These 3 SEO Mistakes will CRIPPLE your Traffic

- I'm gonna tell you three. things that you might be doing that's gonna prevent. you from getting traffic and rankings on Google. Now I do a ton of website audits. I audit websites in my, one-on-one consultations. I audit websites on this YouTube channel, and we also audit websites, for our clients at my agency, The Search Initiative. And I commonly see three mistakes that are preventing people from getting traffic, and rankings on Google. And the reason I'm making, a video about this, is because I often see people. in the SEO Facebook groups saying stuff like, "Hey, I've been doing all the right things for like a year now, why am. I not getting any traffic? Why am I not getting any rankings? Why am I not making any, sales? What is the deal?" Well we're gonna be, answering these questions, so we can see if you're, guilty of these three things and see if we can fix them so. we can get you some traffic. The first mistake I see is that people are writing excellent content, but it's just not what Google wants to actually see. We have to remember that. Google is not a human. It's not a living, breathing. human that can sit down and read the content of every webpage in order to figure out. if it's good or not. Google is a robot. It's. a computer program. Or like Kyle Roof said at. Change My SEO conference. "Google's algorithm is an algorithm." This means that just. like any other algorithm, it's gonna perform better with a certain set of organized data, in our case content. Your content needs to be optimized such that Google can read it easily and that it has all the, signals that would let it know that your piece of content. is the best on the internet for it's keyword. Now don't worry, we're gonna get to what those signals are very shortly. So, even though you wrote what you believe to be the best piece of content, on the internet for fishing, it doesn't matter if Google. just doesn't understand it. Now just think about it. The best piece of content, on the internet about cancer is probably some white paper and a top tier online medical journal. But why doesn't that come, up at the top of Google? Because Google can't understand it, because it's not optimized for Google. So let's talk about what signals you can actually give to Google to help it understand your content. The first and most. impactful place to optimize is what I call the three. Kings in my course, The Affiliate Lab. This includes your URL,. your title, and your H1. Let's say you're trying, to rank the keyword DIY vitamin C serum. Here's the rules for optimizing your URL. Try to get the most important words of your keyword phrase in there and keep it short and sweet. Here's a good one, website.com/diyvitamin-c-serum. Here's a bad one, website.com/how-to-make-homemade-diy-vitamin-c-serum. It's just too long. Now let's move on to your title. For this you need to do a little bit more keyword research and come up with a list like this. Here's the rules for, optimizing your title. Try to get the most important words from the top of your, keyword list in there. Keep the top phrases together and towards the front. Write in proper English. Do not repeat words. Keep it around 60 characters, and leave the click bait until the end of the title. Here's what I do at these keywords. DIY Vitamin C Serum; How to make it using a homemade recipe. Check out how I've covered every single word of the top four keywords in here. Now it's time to optimize your H1. The rules here are pretty much the same as your title. You just don't want them to be exactly the same, so scramble it up. Here's what I'd use. How to make your own homemade, vitamin C serum, a DIY recipe. But optimization doesn't stop there, you need to optimize your content as well. See, Google doesn't really, know if your piece of content is the best on the internet, for DIY vitamin C serum, it's just not an expert on the subject. So what it does, most other. things is compares your content to the other people already,

ranking for that keyword. And if you reverse engineer their content, you get a map on how to create yours. It's like you're playing poker, but your competitors, are showing their cards. For writing content, I, always have my writers use Surfers Content Editor. Surfer is gonna analyze the top ranking articles in your niche and tease. out the critical factors that will inform your writers on how they need to create your content. It will look at word count,, the number of paragraphs, headings and images that you. need to fit in with page one. And most importantly, it will use Google's natural language processing, API to figure out what entities or words Google is expecting. to see in your content, and at what frequency. Then as your writers write, it, updates progress meters until a piece of optimized content is produced. Now speaking about optimization, if you like what you're seeing so far, why don't you go ahead and optimize that like button down below, thanks a bunch. The second mistake I see is people taking short cuts when it comes to the link quality. If we were to look at SEO with an analogy, think of your website being your car and the links that go to your website, like the gas that goes into it. If you put terrible gas in your car, it's gonna have a hard time. doing what you want it to do. The same goes with the links you send to your site. Now I get it, links are expensive. You're either spending actual money on the fees that nearly all webmasters. are charging these days or you're spending time,, which actually is money on hunting down free links. Whether that be through guest posting or something more, involved like digital PR. But that doesn't mean you should go to a place like Fiverr to buy cheap and terrible backlinks, nor does it mean you should, get backlinks from link farms that will sell links to anyone with money. - No, God please, no. No. - I run a link audit service at Authority Builders, so I see firsthand the links, that are holding people back from ranking, and it's not pretty. Now we could dedicate a whole video on how to audit link opportunities. In fact, I've already held a full webinar on link vetting, which I've linked in the description below. So check that out after. you watch this video. But if I had to say, if, there's one critical factor that you should use when you're judging whether or not you want a link, it would be traffic. Why? Let me explain. Google has said multiple. times in multiple places that they have the ability to ignore backlinks. In this article headline, they talk about their ability to ignore malicious links. In this other article, they talk about their ability, to ignore unnatural links. Now, of course you don't want your hard earned links to be ignored, so what do you do? Ahrefs did a study and found that only 9% of the internet gets traffic. So one could say that. Google is very stingy about who they give traffic to. In fact, you could argue, that Google's ranking and traffic algorithm is, the stingiest algorithm that they have. So my theory is that Google is not likely to ignore backlinks coming from sites that they actually give, rankings and traffic to. I mean, if they like a, website enough to rank it, why would they ignore the links that they're sending out? And I single variable tested it. I sent a hundred links from sites with traffic to third-party URLs and I, monitored their rankings. 87% of the time we saw an increase in ranking. 8% of the time we saw a flat result. And 1% of the time we saw. a decrease in traffic, but that was because the receiving site was hit by a core update, during the time of the test. So make sure when you're building links, make sure you're spending a decent proportion of your time focusing on getting links, from sites with traffic. Sure, you could look at, some other things as well, but definitely just don't ignore traffic. The third mistake I see coming up a lot, is people ignoring technical SEO. Remember that car analogy I gave earlier, having bad technical SEO on your website is like having a (beep) car. It doesn't matter how good the links are, this (beep) isn't moving anywhere. What actually is technical SEO? I'll get to that in a minute. But first I wanna address a common misconception that a lot of people

