Three commonly overlooked things businesses do that hurt their rankings

For many business owners, search engine optimization (SEO) is a proverbial Rubik's cube - a complex puzzle that can be solved in a variety of ways, but that few completely understand. With digital marketing becoming more and more essential to business performance as time goes on, entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly familiar with SEO and the impact it can have on conversion rates.

In fact, 17 percent of small businesses now invest in SEO.

The total spent on search engine optimization by U.S. businesses increased by 4 percent from 2017 to 2018.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation out there about SEO techniques, and it can be difficult for business owners to sift through the noise to find the most accurate and beneficial information. As a result of this, business owners often make SEO mistakes that work against their overall marketing strategy without even realizing it. That's why we decided to cover some of these mistakes in an effort to help business owners fine-tune their digital marketing.

Here are Three Little Known Mistakes That May Be Hindering Your SEO 

1. Forgetting to use anchor text. Have you ever thought about the text that you are linking in your blog post or website copy? Too often, businesses post content where the link text is “click here”, “this article”, or even worse, just “here”.  Sure, linking these generic terms gets the job done in the sense that it allows your reader to click through to an additional resource, but they don’t do anything for your company’s SEO strategy. Using descriptive anchor text that contains SEO keywords will actually help your site rank higher on Google. So, the next time you’re placing a link in your web copy, try to follow these anchor text best practices. 
2. Overlooking duplicate content. Does your website contain similar or identical content in multiple locations? If so, Google may not be rewarding your site as favourably as you’d like.  In order to improve SEO rankings, you want to ensure that your content is as unique as possible and that it adds value rather than simply acting as filler. This is because Google favours content that is unique to you. If it notices that content very similar to yours also appears on higher-ranking sites with more authority, its algorithm may assume that you took your content from other sources, even if it has been tweaked. Additionally, if your website contains any content that is directly copied from an identifiable source, Google will likely ignore your content completely. And while this doesn’t outright damage your rankings, it certainly doesn’t help them. If you want to avoid SEO mistakes that are often associated with duplicate content, we recommend checking out these seven SEO tools that can help.
3. Not submitting your sitemap. On the list of important SEO techniques, submitting your sitemap to Google should be a top priority. This is because Google uses your sitemap to quickly and accurately find all of the content on your site. Without it, Google doesn’t know which of your website pages are most important, and they all fall under the same category. With a sitemap, however, Google has a better idea of how to rank and categorize the various pages of your site. To maximize the benefits of your sitemap, it is recommended that you include a description of each web page, along with a direct link to the page, and any relevant keywords you want that page to be recognized for. This will help you improve SEO rankings since Google will take this information into account when indexing your site.

As a leading SEO company in Edmonton, our team of SEO specialists can help you avoid these mistakes and implement dynamic SEO strategies that benefit your business. We encourage you to check out our SEO services page to learn more about our process and how we can help you rank higher on Google.