Who else wants to build a money making blog? Hands down, every blogger is desperately looking for ways to create a profitable blog that gets more search traffic and sales.
If you’re struggling to increase your search engine traffic and website sales, you might be making few deadliest SEO mistakes. So let’s talk about the 5 biggest mistakes that are costing you a ton of traffic and sales.
Avoid them and you’ll be on your way to building a blog that gets more traffic (including sales). Let’s get into the details without further ado.
Avoid These 5 SEO Mistakes to Build A Profitable Blog
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Strategic keyword research is missing
Keyword research is the process of finding better keywords for your blog in order to increase your overall search traffic. Most beginner bloggers struggle to get more search traffic because they publish blog posts without doing any keyword research.
Or they don’t do smart keyword research.
So if you’re also one among them, here’s how you can do strategic research to find traffic generating keywords for your blog.
Find long-tail keyword phrases
The best way to do keyword research is to find low competitive (less monthly searches) keywords. That way, you can get first page rankings even if you’re running a new site.
When it comes to low competitive keywords, long tail keywords play a key role. These keywords usually contain 3 or more keywords in them.
Some of the examples of long-tail keywords include:
- Best apps for iPhone users
- Cheap flight tickets from Delhi to Bangalore
- How to lose weight without hitting the gym
- Best Black Friday hosting deals
- And the list goes on
As you can see, the above keywords are long-tail keywords and they are much easier to rank when compared to short-tail keywords like:
- iPhone apps
- Cheap flight tickets
- How to lose weight
- And so on
You can use free tools like Google autosuggest to easily come up with tons of long-tail keyword ideas.
Are you getting it?
Long tail keywords help you increase your search traffic even if you’re running a brand new site. They also convert high and you can rank for multiple keywords with long tail SEO.
Did you know that 70% of the search traffic comes from long tail keywords? Yes, that’s true.
So start targeting long tail keyword phrases if you want to increase your search traffic and sales.
Focus on the right keyword metrics
While doing keyword research, there are a couple of keyword metrics that matter a lot. Let’s discuss some of them so you can find the right keywords to boost your organic traffic.
- Keyword difficulty (KD): It’s a metric provided by a ton of online SEO tools ranging from Ubersuggest to KWFinder to SEMrush and so on. It allows you to estimate how hard it would be to rank a new website on Google search for a particular keyword. Focus on finding keywords with less than 40 (Or 30) KD.
- CPC value: This gives you an idea of how profitable a keyword is. The higher the CPC, the better it is for you to increase your sales.
- Competition: You need to analyse the competition for the keywords you want to rank for. If a keyword has too much of competition (and if you see the top 10 search results are filled with branded and big sites), it’s better to avoid them!
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Ignoring the optimization part altogether
Keyword research is one thing and optimizing your pages for your desired keywords is another thing.
Keyword optimization is one of the most important on-page factors that can make or break your SEO success.
But most people often ignore their optimization part. They publish blog posts without optimizing for any primary or secondary keywords. That’s the reason why they struggle to get more traffic from search engines.
When it comes to optimizing keywords, you need to do keyword research (we already have discussed above) and use your targeted keywords in primary places including;
- Title tag
- Meta description
- URL
- Throughout body text (don’t stuff the same keywords, use LSI keywords)
Even if you’re running a fairly new website, you can get top rankings with proper on-page SEO. Install SEO by Yoast or Rank Math plugin (both these plugins are free to use) to optimize your blog posts for your desired keywords.
That being said, here are some of the most important factors that you need to focus on while optimizing your blog posts.
- Keyword density (it is the percentage of times a particular keyword appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page)
- Keyword proximity (it refers to how close together keywords are to one another on a web page and search engines usually give more preference to the keywords that are closely assigned together)
- Keyword prominence (it refers to how relevant your primary keywords are when compared to other elements like title tags, meta tags and so on).
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You’re not updating old blog posts
What’s the point of publishing new blog posts if you’re not updating your old posts? Whether you agree with it or not, you can get a ton of search traffic if you frequently update your old content.
Even if you have published “timeless content”, with time, that content will certainly age and start losing its “freshness”. There’s already too much competition out there. So some of your competitors wrote better content or created visually appealing infographics or made some gigantic videos to outrank you.
That’s the reason why you should always keep an eye on your old blog posts (which are already generating you decent traffic from search engines).
Once you have found traffic-generating posts that are not updated for the last couple of months or years, you need to start working on them immediately. You can use Google Analytics to easily find the top-performing posts and pages on your site.
Now, use spreadsheets or something similar to create a list of all the URLs that you want to work on. Then, use the following tips to bring new life and more search traffic to your old posts.
- Improve your metadata: The first thing to work on while updating your old posts is to improve your existing metadata including titles and meta descriptions. If your URL is too big or vague, try to use 301 redirects and create shorter and optimized URLs for better optimization.
