Online Marketing: Common Mistakes
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound. Customers are looking for your business or trying to solve a problem that your company solves. Inbound strategies create content online that informs, educates, and engages these potential customers.
Contact an Online Marketing Specialist
We are a marketing company here in Utah, expert in content marketing and SEO. We see a lot of small and large corporations make mistakes promoting their businesses online. Some missteps can be pretty head-scratching. SEO has been around for a while now. There are no more excuses for not investing in digital marketing.
Many techniques for being found through inbound marketing were groundbreaking a few years ago but are now commonplace. Your competitors are using these strategies, but there is still room in most marketplaces to use online resources to improve lead generation.
There are many ways to learn content marketing best practices. If you own a company or work in marketing for a small business, you should understand the basics of online promotion. You should know what is possible and what is standard. More than anything, you want to avoid some of these mistakes:
01: Not Using Keyword
SEO has been around so long, it’s strange to think companies do not know how to use keywords. Some professionals began to think a few years ago that Google didn’t look at keywords, pushing this part of their strategy to the wayside. This is false. Keywords are still very relevant.
Misunderstandings about Keywords
Google began to crack down on people trying to game the algorithm. Some websites were very low quality but stuffed with repetitive uses of keywords. This was an easy strategy to use. They’d build large networks of thousands of websites: They were poor quality, uninformative, boring, and they used too many targeted keywords.
Google saw this as a big problem. These sites were spammy and not valuable to consumers. They weakened the quality of Google’s search engine. When people use Google, they believe they are using the authoritative searching tool. They expect to find answers to their questions on the first page of a search. They expect to find the best content, not spammy sites with a lot of keywords about their topic, but nothing meaningful or helpful.
Several years ago, Google figured out how to filter out these large networks of keyword-focused content. Using keywords too much became a negative rather than a positive ranking factor.
Many in the marketing industry got the impression they shouldn’t be using keywords that much, that too many uses of a phrase would hurt them in search results. But it wasn’t the use of keywords that was hurting the performance of websites. It was the misuse of them that was causing their sites to be deindexed.
The central goal of any webpage is to make it high quality. Make it relevant or interesting to someone who lands on it. Keywords are also essential, but they don’t work if you use them too much. They also don’t work if your page and website are filled with junk.
But do not completely neglect the need for keyword optimization. No one will see your page if you don’t tell the Google algorithm who should see the site and what keywords it should rank for.
At our digital agency, we are always attempting to push our websites to the top of page 1. We do this by understanding what the target keyword phrase is for a page. We use variations of that phrase in the title, the subtitles, and throughout the text on the page, usually someone in the first paragraph, somewhere in the middle, and somewhere in the conclusion of the page. We also determine what synonyms for the keywords are and use them throughout the text as well.
This is just good writing, principles we all learned in High School writing class. Tell the audience what your thesis is about and make it very focused. Tell your audience again what you’re trying to convey, providing details and support for your main idea. And then tell them again at the end by summarizing your thesis and main points. If you follow this rule, not getting too fancy, but writing clearly as possible, you can’t really go wrong. This works for us and continues to help websites rank on Google.
02: Failing to Effectively Use the URL Structure
When we start building a website, we try to have a very clear site map and plan for how the pages are going to be built out and will connect with one another. Some pages will be parent pages of child pages, meaning the URL structure tells Google what pages the main categories are, and what pages we are designating as subcategories. There isn’t a wrong or right way to do this exactly. The best way is the method that fits your goals as a business.
Conducting keyword research gives us insight as to the highest traffic keywords we want to target. The goal isn’t to find the most popular keywords to rank for. These often have the most websites competing for them, and so they are harder to get on page one. We are looking for the right keywords where there is a fighting chance to rank for the phrases within a couple of months.
When we organize these pages on the site, the URL structure reflects the organizing strategy we’ve chosen. A forward slash will separate the home page from the parent page in the URL. A second forward slash and verbiage following it tells Google this is a child page of the parent page.
For example, if you owned a pet store, you could have a URL that looks like this:
| Website Domain |
| petcompany.com |
| Parent Page |
| dogs/ |
| Child Page |
| retrievers/ |
Local Intent
If your company is trying to find local customers, we try to find the keywords that suggest to Google that the searcher is looking for a local business. Many keywords send the user to big global websites because the keywords used are very general. Other keywords tell Google the searcher is looking for a company nearby to do business with.
For example, let’s say you’re a local biotechnology company manufacturing an antibiotic. If someone googles the word “antibiotics” they are likely to find a lot of generalized information about the topic. Nothing local.
Instead, you may need to build a page focusing on this: “antibiotics biotechnology companies Utah.”
This search will show local companies nearby that are biotechnology companies working on antibiotics.
As digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO, we always think about intent. If we’re working in a very competitive space, we may target certain keywords where there is a greater chance of success.
More coming soon.