SEO mistakes to avoid for Higher Rankings in 2020

SEO is predominantly essential for growing your brand in 2020. By using SEO, you can get a better website ranking and visibility in Search Engine Results Page and achieve top rankings and Zero rankings in Google Search. There are multiple things to check while doing SEO, while many people do some mistakes which can impact search results and also get penalized ending up harming your reputation.

Here are some of the mistakes to avoid in 2020 for better SEO results.

Search Intent

You got content, keywords and everything on your web page but if you don’t have any intention behind all these things, all of your efforts may go into useless. Your content and website need to satisfy your visitors with a solution or answer. You may also create an intention to educate your visitors with full and complete information.

For Example, if a user searches for Digital Marketing in Google, the user is looking for what is Digital Marketing. When a user searches for Digital Marketing Services, then it is considered as the user is searching for a Digital Marketing Company or a Digital Marketing Agency. Both the keyword has a different intention. You can’t succeed targeting Digital Marketing Services when the user is looking for what is Digital Marketing? Choose your intention correctly while choosing your Keywords or Longtail Keywords.

Adapt New SEO Techniques

SEO is a dynamic concept, developing and changing mostly on a regular basis. To stay on top of Google Search results, you need to keep yourself updated and apply new SEO techniques. You may end up getting penalized using traditional, old and outdated SEO practices. Old days are gone when I used to rank higher just by doing Keyword Stuffing, Black hat techniques, and others.

Google is smarter than before, you can also get top rankings for those keywords that you have not targeted. As you all know the recent updates from Google like BERT, which helps to understand Google about the content and user queries. You can check my recent article on the latest SEO updates.

Get Updated

As mentioned above, SEO is a dynamic industry and needed to keep you updated with all the latest happenings. Google rolls out updates on a regular basis to increase User Experience. Even if you miss out on a single major update, it may impact your search rankings and lose traffic to your website.

Keep yourself updated with the latest algorithms such as June 2019 Core Update, Bert and more.

Structured data and Featured Snippets

Structured data is imperative to stand out from the crowd and your competitors. Through structured data, your search result may end up featuring on top of first search result called No Search Result or Zero Search Result which is displayed in enhanced information and becomes a go-to choice for the visitors.

Improve your internal search of a website to find information easily. Incorporate and optimize your content and website for your visitors to find what exactly they are looking for. You can use Structured Data on different types of content such as

• Product Reviews
• How to
• What is
• FAQ’s
• Contact Information
• Events
• Books

Conversion Optimization

Generation leads and increase conversions are the ultimate goals for all businesses. Most of the businesses ignore Conversion Optimization and concentrate only on things such as Design, Content, and others.

Provide your customers with all the information which can turn them into potential customers. Load your website with Testimonials, Case Studies, Clientele and more information to drive more leads and conversions. Ease your visitors to make a decision on opting for your services or products. Ignoring conversion optimization may lead you losing business, customers, and revenue.

Anchor Texts

Use Anchor Text or Anchor Tags to navigate your visitors with relevant pages. This practice works for multiple things like Link Building, improving your Bounce Rate and Domain Authority. You can also use anchors that relate the information with other pages and blog articles.

Anchor tags help in improving your brand recognition and lead to higher rankings and results. Studies show that the more branded anchor texts the more are their rankings observed.

Podcasts are the new trend

You may have heard, images and videos are the future. And it’s true, videos are the easiest way to learn and people often choose videos other than any format which results in YouTube’s popularity.  Even Videos lists on Google SERPs, as Google knows that videos are the future and people prefer videos than text.

Videos take less time to rank and visible on Google than text. Videos are more Engageable and shareable content and are easy to understand and flexible to access through many video portals.

Podcasts are the new trend and Google started adding in SERPs. These two content types are growing and are less competitive to focus on and are easy to produce than text content.

Focus on branding

Google loves brands. SEO becomes a Brand Centric. Now, SEO is not just about getting or driving traffic. If you want to win the game, you need to make your business trustworthy and profitable by increasing brand awareness through rankings, paid ads, and social media.

You need to increase your brand search on Google. Brand awareness increase Brand Search and Google will automatically start ranking your business on top which is an evergreen strategy to grow your business.

Mobile Ready

Make sure that your website is compatible and responsive to all the devices, browsers and platforms. More or less to 50% of traffic is coming from mobiles and other devices. If your website is not responsive, Google automatically considers your website as incompatible for search and will lead to lower ranking or penalize your site.

Prefer people over search engines

Write your content and plan your strategies for the real users but not for the Search Engines. Ultimately, you need real customers to generate profit and sales to run your business. Where Google shows the business having good intent, content, and trust to acquire more users to use Google and its products.

Focusing on your visitors and customers is the ultimate strategy to drive more traffic, to generate more sales and profits. Google too loves businesses that focus on their customers rather than Google search.