1) Your business doesn’t have a website.

This may seem strange to some of you, but a survey by Yodle in 2013 showed that 52% of local businesses still DO NOT have a website and instead just use directories and social media to market their business.  Yet nowadays, creating a basic website is not difficult, especially if you use a software tool such as wordpress.
There are some fabulous wordpress tutorials, themes & templates available to get you started. Fo rmore help in this area, check out my article: ‘Learn How To Build Your Own Business Website Using WordPress‘

2) Your website isn’t crawlable.

What do I mean by this? Google has an automated process to ‘crawl’ your website content to gain an understanding as to what it is all about. If your site cannot be crawled, it cannot be indexed and will NOT appear in any google search results.

Google has a valuable resource called ‘Webmaster Tools’ which you can access as long as you have either a gmail account, OR an email address linked to google (e.g for Youtube, Google+ etc). To sign up, simply visit http://www.google.com/webmasters

Once you have followed the instructions to add your website, amongst other things you can:

  • Check crawl stats
  • Submit & check a website sitemap
  • List broken links
  • List internal & external pages that link to the site
  • See keyword data

3) Your website page content doesn’t include the right words.

Don’t try & be clever!

The key here is to create quality, compelling content, using the words your visitors would use. Put yourself in your customers shoes – what words would they type into a search engine to lead them to your products? Brainstorm it, do some research by typing phrases into the search engine yourself & see if any of them ‘auto-complete’ as you type. Then, build these words ‘naturally’ into your webpage text.

Take care though not to over do it – repeating the same words over & over can damage your search engine rankings.

4) Important content cannot be read.

Say you are a restaurant and you have uploaded your menu to your website as a PDF which is accessed via a clickable link. The text contained within that PDF cannot be read by the search engines. Consider adding a separate page with the proper text and then give the visitor the option to download the information as a PDF as well.

5) None existent or poorly defined Home Page Meta Title & Description.

Please refer to my separate Meta Title article which explains this in more detail. Consider implementing this on all of the ‘important pages’ on your website.

6) Your page / post URL’s just contain numbers

As part of your website set up you can dictate how your page and post URLs are structured. These are known as ‘permalinks’.  If you don’t change them, typically the standard format will be your domain name followed by a series of numbers (which will be the post or page number), which tells the search engines nothing about the content of the post.
Changing this structure to incorporate the post title (known as post name) enables you to include keywords within the URL.  For example, the URL of this post is: https://profitmastersltd.com/basic-seo-mistakes-to-avoid-to-improve-your-business-search-rankings/

7) You don’t give your reader anything else to do

If a visitor arrives on your website, reads the content of the page they land on (which doesn’t necessarily have to be the homepage) and then clicks away from your website, this will be recorded as a ‘bounce’ within your analytics.  If you have a high bounce rate, the search engines will deduce that your website content is poor and your search engine rankings will suffer.  So make sure you give your readers direction.

Make use of things like ‘next / previous’ post or include links within your posts etc. Give them a reason to carry on browsing around your site.

To learn more about how Profit Masters Ltd can help you improve your search engine rankings and grow your business, get in touch via our contact form, or click here to sign up to receive regular advice and tips by email (beginning with our bonus eBook – 27 Powerful Marketing Strategies and Tactics).