March 4, 2025 • 20 mins
Are you putting in the effort to create great content, optimize your website, and attract more visitors—only to see little to no growth in your traffic? You might be making some common SEO mistakes that are holding your website back.
SEO isn’t just about stuffing keywords into your content and hoping for the best. It’s about strategy, consistency, and avoiding the pitfalls that could be pushing your site down in search rankings.
In today’s episode, I’m uncovering the 5 most common SEO mistakes that could be killing your website traffic. Plus, I’ll walk you through how to fix them so you can start climbing the rankings and getting the visitors (and conversions) you deserve!
Mentioned Resources:
Mastering SEO
-> EP 024: Breaking Down SEO
-> Ep 033: Unlocking the Potential of Keyword Research to Skyrocket Your E-Commerce Success
-> EP 067: SEO for Long-Term Online Business Success
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Carrie Saunders (00:01):
Are you putting in the effort to create great
content, optimize your websiteand attract more visitors, only
to see little to no growth inyour traffic?
You might be making some commonSEO mistakes that are holding
your website back that arepretty easy to fix.
Seo, or search engineoptimization, isn't just about
stuffing keywords into yourcontent and hoping for the best.
(00:22):
It's about strategy andconsistency and avoiding the
pitfalls that could be pushingyour site and hoping for the
best.
It's about strategy andconsistency and avoiding the
pitfalls that could be pushingyour site down in search engine
rankings.
In today's episode, I'mcovering the five most common
SEO mistakes that could bekilling your website traffic.
Plus, I'll walk you through howto fix them so that you can
start climbing the rankings andgetting the visitors and
conversions you deserve.
(00:50):
Welcome to the e-commerce madeeasy podcast.
I'm your host, k Saunders.
When we started this business,all I had was a couch, a laptop
and a nine month old.
My main goal to help others.
Now, with over 20 years in thee-commerce building industry and
even more than that in webdevelopment, I have seen a lot.
I love breaking down the hardtech and to easily
understandable bits to helpothers be successful in their
online business.
Whether you're a seasonede-commerce veteran or just
(01:10):
starting out, you've come to theright place, so sit back, relax
and let's dive into the worldof e-commerce together.
Welcome back to the show.
Today we're talking about thefive most common SEO mistakes
you may be making on yourwebsite and how to fix them.
So the first one is ignoringtechnical SEO.
Now, that might sound a littletechie, but it's actually not
(01:32):
too bad, and we have quite a fewpodcast episodes that can help
you through these differentthings I'm going to talk about
in this section.
So the main issue here is thatbusiness owners focus on their
content and don't worry aboutthe technical SEO part, which is
simply things like low sitespeed, broken links, poor mobile
optimization and missing alttext.
(01:54):
Those all can dramaticallyimpact your rankings.
And we have some other podcastepisodes around many of these
topics and we will link to thosein the show notes around many
of these topics and we will linkto those in the show notes.
But monitoring and making surethat your website speed is fast
is actually a pretty easy task.
Sometimes fixing it is a littlebit harder.
Sometimes it's not that hardand we actually have a free
(02:15):
download on how to make sureyour images are appropriate size
for the web too, for mobileoptimization.
That's something very easy foryou to test With many new modern
software out there.
It's a bit easier to fix too,if your software has the ability
for you to adjust that prettywell.
Otherwise, you can simply get adeveloper to help you with your
mobile look and feel.
(02:37):
But we want to make sure it'ssuper important, because Google
will penalize you if your siteis not mobile optimized.
So you can check your speedwith Google PageSpeed Insights.
It gives a great perspective ofwhat Google perceives your
website as to being, as far ashow fast it goes, and you can
use that to make improvements.
And we want to make sure thatyour website is mobile friendly
(02:59):
and responsive, so it works onmany different types of devices.
And we want to fix broken links.
So we want to make sure thatthere aren't links that are
broken, and you can realize agood bit of this.
And if you connect to Googlesearch console and this is an
area of Google that I find mostbusiness owners neglect to look
(03:21):
at and it's really a lot less,honestly, overwhelming than
Google Analytics Look at.
There's a lot less options inthere and it's pretty clear cut.
When you have issues, it willactually tell you that you have
issues in there.
So that's something I want youto pay attention to and, if you
don't understand how to fix, andget a trusted web developer
like us to help you out there.
