. However, if you can produce meaningful, useful, searchable content with more words than that, you’re giving your blog its best chance in the Google rankings.
Meta Descriptions
I used to write a post, add an image and just hit publish. Can you imagine!?
I genuinely only discovered what meta descriptions are about a year ago thanks to the Yoast plugin. Since I now put some effort into my meta descriptions, the more traffic I’d see coming in from Google.
Overusing ‘Click Here’
As soon as I learned about interlinking my other pieces of content throughout my blog, I’d write ‘click here’ everywhere.
For example, here, I would have added – Click here to read 5 Ways To Optimise Your Blog Posts For SEO.
Google views this as spammy so you should vary your anchor text as you pepper links throughout your posts.
Instead I would write – These are the SEO mistakes I used to make before I discovered ways to optimise my blog posts.
See what I mean?
Ignoring Google Analytics
I won’t lie, it takes a while to get your head around Google Analytics; how to use it, how to search for something specific and even how to set it up. You’ll be so grateful you figured it out once you do though.
Without checking your analytics, you’re missing out on valuable information.
I couldn’t tell if one social platform was bringing more traffic that another. I couldn’t see if a blog post had completely tanked with poor SEO so I could fix it and I also couldn’t celebrate a post ranking on page 1 of Google until I realised months later it had keywords that were performing brilliantly for me!
Now I check my referrers, my top key words and the quality of my back links often so I can keep on top of what’s serving me traffic and what’s harming my blog.
I also regularly update old posts that used to perform well to bring them more traffic again.
Have you made any of these mistakes? I’d love to know if there are any other mistakes you’ve made. Let me know in the comments below.
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