– Entrepreneurs aregreat at solving problems and giving life to ideas.
But when it comes toSEO, I've seen them make some of the biggest mistakesthat cost them hundreds, even if not, thousands of dollars and sometimes even millions of dollars.
Heck! Some of these guys havegone on to create businesses that are succeeded and are big brands and they still continuallymake these mistakes.
Everyone, I'm Neil Patel, andtoday I'm going to breakdown the five dumbest mistakesentrepreneurs make with their SEO.
(calm pulsating music) Before we start, make sureyou subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the Alert Notification.
So lets dive right intothe five biggest mistakes.
Mistake number one.
Optimizing for the wrong keywords and trying to rank previouslycompetitive keywords early on.
This is a mistake that a lotof new businesses make early on and its an issue that couldbe avoided really easily.
Because, here's the thing.
If a keyword is super competitive, then chances are you'renot going to rank for it.
Or if a keyword won't convert well, ranking for it isn't goingto drive you any sales.
And its not hard to solve this problem.
All you have to do is go to Ubersuggest.
Type in your competitor URL.
Click on Top Pages, it willshow you all their top pages and then I want you to click on view all under estimated visits.
This will show you all thekeywords that your competition is going after.
These keywords are morelikely to convert into sales than just picking random keywords.
The next thing I want youto do is go to Ubersuggest once you have a list of keywords.
Type them in and it willgive you all these ideas and other comparison words, prepositions and other ideas that you can go after.
But, here's the thing.
When your doing this, you can't just go afterany random keyword.
You need to look forkeywords that have a high CPC because if someone has a, is paying a lot of money to advertise on it, youcan bet that it converts highly into sales.
The other thing you needto look for is a low SD.
A low SD stands for SEO difficulty.
So the lower the numberssuch a 40's, 30's, or 20's is great.
The moment you get above 50 for e-site just going to be harder to write.
Look for those twothings, plus high volume.
So the higher the volume, the higher the CPC and the lower the SD or SEO difficulty, the better that keyword is.
Those are the ones you want to go after.
And when you do that, you'remore likely to get some sales.
The second biggest mistakethat I see people making is their not using analytics or running regular website audits.
This is one of the big mistake that companies make all the time.
Because if you don'thave analytics set up, and I'm not just talkingabout you're visits.
Do you have goal tracking set in place? Conversion tracking? Do you know what pages, whatcontent is driving the sales? Do you know what visitors are? Hey, a visitor from Californiamay not be worth the same as a visitor from New Yorkor Texas or any other region.
Look, many people act onadvice that they get online.
And, hey, when you do that, that's fine.
But if that advice isn'tconverting into revenue, who cares? So when you're getting all this SEO advice that people are giving youand you're implementing but its not converting intorevenue, stop doing that.
What you need to do islook at the core metrics that are driving yoursales and focus on them.
And, in addition to that, you need to be running regular site audits.
And you can also do thiswithin the site audit report within Ubersuggest for free.
It will tell you what'swrong and as you fix them, you should notice moreconversions and sales within your analytics.
The third big mistake.
Overlooking page titlesand meta descriptions.
Look, if one site ranksnumber one one Google and another site ranks number two but everyone's starts clickingthe number two listing what do you think that tells Google? Hey, the number twolisting is more relevant than the number one listing.
It doesn't matter if thenumber one has more backlinks or a better on page SEO.
They're look at user metrics.
So think about copy.
Persuasive copy.
Start looking at the paid ads.
Typically, the people at thetop aren't just paying the most but they're getting a lot of clicks because that helps Googlemake a lot more money and that will help you do well.
Now with your meta descriptions, try to keep them around 160 characters.
If they're too long, what you'll find is they won't get cut off.
Try to be punchy.
Have the keywords in the titletags, the meta description closer to the beginning.
That should help you get more clicks.
The fourth big mistake.
Not using anchor tags properly.
If you're going after akeyword like online marketing all your anchor tagsshouldn't say online marketing when other sites link to you.
And even when you're doing internal links, all your anchor tags shouldn'tsay online marketing.
It needs to be natural.
Sometimes I'm writing ablog post and I'm linking to my posts on SEO and I'll say, Hey, if you want to rank higher in Google, follow these tips.
You'll notice that I didn'tuse the word SEO right there.
And sometimes, when Iam talking about SEO, I'm linking to my SEO article, I'll say, Hey, you need to check out these SEO tips.
And I'll link the wordSEO tips to that article.
In other words, I'm rotating it up.
I'm having a lot of random keywords.
Some are brand oriented, some are random, some are related to the article.
And by doing this, its natural.
I'm not doing this because I'mtrying to manipulate Google.
I'm trying to do this because I'm doing what's best for the user and I want it to flow naturallyas if someone's reading it versus just stuffing in a keyword.
And when you do that, you'llfind that you'll rank higher versus, if all your linkssay the same anchor tag, Google's going to know thatyou're trying to manipulate them and that's an easy way to seeyour ranking start climbing and then you'll noticeall of the sudden, boom.
They start dipping and theykeep dipping more and more because your anchor tag's just too rich.
The fifth mistake.
Building content for algorithmsand not your audience.
Look, at the end of the day, Google has algorithm updates like EAT.
Right, which is all aboutauthority, expertise, trust.
And they have algorithms like BERT, which are optimizing fornatural language processing.
In other words, they do notwant you to create content for just their BA.
They are trying to adopt their algorithm to optimize for what humans want.
So think big picture.
Don't be really closed minded, be like Hey my competition's really spammy and they are creatingcontent just for Google and keyword somethingso I'm going to do that.
Its not about your word count.
Its not about stuffingkeywords in your article.
Its about doing what's best for a user.
And if you write contentfor them, in the long run, you'll do really well.
And what I see people doing is like, oh, I'm going to writesome content for Google and some content just for people.
No! Write content for people first, even if Google doesn't like it.
And then try to optimize that article for search engines as well.
Make sure you do have theright keywords in there.
It flows well, you havethe right internal linking.
Good on page SEO.
But if that means thatarticle's not that optimized because you wrote it for peopleinstead of search engines, that's okay.
In the long run, that willhelp you rank the highest and beat your competition.
Now if you need more adviceto climb higher in Google and improve your rankings, check out my ad agency Neil Patel Digital.
Of course, if you enjoyedthe video, like it, share it, subscribe to the channel andtell other people about it.
Thank you for watching.
.