(03:41):
And then you also want to makesure you have alt text on your
images.
So this is actually a reallysuper important thing for a
couple reasons.
It helps your accessibility aswell.
It helps Google understand whatthe image is about and what the
intention of the image is.
Now, with current AI, it's alot easier for Google to figure
out what's in the image, butwith this alt text, it helps
(04:04):
Google understand what you thinkis important about the image
and it's a great another toolthat they Google uses and the
main search engines uses to makesure that the content on your
website is important.
So make sure you're describingyour images appropriately with
that alt text.
So for this section, we want torecap a little bit this
(04:24):
technical SEO.
While it's called technical SEO, it isn't really that technical
most of the time, unless youactually need to dig down and
fix some of these things.
But search engines doprioritize a lot of these
elements actually most, if notall, of these elements.
All search engines do to makesure that your site is up to par
for their visitors to deliveryour site to them, because if
(04:45):
your website structure is notgood, they're not going to
deliver your website to them,because they're going to be
serving their customers pooruser experience.
That's one of the main reasonsthat we want to make sure we
have these elements proper andright.
Also, not using the rightkeywords this, I know this is
kind of like black magic andmany times think people think it
is black magic, but again, it'sbetter to not guess here.
(05:09):
It's better to start learninghow to do keyword research and
figure out what the goodkeywords are for you.
Many businesses don't do anykeyword research at all.
You can just simply do somebasic keyword research and
you're going to be better offthan many business owners.
You want to make sure thatyou're not focusing on broad,
highly competitive words, so asimple way to do that is to
(05:32):
search the keywords.
You might think that peoplesearch to find your website in
Google, and then there's thislittle more information link and
you can use it to see how manycompetitors there are on that.
How many pages are therereturning for that result.
That can kind of give you anidea of how busy the result is,
how many people are competingfor you on that result.
(05:54):
There's also great tools likeUbersuggest, google Keyword
Planner and also Answer thePublic.
Those can help you findkeywords too, and many of them
will tell you how competitive itis, which means how many other
people are vying for thatkeyword and how popular the
search is.
So you want to find the rightbalance between popular enough
(06:17):
but without too much competition, and you're going to be able to
rank faster for those keywords.
So using long tail keywords isusually the key here, especially
for newer or less establishedbusinesses, and we want to make
sure that we're using these whenwe're doing our keyword
research and our keyword in ourcontent.
And what a long tail keywordmeans is it's multiple words.
(06:40):
It's generally three or more.
Many times people are lookingat four or five words together.
So it's basically a phrase, notreally a keyword.
So think of it like that is ashort phrase.
You know how to improve yoursearch engine optimization would
be a really a keyword.
So think of it like that is ashort phrase.
You know how to improve yoursearch engine optimization would
be a long tail keyword andthat's probably a bit too
competitive out there.
(07:00):
But that's just kind of anexample of a long keyword, a
long tail keyword, right there,and you can also.
What we want to do is we want tomake sure we are naturally
placing these keywords on ourpage and we want to focus on one
keyword set per page, ideally,so when we're putting them
throughout our page, we want toput them in the title, we want
(07:23):
to put them in our any headerswe have and throughout your
content in a natural manner.
And another thing you can do isyou can take your keyword
phrase or your long tail keywordand reorder the words a little
bit, kind of make it be a bitmore natural on reading too for
the consumer, and so you canfind some more creative ways to
(07:45):
add it into that page's contentwhen you're thinking more of
like you know, if I were writingthis as a report to my English
teacher, how would I reemphasizethis point?
But with maybe a differentarrangement of words or some
synonyms.
Many times synonyms canactually help us too with our
keyword research and our keywordcontent for our articles.
(08:08):
So make sure that you knowyou're looking at different ways
to put it in there.
Obviously we don't want tooverstuff.
We don't want something supercrazy and a whole bunch of your
keywords in there.
Otherwise you'll get penalizedfor that as well, because that's
old SEO tactics from like the2000s.
So we don't want to be doingthat because the search engines
are much smarter to that now.
(08:29):
But making sure we have themsprinkled naturally throughout
our pages.
Content is super important.
Another mistake people make ispushing low quality or thin
content.
So websites with short,unhelpful or outdated content
often get penalized.
Google and other major searchengines prioritize useful,
(08:52):
in-depth content that answersusers' questions.
