Today we will share five SEO mistakes that will kill your traffic.
You know what, after you stop making five deadly SEO mistakes, this number will increase.
The first mistake is putting dates in your URL
What a big mistake. The URL structure used to be slash year, slash month, slash blog post title. Guess what happened to our search traffic?
Well, in 30 days, it increased by 58%. And we’re not talking about that; we increased our search from 1000 visitors to 1580 visitors. I’m talking about, and I already had hundreds and thousands of visitors from Google with data every month.
We saw an additional 58% increase in our search traffic. So, whatever URL structure you have, make sure it doesn’t have data in it. The factor for this is that if you have a date in your URL, Google assumes that your website is relevant to that date.
So if you write a blog post, Google thinks that the blog post must be related to April 17, 2025, or today’s date. So if you want your web content to rank continuously, evergreen content, you can’t use dates in your URL.
The second mistake that you’re making is you’re thinking of your site as a silo
It doesn’t matter how many different domains or categories you have, and it’s still one site.
It’s on a single domain name. For example, my blog is about marketing. So when I create content, I link to all the other marketing posts relevant to the post I just published. And you should think of your website as one big website, rather than different silos.
So when you write content, link to other relevant content.
That way, all your pages will be connected, and they will rank better.
The third mistake that you’re making, you’re thinking of SEO as just SEO
It’s not just about on-page code. It’s not just about building links. It’s also not just about getting social shares.
It’s about developing a brand. Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, when stated that brands are the solution. When attempting to identify which sites to rank higher than others, he decided, as did many other people at Google, that you should rank higher if you have a brand.
Why is that? Well, you’ve heard of this thing called Fake News. That’s a great way to combat that. It’s not just Facebook that’s worried about Fake News. It’s also Google. It’s also Linkedin. It’s Twitter, too. It’s all the big platforms out there.
So building a brand does wonders for you, particularly when it comes to SEO. You can do things like accumulating emails to get people to keep coming back to your website. You can utilize tools like Hello Bar to do that for free.
You can use tools like subscribers.com to send push notifications. So when people come to your website with one click, they can subscribe. If you can get all those people to keep coming back, it will help build your brand with them. That will help you move up in the rankings in the long run.
The fourth mistake is just writing content
I know you think content is king. How is that a mistake? No, writing content is not a mistake. It’s writing content and then not upgrading it, and that’s what most people do.
They write content, and they write more new content. Then they write more new content, and guess what they do after that? They write even more new content.
So when you update your content, Google will say, “Oh, wow, that’s fresh. It’s hip, and it’s new; it’s still relevant. Let it rank higher. With over a billion blog sites around, Google likes to choose brand new, updated content over old, outdated content.
That doesn’t mean you have to rewrite the entire article. It could be just a paragraph or two or a few lines. It could just be a review of the article to make sure it’s still current, and you don’t make any changes because it’s still okay.
The fifth mistake you’re making, you’re not thinking about the user
Google looks at something called user metrics. Whether it’s the web browser, whether it’s the toolbar, Google wants to make sure people have a great experience.
They use all these platforms to track how people are coming to your site and how they perceive it. And they can’t talk to them by interviewing them or anything like that, but what they can see is, hey, did somebody do a Google search, click on the listing, landed on your website, and within a second, did they click the back button? Because if they do, that tells Google that your website is not relevant.
So if you put the user first instead of putting SEO first, it will help you get to the top.
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