- Use new keywords: You should also perform keyword research to find new LSI keywords and long tail keywords to include them with your old content. If your old posts are not optimized at all, this is the right time and try to include your keywords in title, meta, image alt tags etc.
- Add fresh information: The major reason to update your old blog posts is to fill out new information. If any content is outdated, remove it and update it with the latest information. Change dates if possible.
- Promote again: Once you updated your old blog posts, push them to the home page to give more exposure. Promote your old posts again on social media sites for maximum impact and social shares.
- Keep an eye on your links: You might have used a ton of links (internal and external links) within your old posts. So check out if all those links are working fine and not leading to 404 error pages. Replace existing links or add new links to the sites so you can reach out to the bloggers to promote your stuff.
Last but not least, make sure to rework on your existing headlines. Whether you know it or not, on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. Headlines are extremely important. So spend time on making them powerful.
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Not investing in the RIGHT SEO tools
Increasing your search traffic and sales is NOT an easy task (especially if you’re new to the blogging world). So you need access to the right tools to improve your overall organic traffic. Yes, there are a ton of free tools out there but most of them don’t provide you comprehensive data. When it comes to SEO, you need accurate and in-depth data while doing keyword research, competitor analysis, website audits and so on. Here’s where premium SEO tools come into play as they provide you a ton of data including support assistance (and frequent updates).
Another reason to invest in premium tools is that you work even harder when you’re putting money. When you’ve access to free tools, you don’t value them. But when you’re paying something every month (or yearly) for a tool, you’ll definitely learn more about how to make the most out of it.
That being said, here’s a list of some of the best-paid SEO tools that are worth every penny.
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
- KWFinder
If you’re looking for some free tools, here are a couple of them which are as good as premium SEO tools.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- Ubersuggest
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Forgetting the importance of backlinks
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Backlinks play a crucial role in increasing your website’s search engine traffic. Search engines like Google give a lot of weightage to the pages with quality and diversified links.
According to Moz, all top 50 search results had at least one link pointing to their sites.
So if you’re ignoring link building, you’re making a huge mistake. Although there are a ton of ways to get links but the following 3 ways are always evergreen and work like a charm no matter what niche you are in.
- Build relationships: The whole purpose of blogging is to help each other out. You need to create a network and build strong relationships with other bloggers in your niche. You can use guest posts, social media sites like Facebook, emails, etc to connect with other bloggers. The key here is to link out to other relevant bloggers frequently and email them whenever you do so. They will also reciprocate in the future (or when you ask for links).
- Write guest posts: Guest posting is definitely an evergreen strategy to build relevant and quality backlinks to your site. The key here is to build a list of websites that often publish great content on their blogs.
Don’t publish guest posts on mediocre blogs as those links don’t add much value to your website’s backlink profile. Instead, pick highly informative blogs and spend quality time to write in-depth guest posts. - Create link-worthy content: There’s a reason why authority sites always get a ton of incoming links from other sites all over the blogosphere. The reason is that most of the authority sites produce top-notch content.
So if you want to get links to increase your search traffic, you should create link-worthy content. Make sure to create ultimate guides, how-to articles and so on related to trending and popular topics in your niche.
Over to you
Although you can’t see outstanding results overnight because search engine optimization takes time. Make sure to avoid the SEO mistakes mentioned above and try to learn from your competitors.
So what are your thoughts? Did you like this post? If yes, please share it with others. If you’ve any more questions, do let us know in the comments.
You shared very well your SEO experience. A long-tail keyword is very useful to rank any post on search. But it difficult to place twice or thrice in one blog post.
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Thanks for the article. I would like some clarification though. What’s your take on using free tools for keywords research? When do you consider ‘x number of backlinks is okay for this post? How about not updating a blog post thats already ranking #1 on google search?
if anyone starts blogging so he should concentrate on On-page SEO which for the new blogger yoast is the best software, which reminds you everything about SEO at the time of writing and these work great for search engine
Yes, Anil, Its very important, t’s a metric provided by a ton of SEO tools ranging from Ubersuggest to KWFinder to SEMrush and so on. It allows you to estimate how hard it would be to rank a new website on Google search for a particular keyword. Focus on finding keywords with less than 40 (Or 30) KD.
Thank you for breaking this down so well, Anil! These insights you shared are useful and timely especially in this time and age when most businesses are aiming to gain traffic and sales online. I couldn’t agree more with everything you said here, particularly about backlinks and the updates on previous blog posts.
Backlinks have always been an important ranking factor and when done right, every business with SEO campaigns can climb the shiny heights of search engines.
Not updating old blog posts is the most common mistake I have seen among bloggers. I have also made this mistake. Thanks for letting us know about all SEO mistakes.
Indeed a useful post about SEO mistakes, It’s best to learn from other’s mistakes than to feel the urge to commit one by oneself & then think of learning. I think we’ve all made some of these mistakes to some degree or another.
Choosing the wrong keywords during the keyword research was always a worst mistake I’ve done in the initial days.