So we're going back here towhat is most important for
Google and Bing and the majorsearch engines to do, and that's
to serve you content that'suseful to you.
So they want to make sure thatthe content they are showing in
their results is going to beuseful to the consumer.
(09:12):
So if your content's reallythin, it's kind of is vague and
it doesn't really nail down to apoint and be very helpful,
they're not going to use thatcontent and, you know, show it
to the users.
So one of the ways you can fixthis is to write more long form
content we're talking.
Some people recommend athousand words.
(09:32):
I think you can, you know,generate a good amount of
information in about 500 words,if a thousand words sounds not
doable to you, because we alsoneed to balance.
You know how long is the useractually going to read something
too, and you don't want to juststuff it with a bunch of words
that are unnecessary.
So if you can provide helpful,useful content in less than a
(09:54):
thousand words, I think that'salso fine as well.
We also want to make itskimmable, so use bullet points,
use headers and visuals to makeyour content very easy to read.
We tend to not read when it's awall of text, so when we create
bullet points and headers andvisuals, that helps support our
(10:14):
information for that and helpsthe user read our information
and read our full blog articleor whatever the content might be
.
And another thing you can do isrefresh and update old blog
posts to help keep them relevant.
I like to keep a spreadsheet ofwhat we have written and what
we've done on our podcast so weknow what topics are out there.
(10:35):
So then we can go back and lookat that list of topics and know
which ones we might want torefresh.
So do that as you're creatingthis content to make it easier
and feel less overwhelming thanclicking around and digging on
your website to figure out whatcontent to update and refresh,
and also answer real customerquestions and pain points in
your content.
Use the questions that yourconsumers and users are already
(10:59):
asking.
You Could be an FAQ questionthat you really want to dig a
bit more deeper on.
It could be a pain point thatthey're having and something
that you have a solution for.
So really answer these consumerquestions and customer
questions in your blog and inyour articles.
So I want to recap on thislittle point again.
So we're coming home again towhere Google wants to serve its
(11:23):
users useful content.
So make sure that your contentis useful and then Google will
pick that up and start showingit to more users if you do that.
So the next common mistake thatmany business owners do with
their website is they forgetabout internal linking.
Many business owners do withtheir website is they forget
(11:44):
about internal linking.
So many websites and manybusiness owners focus on getting
those backlinks which areexternal links to your website,
but they ignore their internallinking structure and this means
that it's hard for Google andmajor search engines to navigate
.
They really struggle tounderstand the site structure.
Just the other week I washelping a client trying to
figure out why she had a largenumber of pages that Google knew
(12:07):
about but they hadn't indexedthem, they hadn't put them in
their search results, and shewas wondering why.
Well, when I started digginginto her website, it became
pretty obvious that most of herblog posts are buried under
pages of pages of pages oflinking structure, rather than
having a column on the right.
(12:27):
That either is by category andor you can have both by archive
date.
That made it hard, since shedidn't have that, for Google to
find those other pages they werehaving to click.
You can think about Googleclicking through your site if
you want to get a visual of it,but Google would have had to
click 10, 15, 20 times even morefor some of her pages for it to
(12:51):
get to it.
So since Google can't get therequickly and fast through your
internal site linking, thenGoogle feels like those pages
are not that important to you,which means they're not that
important to the consumer.
So a simple fix for her wouldbe to have a category tag
structure on the right that shecould, that she's already
(13:13):
probably categorizing her blogposts and then that would make
it so that you can link to thatcategory and so a blog post
would be two to three clicksaway instead of 10 or more
clicks away.
Or she could also do an archivestructure where it has you know
, say, august 2025, april 2023.
It has you know the differentmonths and years of her blog
(13:36):
information, and then that'sstill a very quick way to get to
that blog post.
So we want to make sure we'relinking to related blog posts
and or product pages within yourcontent.
This is super important forGoogle.
It also is a great way to boostkeywords for that page, because
if you're linking, usingkeywords in the link to that
(13:57):
next page, that also helpsGoogle realize those keywords
are important to you.
We want to use descriptiveanchor text when we're doing
that, which is what I justalluded to here.
Instead of having words likeclick here we want to have the
actual keywords in that linktext and we want to make sure
(14:23):
that important pages are easy tofind within clear navigation.
