5 Beginner SEO Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Website Traffic And What You Should Do Instead

– No matter how good you are at marketing, you're not gonna get traffic from Google unless you stop doing this.

Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm gonnashare five SEO mistakes that are gonna kill your traffic.

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That way, as I releasemore videos like this, you'll get notified.

Quick question for you.

How much traffic are you getting per month from Google? Leave a comment below with the number.

Because you know what, after you stop making thesefive deadly SEO mistakes, that number is gonna increase.

The first mistake isputting dates in your URL.

I used to do this with neilpatel.

com.

What a huge mistake.

My URL structure used to be neilpatel.

com, slash year, slash month, slash title of my blog post.

The moment I took offthe dates from my URL, guess what happened to my search traffic? Well, within 30 days, it went up by 58%.

And I'm not talking about, I took my search higher from a 1000 visitors to a 1580 visitors.

I'm talking about, I hadhundreds and thousands of visitors from Google already each month with dates in my URL.

But the moment I removed 'em, I saw additional 58% increasein my search traffic.

So, whatever URL structure you have, just make sure it does not have dates.

Reason being is, when youhave a date in your URL Google thinks of your site asbeing relevant to that date.

So, you write a blogpost, they're like oh, this blog post must be on, related to January 12th, 2025 or whatever the date is today.

So, if you want yourcontent to continually rank, you know that evergreen content, you can't be putting dates in your URL.

The second mistake that you'remaking is you're thinking of your site as a silo.

It doesn't matter how manydifferent sections you have or categories, it's still one site.

It's on one domain name.

For example, my blog is about marketing.

So, when I create content, I link to all the other marketing posts that are relevant to thepost that I just released.

And you should considerthinking of your website as one big site, versus different silos.

So when you write content, link to other pieces of content that are relevant.

That way, all of your pagesare gonna be interconnected and they're gonna rank higher.

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 not even just aboutgetting social shares.

It's about building a brand.

Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEOof Google once said that brands are the solution.

What he's talking about is, when you're trying to figure out what sites to rank higher than others, he decided, as well as a tonof other people in Google, that if you have a brand, you should rank higher.

Why is that? Well you've heard of thisthing called fake news.

It's a great way to combat that.

It's not just Facebook, who'sconcerned about fake news.

It's also Google, it's also Linkedin.

It's also Twitter.

It's all of the major platforms out there.

So, building a brand does wonders for you especially when it comes to SEO.

You can do things like collecting emails to get people to keepcoming back to your site.

You can use tools like HelloBar to do that for free.

You can use tools like subscribers.

com to do push notifications.

So when people come to yourwebsite within one click, they can subscribe.

Getting all those peopleto keep coming back, it'll help reinforce your brand to them.

That'll help you climb inthe rankings in the long run.

The fourth mistake isjust writing content.

I know you're thinking, oh Neil, content's king.

How's that a mistake? No, writing content isn't the mistake.

It's writing content andthen not updating it, and that's what most people do.

They just write content, andthey write more new content.

Then after that, theywrite more new content, and guess what they do after that? They write more new content.

So, if you update your content, Google's gonna be like, oh wow, it's fresh.

It's hip, it's new, it's still relevant.

Let's rank it higher.

With over a billion blogs out there, Google likes pickingbrand new, updated content versus old, outdated content.

This doesn't mean you haveto rewrite the whole article.

It could just be a paragraphor two, a few lines.

It could just be reviewing the article, making sure it's still up-to-date, and you make no modifications, because it's still good to go.

And the last mistake you're making, you're not thinking about the user.

Google looks at somethingcalled user metrics.

Whether it's the browser, whether it's the toolbar, Google wants to make sure peoplehave an amazing experience.

They're using all those platforms to track how when people come to your website, how they perceive it.

And they can't talk to'em by surveying 'em or anything like that, but what they can see is, hey did someone performas a Google search, click on the listing, land on your site, and within a second, are theyclicking the Back button? 'Cause if they are, it tells Google, your website, that webpage isn't relevant.

So, by putting the user first, instead of putting SEO first, it'll help you climb to the top.

Now, if you're struggling with your site and not getting the searchtraffic that you deserve, check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital, and if you like this video, please leave a comment below.

Tell other people about it.

Subscribe to the channel, and of course, like the video itself.

Thank you for watching, and I look forward to helping you out later this week.

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