Implementing a stellar SEO strategy takes time and a lot of hard work. Ensuring that your site continues to see improvements in its ranking within search engines is an ongoing task.
So, after all that hard work, it would be a real shame if there was anything that was having a negative effect on your rankings within Google, Bing and Yahoo, wouldn’t it?
We’ve put together a helpful list of the 6 BIG SEO mistakes that many kitchen and bathroom retailers make, and how you can avoid them for an SEO strategy that will grow your business. Not only will we tell you what these mistakes are, but we’ll provide a solution, too…
#1: Fast Is Always Best
The first thing to cover, and potentially the most important, is the speed of your site. We’ve all been on websites that are slow to load, and the truth is that we don’t stay on them for long. The faster your site, the more search engines will rank it. You can use a tool from Google to check your site speed called ‘Google PageSpeed Insights’. This gives you the insights to know what parts of your site need the most speed improvements.
Something that we often tell our clients here at Flo is that optimising your images is a great way to get around this. A lot of websites have images that are too large and they take a long time to load. Taking a minute to resize some images can increase the site speed no-end. If you are working in WordPress, you can easily do this by installing one of their handy plugins that resize images for you.
Another great strategy is to turn on ‘browser caching’ and ‘gzip’ compression. Fairly technical, but both of these will speed up the site. Browser caching works for returning visitors, making your site faster to load for people who are coming back after a previous visit. Gzip compresses files, which then makes them faster to load.
Another tip is to look at the plugins on your site. Do you really use all of those plugins that are whirring away in the background? The simple rule is that the more plugins you have, the slower your site is going to be. So if you can offload a few, go for it.
#2: Ranking For The Wrong Keywords Won’t Help…
If you want to rank highly with the big search engines, you need to check you’re using the right keywords for every page. One big mistake we often see kitchen and bathroom retailers make is that they are optimising for keywords that are too generic. If you are a smaller kitchen retailer trying to rank for ‘kitchen design’, you’re aiming too high. Try to think of something more detailed and specific. At the very least, ‘kitchen design Crawley’ would be a better alternative, meaning you rank for traffic searching in your area.
Using a more specific and longer keyword is better according to Google – the chances of ranking for this keyword become higher. Being more specific does mean that your search volume begins to dip significantly, but that’s okay, as national traffic is of no use to you, anyway.
#3: Not Using Metadata in the right way
Metadata sounds like a technical term, but all it means is the text that shows on search engine result pages, like the ones you see in Google when you search for something. When you carry out a search, you’ll find the title of the page and its ‘meta’ description beneath it. One of the most important ranking factors is the page title, so make sure to optimise it for the keyword that the page is targeting by including that keyword somewhere in the title. Just a quick word of warning, though: If your page title is too long, it will get cut off in Google. Aim for a title between 50-60 characters.
The meta description isn’t a ranking factor per se, but a well-written meta description is going to encourage more people to click through to your site.
#4: Writing Informative, Entertaining and Valuable Content
It feels like every marketer is always banging on about ‘content’, but from a marketer’s point of view, it feels like the world just isn’t listening!
We frequently see sites where the blog has been neglected, and even if it is being used regularly, the content on the page just isn’t providing value to the target audience. It’s of paramount importance that every page of your site has a good amount of content and no less than 300 words. Google won’t view you as an expert on a certain topic if you have only written two sentences about it.
But that said, Google itself isn’t your audience. You write for the people that are your prospects, not Google. Google’s mission is to organise information and provide the answers. Therefore, writing quality, valuable content is something that will lead to Google’s approval.
Quality content means original content. One reason for this is to avoid duplication of content with other sites, which is prohibited by Google and will quickly get you in their bad books.
#5: Get Them To Leave Their Details
Once you have done the hard work and got people to visit your site, it’s important to keep them on there. If your visitors are heading straight back to the search engine which they came from, your bounce rate will increase and that’s not good for SEO. You need to encourage visitors to click around your site. One way to do this is to put buttons with instructions on, such as ‘View Gallery’, or ‘Book a Design Appointment’.
Each page should have a call to action. In some scenarios, you should add a form so that people can leave their details. One button or form per page is optimal – asking your browsers to do too much is confusing, and confusion leads to taking a step back from your website.
#6: Mobile First…
Google recently switched its algorithm to index mobile devices before desktop computers. This means that Google is looking at your mobile site to decide how you should rank. So, if you have neglected your mobile site, you might want to jump on your phone to see what the user experience is like!
Google has its own mobile-friendly test (which you can find here), which will give you some insights and a breakdown into your mobile site, and check whether it’s fit for displaying on mobile devices. The best thing to do in this instance is to spend a few hours looking at your site on a mobile device – a normal smartphone and tablet should cover most bases – and check if you can browse around like you would want to. It’s often good to get a third party to do this, as they will be able to think like a customer and pick up on things you may not have noticed.
Hopefully that’s helped you spot a few mistakes you may be making when running content and SEO campaigns for your business. If we can help with anything or you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to give us a call.