So again, think of Google andmajor search engines like a user
.
A user is not going to beclicking page after page after
page after page to get yourcontent.
So Google and Bing and themajor search engines also think,
well, those pages aren'timportant, so they're not going
to index them and show them toconsumers.
So make sure you're doing agood job with internal linking
structure here.
(14:44):
And then the final point is nottracking your SEO performance.
I know this can sound reallyboring and really mundane and,
honestly, if you really don'twant to do this, then I highly
encourage you.
You hire a trusted serviceprovider like us or somebody
else to do this for you.
But many businesses don't tracktheir search engine
optimization performance andthis could even be just a super
(15:07):
simple thing that you need to do.
That.
You can just generally and I'lltalk about which reports you
could do if you really want tomake this very minimal but we
want to make sure that we're notsetting and forgetting our
website.
We want to make sure that we'renot setting and forgetting our
website.
We want to make sure that we'retracking our performance of our
website.
You can use Google Analytics totrack your organic traffic and
(15:28):
see which pages perform best.
Now, if Google Analytics makesyour eyes glass over because
there's so many options in thereand so many things to do, then
just take that first basicreport of your monthly traffic
and keep an eye on it.
We want to make sure it's notgoing down, we want to make sure
it's staying steady and,especially, we want to make sure
it's going up.
So if you do only one thing, Irecommend that you, maybe once
(15:52):
or twice a month, look at themain Google Analytics report
that shows your visitors for atime period, and usually it's
defaulted by a month on thatreport unless you change it.
So just keep an eye on that andpromise me that you'll at least
do that, or pay a VA orsomebody like us to do that for
you.
And then I want to make surethat you're setting up Google
(16:14):
search console and looking atthis once or twice a month.
It is there to help you.
It monitors your site errors.
It monitors your keywordrankings and click through rates
.
It is there to help you.
It monitors your site errors.
It monitors your keywordrankings and click-through rates
.
It really does a good job ofgiving you a very much simpler
dashboard than Google Analyticsand tells you what's wrong as
soon as you see problems inthere.
(16:35):
If you don't know how to fixthem, then get somebody trusted
again, like us or your trustedprovider, to fix those errors
pretty quickly.
Because when people don't fixthe errors in our Google search
console quickly, that's when asnowball effect of bad things
can happen sometimes, becausethen you might start getting
deranked by Google and majorsearch engines because there are
(16:56):
actual structural problems withyour website.
So promise me you'll at leastdo those two looks the main
analytics report in GoogleAnalytics and then looking at
your Google search console.
You can even be signed up inthat one for alerts and it'll
email you whenever there is anissue.
So pay attention to thoseemails.
They actually do mean somethingand that way we can mitigate
(17:18):
any problems before they becomea big problem.
So it's really important, easy,you know, quick check.
Make it a Friday task, maybewhen you're brain dead at the
end of the day on a Friday, butmake sure you're regularly
checking those two things.
That's going to help you notrun into major problems later.
So let's do a quick recap.
(17:38):
So there are five common SEOmistakes that many business
owners make that we see.
We want to make sure we'realways checking our site speed
and fix any issues there and anyother technical issues that
might come up, like images aretoo big, etc.
We want to do some good keywordresearch and many times.
You can do this once if youreally need to be minimal about
(18:00):
it, and do it once and then juststick with those keywords and
make sure that they're long tailkeywords and they are being
searched as well.
We also want to create highquality, valuable content.
We want to create content thatGoogle and the major search
engines want to deliver to theirconsumers, so it's important
that we are creating highquality content.
We want to use internal linkingso that Google and the major
(18:23):
search engines can actually findthose great articles that you
created, like four or five yearsago, because they might still
be important, might still berelevant.
So make sure your internallinking is really good and then
track your SEO performance.
Do it monthly, if that's allyou can do.
Twice a month would be the best, maybe the first and the 15th
but track your search engineperformance monthly or
(18:46):
bi-monthly if you can.
Search engine optimization isn'ta one and done task.
It is an ongoing process.
So, whether you're handling ityourself or having a
professional handle, the searchengine optimization for you is
something that does need to bedone regularly.
So keep an eye on these fivetop mistakes, make sure that
(19:09):
you're handling them well andnot making the mistakes, so that
you will start to get moretraffic, more engagement and,
ultimately, more sales.
