Businesses big and small all around the world make search engine optimisation mistakes on a daily basis that lead to lower traffic and less sales for their businesses. Most of these mistakes are easily avoidable and easily fixed once they are noticed. Here are 3 of the most common SEO mistakes made by Cork businesses and how to fix them.
1: Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is an issue that constantly arises across the internet. One of the main problems with duplicate or similar content is that Google may filter out one or more of the pages if they show up for similar search queries. This can be frustrating, especially when it filters out the more relevant page. To combat this, you should avoid creating duplicate content, updating old content is always a strong option. Alternatively, you can use the rel=canonical attribute to inform Google of which duplicate page should be ranked.
2: Image Issues
Issues with the images on your website can have a detrimental effect on user experience and your rankings in SERP’s and they are some of the most common SEO errors made by Cork businesses. There are many great free SEO tools out there that allow you to crawl your website for image issues. Using one of them, check your website for any image issues such as missing alt text or completely broken images. Go through the list of errors and start correcting them by adding alt text to describe the image where it is missing and by replacing broken images. Hosting images within your own media library rather than in that of a third party is the best way to avoid broken images altogether.
3: Not Adding Content
Once upon a time if you built a website well you had a chance of ranking highly even if you left it alone. That’s no longer the case, another common SEO mistake is not regularly adding content to your website. This can take many shapes such as a blog or industry news section. Google now uses content freshness as a ranking factor, so creating relevant new content for your website regularly can be a huge benefit to your SEO effort.
If you run a business in Cork, avoid duplicate content, fix any issues with your images and regularly update your website with new content. Avoid these common SEO mistakes and start ranking higher on search engines.