oops-seo-misfires-avoid-website-content-marketing

I doubt any marketing team can perfect its SEO and content marketing efforts. Time, degrees of expertise, and changing algorithms always get in the way.

But SEO misfires abound for B2B and B2C websites and they can be avoided or at least minimized.

Let’s dive in.

1. Keyword selection

Keywords are probably the easiest SEO area to mess up. Aim too high for a competitive keyword phrase and you may never rank. Settle for low-hanging fruit and you might fall asleep while waiting for a rare visitor to make his or her way to your website.

I tell everyone to focus on relevancy and the sweet spot. What’s a sweet spot with SEO? You can sense it when viewing rankings in Google’s monthly search engine volume.

Try this: Do you tend to rank one to 10 on Google for keywords searched 300 times a month? Maybe 1,000? Get a feel for a variety of your pages. Your sweet spot is the correlation of top 10 rankings and the monthly search volume. Often, your sweet spot is more likely a range, such as 30 to 70, 200 to 500, or 1,200 to 1,500 searches for your one to 10 rankings.

Don’t be dismayed if your site typically ranks well for a keyword phrase that attracts only 50 visits a month. Your products and services may have good price points and margins. In other words, you should be happy with even occasional sales that can more than pay for your SEO investment. And any website page that may rank for multiple keywords can always be working on your behalf.

And the best part? With ongoing SEO, you could pursue more competitive keywords over time. Just don’t go after something with 3,000 searches a month when you can’t even rank for a keyword that has 100 searches each month.

2. Pages attract too many keywords

Your home page often supports tons of keywords because it has the most authority (backlinks). A keyword phrase may rank better if you optimize an interior page.

Take Heinz’s home page, which ranks only ninth for “Heinz Ketchup.”

If Heinz made some changes to its Heinz Tomato Ketchup interior page, it might rank higher for “Heinz Ketchup.”

Heinz made a mistake because its ketchup page URL (http://www.heinz.com/products/heinztomatoketchup) doesn’t have a keyword – it’s jammed with characters and lacks dashes.

A better (with a 301 redirect) page URL would be http://www.heinz.com/products/heinz-ketchup.

The SEO page title needs help too.

Current: Heinz Ketchup Varieties | Heinz Ketchup

Better: Heinz Ketchup

The page’s visible content could remain until the title and URL changes affect search engine rankings and updated a little after that.

heinz-tomato-ketchup-homepage

3. Engagement

Search engines like Google want users to have a good experience. If people jump from your website right away and conduct another search, it could affect your rankings. Time spent on a page matters with SEO and content marketing.

Generally, you want people to visit and make their way to other content pages. Unfortunately, those pages may not be well designed, may lack compelling content, or may switch visitors to a different language.

Yes, it happens.

Ernst & Young takes visitors from English pages to the Netherlands (I wonder how often pages are reviewed by the marketing team).

My trip began on what must be a popular page about risk assurance. I hovered over “cybersecurity” in the menu (as shown in the URL on the lower left of the screenshot):

ernst-young-different-language-example

And, in a second, I flew across the pond.

ernst-young-different-language-example-2

The conflicting language issue exists in part because thousands of Ernst & Young pages are indexed. I came across its English global version, which is indicated by the GL in the URL that I saw when checking the company’s ranking data. But it’s still odd that the language would change to the Netherlands – for cybersecurity and all other sections linked from the risk assurance and other pages within the global content.

4. Content headers

It’s best to use an H1 header tag with page content headers to identify important text. Unfortunately, headers often lack strategic keyword phrases.

Citi has this page: http://www.citigroup.com/citi/about/citizenship/.

The H1 is “global citizenship.” No one can do much with that in search.

Or Cognizant has “business value of trust” as its H1 on this page: https://www.cognizant.com/business-value-of-trust.

But Nationwide does it better. It consistently leverages H1 tags like “choosing a cheap car insurance company” for: https://www.nationwide.com/cheap-car-insurance-companies.jsp. (I’m a fan of its SEO efforts.)

5. SEO page titles

It’s important for SEO page titles to include relevant keyword phrases. But sometimes the words used by content marketers in the titles aren’t well represented in the content.

Brands frequently mention their names in SEO page titles. Unfortunately, their inclusion limits the prominence of the remaining keywords. And sometimes the same words are repeated.

Here is an example from Cognizant, which uses “solutions” twice: “Healthcare BPO, IT Solutions and Services | Cognizant Technology Solutions.”

Keyword redundancy isn’t the only issue. The page’s content never mentions BPO or business process outsourcing. It’s probably not going to rank for “IT solutions,” which is too broad for this page, but it may be a good companion to “healthcare.”

A better SEO page title may be: “Healthcare BPO and IT Solutions.”

If Cognizant makes the change, the company may rank higher for “healthcare BPO.”

cognizant-healthcare-bpo-ranking