That's all we have for thisweek's episode of the e-commerce
made easy podcast.
I hope you found it superhelpful and, if you'd be so kind
, share it with a businessfriend.
That's a great way to get theword out for us so that we can
help more business owners justlike you.
(19:30):
And if you haven't already,make sure to rate us on Apple
podcasts or your favoritepodcast app.
We would be so grateful forthat, and you can always find
our show notes at e-commercemade easy podcastcom, and we
will see you next week.
Are you putting in the effort to create great
content, optimize your websiteand attract more visitors, only
to see little to no growth inyour traffic?
You might be making some commonSEO mistakes that are holding
your website back that arepretty easy to fix.
Seo, or search engineoptimization, isn't just about
stuffing keywords into yourcontent and hoping for the best.
(00:22):
It's about strategy andconsistency and avoiding the
pitfalls that could be pushingyour site and hoping for the
best.
It's about strategy andconsistency and avoiding the
pitfalls that could be pushingyour site down in search engine
rankings.
In today's episode, I'mcovering the five most common
SEO mistakes that could bekilling your website traffic.
Plus, I'll walk you through howto fix them so that you can
start climbing the rankings andgetting the visitors and
conversions you deserve.
(00:50):
Welcome to the e-commerce madeeasy podcast.
I'm your host, k Saunders.
When we started this business,all I had was a couch, a laptop
and a nine month old.
My main goal to help others.
Now, with over 20 years in thee-commerce building industry and
even more than that in webdevelopment, I have seen a lot.
I love breaking down the hardtech and to easily
understandable bits to helpothers be successful in their
online business.
Whether you're a seasonede-commerce veteran or just
(01:10):
starting out, you've come to theright place, so sit back, relax
and let's dive into the worldof e-commerce together.
Welcome back to the show.
Today we're talking about thefive most common SEO mistakes
you may be making on yourwebsite and how to fix them.
So the first one is ignoringtechnical SEO.
Now, that might sound a littletechie, but it's actually not
(01:32):
too bad, and we have quite a fewpodcast episodes that can help
you through these differentthings I'm going to talk about
in this section.
So the main issue here is thatbusiness owners focus on their
content and don't worry aboutthe technical SEO part, which is
simply things like low sitespeed, broken links, poor mobile
optimization and missing alttext.
(01:54):
Those all can dramaticallyimpact your rankings.
And we have some other podcastepisodes around many of these
topics and we will link to thosein the show notes around many
of these topics and we will linkto those in the show notes.
But monitoring and making surethat your website speed is fast
is actually a pretty easy task.
Sometimes fixing it is a littlebit harder.
Sometimes it's not that hardand we actually have a free
(02:15):
download on how to make sureyour images are appropriate size
for the web too, for mobileoptimization.
That's something very easy foryou to test With many new modern
software out there.
It's a bit easier to fix too,if your software has the ability
for you to adjust that prettywell.
Otherwise, you can simply get adeveloper to help you with your
mobile look and feel.
(02:37):
But we want to make sure it'ssuper important, because Google
will penalize you if your siteis not mobile optimized.
So you can check your speedwith Google PageSpeed Insights.
It gives a great perspective ofwhat Google perceives your
website as to being, as far ashow fast it goes, and you can
use that to make improvements.
And we want to make sure thatyour website is mobile friendly
(02:59):
and responsive, so it works onmany different types of devices.
And we want to fix broken links.
So we want to make sure thatthere aren't links that are
broken, and you can realize agood bit of this.
And if you connect to Googlesearch console and this is an
area of Google that I find mostbusiness owners neglect to look
(03:21):
at and it's really a lot less,honestly, overwhelming than
Google Analytics Look at.
There's a lot less options inthere and it's pretty clear cut.
When you have issues, it willactually tell you that you have
issues in there.
So that's something I want youto pay attention to and, if you
don't understand how to fix, andget a trusted web developer
like us to help you out there.
(03:41):
And then you also want to makesure you have alt text on your
images.
So this is actually a reallysuper important thing for a
couple reasons.
It helps your accessibility aswell.
It helps Google understand whatthe image is about and what the
intention of the image is.
Now, with current AI, it's alot easier for Google to figure
out what's in the image, butwith this alt text, it helps
(04:04):
Google understand what you thinkis important about the image
and it's a great another toolthat they Google uses and the
main search engines uses to makesure that the content on your
website is important.
