SEO is the fickle mistress of online marketers because she changes her mind all the time and we have to cower in fear and hope we don't get penalized.
But there are a few things that you may be doing that are actually hurting your rankings, and they are as follows.
- Slow Websites - Most people expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less. This is because we're all impatient and use to big billion dollar companies running super servers which load in a fraction of a second. Waiting longer than 3 seconds is never good for your website. Not only are slower websites knocked in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) but they have a 7% reduction in conversions compared to faster websites. Just think of it this way, if users don't like a slow website they most likely Google doesn't either. You can speed up your website by optimizing your code, images and putting your website on a bigger hosting plan or server.
- Keyword Cannibalization (on page) - This happens when you have multiple pages trying to rank for the exact same keywords. Google will see you have multiple pages with the same keywords and they will have to pick one they want to put in the SERPs. Hell, they may not pick any and you're down 2+ pages because you are cannibalizing your own keywords lol.
- Keyword cannibalization (internal linking) - This is where you use the anchor text that is for one topic you want to rank for and link it to a page which is similar, but not quite. An example of this would be if you used an anchor text that was "Stunt Drivers" and link it to one of your pages that is for "Stunt Driving Classes". It's not quite the same because one is about the drivers and one is about safety, see? A lot of people are doing this and it's an easy way to lose a little bit of your rankings.
- Broken outbound links - This is when you link to a page on a website that is not yours and it eventually is deleted. Your outbound link now goes to a URL that has been deleted and now you see a 404 page or get redirected to the homepage. These kinds of links happen a lot when you're linking to blog posts on a random website. It's due to the blogger or website owner deleting the page, or website entirely, and now you're linking to something that does not exist
- The dreaded duplicate content - I've seen a lot of ecommerce websites get hit with duplicate content penalties because they will be a reseller of a product and they'll just copy the titles and descriptions from a different website and paste it onto theirs. It's not difficult to write your own titles along with a brief descriptions. You can target the same keywords, just make it unique
Does anyone else have anything they can add?
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Thanks,
Razzy
chetaseo
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