have about technical SEO. A lot of people mistakenly think that tech SEO is only useful for very large websites, but I have a small website. I don't have a hundred, thousand pages like WebMD, and I'm not trying to, be like Amazon either. Trust me on this one,. technical SEO matters for all sizes of sites. Why? Because technical SEO. makes life easy for Google to do its job, and when you make Google's life easy, they reward you. Another reason you should get. your technical SEO in order is because it usually results, in some very, very quick wins. Put it this way, when I'm, looking for websites to purchase, I look at technical SEO. issues as a plus side. Because I know that fixing them is gonna result in quick gains. So here's the top technical SEO issues that you should look for and, get fixed as soon as possible. First things first you wanna. make sure your website is fast. In this day and age, a, majority of website traffic is coming from mobile devices. And it's Google's mission. to be able to deliver a great user experience to its searchers, that includes recommending and ranking fast websites. Now here's the thing. You definitely don't get a ranking boost if your site is mega, mega, fast and very, very quick, but you do get hit if, your website is too slow. So you need to take care of that. Generally, you're gonna want your website to be faster than a four or second load time. Load your site in a tool like Pingdom to measure your website speed. There's no hard and fast rule, but definitely make sure your website loads faster than four seconds. You have two options for speeding up your website. The first is just to do it yourself. The second, which is what I recommend, is to use a service like WP. Speed Fix to do it all for you. Coupon code, DIGITTY10 is gonna give you $10 off and I've left a link to WP Speed Fix in the description. You also wanna make sure that your website looks good on mobile. This is called mobile friendliness. Open your website on mobile. and scan from top to bottom. Fonts should look good. There should be no horizontal scrolling needed. No elements should be bleeding off the page. An easy way to check to see if your site is mobile friendly or not, is to use Google's free Mobile Friendly Checker. Make sure to take action on any issues you see popping up here. You also wanna take a look at index bloat. And this is when you have more pages indexed on Google, than you actually want them to see. To see what pages do you. have index in Google, run a site, colon domain, name command, and Google is gonna spit out all the pages in their index for your site. Make sure there's no pages there that you don't want Google. to waste their time on. Now, while it may seem that. Google has infinite resources and phenomenal cosmic powers, crawling the internet, takes a lot of resources and especially a lot of money. Google will set a crawl budget to each website, which is a limit to the amount of pages that they'll crawl every day. And you don't wanna exceed that budget by serving them up a bunch of useless pages that don't provide any value at all. Some examples of these types, of pages are author pages, paginated indexes,, images and category pages if you're not an e-commerce site. To deindex, these types of pages, most of the time, it's, a simple configuration of your SEO plugin like. Yoast or All in One or whatever else it is you use. And to force a URL out of the index, use Google's removal tool. found in their search console. You also wanna make sure that, you have no orphaned pages. Orphaning occurs when, there's no internal link path to a given page. It looks like this. The page at the top is the homepage of your site. You always wanna make sure, there's a linking path to every other page unlike we see with these four pages here. The results of this is twofold. First, you're making it difficult for Google to crawl your website. And as I said before, you wanna make things easy. for Google to do their job. Second, because any backlink equity that your website has cannot reach these orphaned pages. Make sure to subscribe, to get more crucial SEO tips just like these.