So make sure you're describingyour images appropriately with
that alt text.
So for this section, we want torecap a little bit this
(04:24):
technical SEO.
While it's called technical SEO, it isn't really that technical
most of the time, unless youactually need to dig down and
fix some of these things.
But search engines doprioritize a lot of these
elements actually most, if notall, of these elements.
All search engines do to makesure that your site is up to par
for their visitors to deliveryour site to them, because if
(04:45):
your website structure is notgood, they're not going to
deliver your website to them,because they're going to be
serving their customers pooruser experience.
That's one of the main reasonsthat we want to make sure we
have these elements proper andright.
Also, not using the rightkeywords this, I know this is
kind of like black magic andmany times think people think it
is black magic, but again, it'sbetter to not guess here.
(05:09):
It's better to start learninghow to do keyword research and
figure out what the goodkeywords are for you.
Many businesses don't do anykeyword research at all.
You can just simply do somebasic keyword research and
you're going to be better offthan many business owners.
You want to make sure thatyou're not focusing on broad,
highly competitive words, so asimple way to do that is to
(05:32):
search the keywords.
You might think that peoplesearch to find your website in
Google, and then there's thislittle more information link and
you can use it to see how manycompetitors there are on that.
How many pages are therereturning for that result.
That can kind of give you anidea of how busy the result is,
how many people are competingfor you on that result.
(05:54):
There's also great tools likeUbersuggest, google Keyword
Planner and also Answer thePublic.
Those can help you findkeywords too, and many of them
will tell you how competitive itis, which means how many other
people are vying for thatkeyword and how popular the
search is.
So you want to find the rightbalance between popular enough
(06:17):
but without too much competition, and you're going to be able to
rank faster for those keywords.
So using long tail keywords isusually the key here, especially
for newer or less establishedbusinesses, and we want to make
sure that we're using these whenwe're doing our keyword
research and our keyword in ourcontent.
And what a long tail keywordmeans is it's multiple words.
(06:40):
It's generally three or more.
Many times people are lookingat four or five words together.
So it's basically a phrase, notreally a keyword.
So think of it like that is ashort phrase.
You know how to improve yoursearch engine optimization would
be a really a keyword.
So think of it like that is ashort phrase.
You know how to improve yoursearch engine optimization would
be a long tail keyword andthat's probably a bit too
competitive out there.
(07:00):
But that's just kind of anexample of a long keyword, a
long tail keyword, right there,and you can also.
What we want to do is we want tomake sure we are naturally
placing these keywords on ourpage and we want to focus on one
keyword set per page, ideally,so when we're putting them
throughout our page, we want toput them in the title, we want
(07:23):
to put them in our any headerswe have and throughout your
content in a natural manner.
And another thing you can do isyou can take your keyword
phrase or your long tail keywordand reorder the words a little
bit, kind of make it be a bitmore natural on reading too for
the consumer, and so you canfind some more creative ways to
(07:45):
add it into that page's contentwhen you're thinking more of
like you know, if I were writingthis as a report to my English
teacher, how would I reemphasizethis point?
But with maybe a differentarrangement of words or some
synonyms.
Many times synonyms canactually help us too with our
keyword research and our keywordcontent for our articles.
(08:08):
So make sure that you knowyou're looking at different ways
to put it in there.
Obviously we don't want tooverstuff.
We don't want something supercrazy and a whole bunch of your
keywords in there.
Otherwise you'll get penalizedfor that as well, because that's
old SEO tactics from like the2000s.
So we don't want to be doingthat because the search engines
are much smarter to that now.
(08:29):
But making sure we have themsprinkled naturally throughout
our pages.
Content is super important.
Another mistake people make ispushing low quality or thin
content.
So websites with short,unhelpful or outdated content
often get penalized.
Google and other major searchengines prioritize useful,
(08:52):
in-depth content that answersusers' questions.
So we're going back here towhat is most important for
Google and Bing and the majorsearch engines to do, and that's
to serve you content that'suseful to you.
So they want to make sure thatthe content they are showing in
their results is going to beuseful to the consumer.
(09:12):
So if your content's reallythin, it's kind of is vague and
it doesn't really nail down to apoint and be very helpful,
they're not going to use thatcontent and, you know, show it
to the users.
