7 Fatal SEO Mistakes Your Small Business is Making

Small business owners often don’t want to pay for the professional SEO services. Their SEO is done by company employees or geek friends of the company owner. This leads to numerous mistakes that can influence companies’ business in a great way. Here you can read some of the common mistakes, when doing an SEO on small business web sites.

Not Using Analytics:

Following websites performance is one of the most important thing for future planning in the digital sphere. Information that can be obtained through Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools are crucial for valuing pages on your company’s website and even planning future marketing tactics for the products or services your company offers.

Bad Anchor Text:

The Anchor text is very important, although many websites often use call to action phrases like “click here”. Some pages even have the same anchor text for every link, this is wrong in so many ways. Call for action was fine, a decade ago, but now when there are so many overly commercialized pages with suggestive headlines, that include a call to action, “check this out!” and “click here” are some of the worse anchor text phrases you can use.

Name of the page from the link or the valuable information that the reader will acquire by clicking on the anchor text is good enough to satisfy all SEO criteria.

Not Optimizing Google Places Listings:

Location, location, location… Small business websites often don’t use any of the Google services that can be very helpful in finding new customers. Around 20% of all searches on Google are local, and the data comes from the new Google Places application. Listing your company on Google Places will help customers to find you and this is not the only information search engines use, it is also monitoring other local business listings like Yelp or CitySearchs.

Title Tags and Meta Description Mistakes:

A website with a good SEO needs to have well written title tags. The title tag is part of meta tags that are placed in the beginning of an HTML document. Each page needs to have a unique title tag, which should fully describe the information that can be acquired from it. Small business web sites tend to have the same title tag (often the name of the company) on all website pages, which is a big SEO mistake that can lower your search engine rating.

Meta description is another very important meta element of each page. This description can be read under the page title, when viewing search engine results. It should be descriptive, accurate and fresh.

Building Website in Flash:

Although SEO for flash websites is more efficient than ever, they are much harder and more expensive to optimize. These formats are very popular among small business owners, and SEO companies will probably ask for more money to optimize these types of websites. Although it looks good, this is definitely not the right format for promoting your business.

Building Website on Sub-Domain:

Companies that don’t have good-looking, informative and functional websites are not considered serious today. Opening a website on a sub-domain and trying to save money that way is another big no-no. This allows someone else to buy the domain name similar to the one your company should naturally acquire. Since same industry comes with the similar specter of company names, this can easily be your direct competitors on the market.

So are you ready to lose customers, for saving a few dollars on the domain name? Of course not! In addition to this if you ever try to move your website to paid domain, you should have in mind that most of the sub-domain providers don’t allow 301 redirect, so you will need to build a full website one more time. In addition to quality websites, each company needs to have their social media pages and accounts and to build a good social media strategy, which is going to attract more customers and website visitors.

Low Quality Content:

This is the biggest mistake one small business website administrator can make. Quality content is the number one criteria for creating big audience and search engine ranking. Content marketing has been one of the fastest growing and the most efficient tactics for increasing number of viewers and this happened due to several large Google search updates including: Penguin, Hummingbird and Panda.

Small business websites should have a good content strategy that will include competitor, keyword and market research. Both quantity and quality of website content are important, but when it comes to readers quality content is much more valuable and is the thing each website administrator needs to focus on. Page with quality content builds link by itself and creates the hype that will place your website on the first pages of search results.