So one of the ways you can fixthis is to write more long form
content we're talking.
Some people recommend athousand words.
(09:32):
I think you can, you know,generate a good amount of
information in about 500 words,if a thousand words sounds not
doable to you, because we alsoneed to balance.
You know how long is the useractually going to read something
too, and you don't want to juststuff it with a bunch of words
that are unnecessary.
So if you can provide helpful,useful content in less than a
(09:54):
thousand words, I think that'salso fine as well.
We also want to make itskimmable, so use bullet points,
use headers and visuals to makeyour content very easy to read.
We tend to not read when it's awall of text, so when we create
bullet points and headers andvisuals, that helps support our
(10:14):
information for that and helpsthe user read our information
and read our full blog articleor whatever the content might be
.
And another thing you can do isrefresh and update old blog
posts to help keep them relevant.
I like to keep a spreadsheet ofwhat we have written and what
we've done on our podcast so weknow what topics are out there.
(10:35):
So then we can go back and lookat that list of topics and know
which ones we might want torefresh.
So do that as you're creatingthis content to make it easier
and feel less overwhelming thanclicking around and digging on
your website to figure out whatcontent to update and refresh,
and also answer real customerquestions and pain points in
your content.
Use the questions that yourconsumers and users are already
(10:59):
asking.
You Could be an FAQ questionthat you really want to dig a
bit more deeper on.
It could be a pain point thatthey're having and something
that you have a solution for.
So really answer these consumerquestions and customer
questions in your blog and inyour articles.
So I want to recap on thislittle point again.
So we're coming home again towhere Google wants to serve its
(11:23):
users useful content.
So make sure that your contentis useful and then Google will
pick that up and start showingit to more users if you do that.
So the next common mistake thatmany business owners do with
their website is they forgetabout internal linking.
Many business owners do withtheir website is they forget
(11:44):
about internal linking.
So many websites and manybusiness owners focus on getting
those backlinks which areexternal links to your website,
but they ignore their internallinking structure and this means
that it's hard for Google andmajor search engines to navigate
.
They really struggle tounderstand the site structure.
Just the other week I washelping a client trying to
figure out why she had a largenumber of pages that Google knew
(12:07):
about but they hadn't indexedthem, they hadn't put them in
their search results, and shewas wondering why.
Well, when I started digginginto her website, it became
pretty obvious that most of herblog posts are buried under
pages of pages of pages oflinking structure, rather than
having a column on the right.
(12:27):
That either is by category andor you can have both by archive
date.
That made it hard, since shedidn't have that, for Google to
find those other pages they werehaving to click.
You can think about Googleclicking through your site if
you want to get a visual of it,but Google would have had to
click 10, 15, 20 times even morefor some of her pages for it to
(12:51):
get to it.
So since Google can't get therequickly and fast through your
internal site linking, thenGoogle feels like those pages
are not that important to you,which means they're not that
important to the consumer.
So a simple fix for her wouldbe to have a category tag
structure on the right that shecould, that she's already
(13:13):
probably categorizing her blogposts and then that would make
it so that you can link to thatcategory and so a blog post
would be two to three clicksaway instead of 10 or more
clicks away.
Or she could also do an archivestructure where it has you know
, say, august 2025, april 2023.
It has you know the differentmonths and years of her blog
(13:36):
information, and then that'sstill a very quick way to get to
that blog post.
So we want to make sure we'relinking to related blog posts
and or product pages within yourcontent.
This is super important forGoogle.
It also is a great way to boostkeywords for that page, because
if you're linking, usingkeywords in the link to that
(13:57):
next page, that also helpsGoogle realize those keywords
are important to you.
We want to use descriptiveanchor text when we're doing
that, which is what I justalluded to here.
Instead of having words likeclick here we want to have the
actual keywords in that linktext and we want to make sure
(14:23):
that important pages are easy tofind within clear navigation.
So again, think of Google andmajor search engines like a user
.
A user is not going to beclicking page after page after
page after page to get yourcontent.
So Google and Bing and themajor search engines also think,
well, those pages aren'timportant, so they're not going
to index them and show them toconsumers.
So make sure you're doing agood job with internal linking
structure here.
(14:44):
And then the final point is nottracking your SEO performance.
I know this can sound reallyboring and really mundane and,
honestly, if you really don'twant to do this, then I highly
encourage you.
You hire a trusted serviceprovider like us or somebody
else to do this for you.
But many businesses don't tracktheir search engine
optimization performance andthis could even be just a super
(15:07):
simple thing that you need to do.
That.
You can just generally and I'lltalk about which reports you
could do if you really want tomake this very minimal but we
want to make sure that we're notsetting and forgetting our
website.
We want to make sure that we'renot setting and forgetting our
website.
We want to make sure that we'retracking our performance of our
website.
You can use Google Analytics totrack your organic traffic and
(15:28):
see which pages perform best.
Now, if Google Analytics makesyour eyes glass over because
there's so many options in thereand so many things to do, then
just take that first basicreport of your monthly traffic
and keep an eye on it.
We want to make sure it's notgoing down, we want to make sure
it's staying steady and,especially, we want to make sure
it's going up.
So if you do only one thing, Irecommend that you, maybe once
(15:52):
or twice a month, look at themain Google Analytics report
that shows your visitors for atime period, and usually it's
defaulted by a month on thatreport unless you change it.
So just keep an eye on that andpromise me that you'll at least
do that, or pay a VA orsomebody like us to do that for
you.
And then I want to make surethat you're setting up Google
(16:14):
search console and looking atthis once or twice a month.
It is there to help you.
It monitors your site errors.
It monitors your keywordrankings and click through rates
.
It is there to help you.
It monitors your site errors.
It monitors your keywordrankings and click-through rates
.
It really does a good job ofgiving you a very much simpler
dashboard than Google Analyticsand tells you what's wrong as
soon as you see problems inthere.
(16:35):
If you don't know how to fixthem, then get somebody trusted
again, like us or your trustedprovider, to fix those errors
pretty quickly.
Because when people don't fixthe errors in our Google search
console quickly, that's when asnowball effect of bad things
can happen sometimes, becausethen you might start getting
deranked by Google and majorsearch engines because there are
(16:56):
actual structural problems withyour website.
So promise me you'll at leastdo those two looks the main
analytics report in GoogleAnalytics and then looking at
your Google search console.
You can even be signed up inthat one for alerts and it'll
email you whenever there is anissue.
So pay attention to thoseemails.
They actually do mean somethingand that way we can mitigate
(17:18):
any problems before they becomea big problem.
So it's really important, easy,you know, quick check.
Make it a Friday task, maybewhen you're brain dead at the
end of the day on a Friday, butmake sure you're regularly
checking those two things.
That's going to help you notrun into major problems later.
So let's do a quick recap.
(17:38):
So there are five common SEOmistakes that many business
owners make that we see.
We want to make sure we'realways checking our site speed
and fix any issues there and anyother technical issues that
might come up, like images aretoo big, etc.
We want to do some good keywordresearch and many times.
You can do this once if youreally need to be minimal about
(18:00):
it, and do it once and then juststick with those keywords and
make sure that they're long tailkeywords and they are being
searched as well.
We also want to create highquality, valuable content.
We want to create content thatGoogle and the major search
engines want to deliver to theirconsumers, so it's important
that we are creating highquality content.
We want to use internal linkingso that Google and the major
(18:23):
search engines can actually findthose great articles that you
created, like four or five yearsago, because they might still
be important, might still berelevant.
So make sure your internallinking is really good and then
track your SEO performance.
Do it monthly, if that's allyou can do.
Twice a month would be the best, maybe the first and the 15th
but track your search engineperformance monthly or
(18:46):
bi-monthly if you can.
Search engine optimization isn'ta one and done task.
It is an ongoing process.
So, whether you're handling ityourself or having a
professional handle, the searchengine optimization for you is
something that does need to bedone regularly.
So keep an eye on these fivetop mistakes, make sure that
(19:09):
you're handling them well andnot making the mistakes, so that
you will start to get moretraffic, more engagement and,
ultimately, more sales.
That's all we have for thisweek's episode of the e-commerce
made easy podcast.
I hope you found it superhelpful and, if you'd be so kind
, share it with a businessfriend.
That's a great way to get theword out for us so that we can
help more business owners justlike you.
(19:30):
And if you haven't already,make sure to rate us on Apple
podcasts or your favoritepodcast app.
We would be so grateful forthat, and you can always find
our show notes at e-commercemade easy podcastcom, and we
will see you next week.
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