As a small business owner, you know how competitive the local market is. Anything to give yourself an edge to improve your visibility, get more leads and increase sales is a must. When a user searches for a local product or service, Google automatically presents a list of the first three businesses it considers the most relevant.

A firm understanding of SEO mistakes to avoid can combat technical issues early on and allow your website to perform at its best. With nearly 80 percent of users preferring organic results over paid advertisements, more establishments and businesses are turning to SEO as their go-to internet marketing strategy. To top it off, a good number of those searchers are converted into clients or customers.

A good structure for SEO has a smooth transition from one point to another, until it concludes. We’ve looked in great detail at some of the specific SEO fundamentals businesses should adhere to—and at the common mistakes that businesses make with each. But there are also some overarching fundamentals our respondents recommend. To prevent getting hit with a manual action, avoid these common SEO mistakes. “Not only should those be properly set up, but they also need to be monitored and maintained as if they were any other social media account,” Coats says.

The harsh reality of link building is sometimes the most well-written content still doesn’t get links. Sure, the content might be well optimized, but you also need to think about the impression it’ll give visitors. People can tell whether or not content is unique and valuable, and if it’s not, you’ll lose trust, and you’ll have a much harder time getting them to take action. It’s easy to get caught up watching which phrases are sending you the most traffic, and then getting bummed when you can’t rank for those super-competitive, high-traffic keywords. Many times, lower-traffic phrases will convert better because they’re more specific, and getting first page rankings for several of them can drive quite a few sales. Without a link to your sitemap.xml in your robots.txt file, search engines will not be able to fully understand the structure of your site.

You could, for example, add the area in which your company is located to the keyword. But there’s more you can do to make your keywords more long tail, as we call it. The links that guide your visitors in and out of your customer journeys can damage your overall user experience and, in turn, your search performance. Google simply will not rank sites that deliver a poor user experience. Many marketers and business owners fail to get results from their search engine optimization efforts.

How much content your site needs depends on the page’s topic, the type of content you’re writing, and what your audience expects. In the end, that limits the potential of the content to reach the audience, no matter what part of the buying cycle is being targeted. A best-answer content strategy focused on creating content with the most relevance to their audience was the SEO Mistakes ticket to better marketing performance for a martech SaaS company.

The problem with using such techniques is that Google no longer tolerates link building that has no other value than passing ‘link juice’ from one page to another. In the near past keyword anchor text links were very important for rankings, but now if you have many of those you can get a penalty instead. It is really a crime not taking advantage of speed as a ranking factor. If there is one factor that we know for sure that it affects your ranking position, this is page speed. Google has many times mentioned that webmasters should pay attention to internal links because it helps them navigate a website better.

SEO experts listen closely to Matt Cutts, one of Google’s top people in the world of search. He warns that if a search engine can’t explore your website it simply doesn’t know what to make of it, and Google won’t rank it. Google is on to the old trick of over-using keywords in site page text. The reasonable and sensible incorporation of important words is appropriate, but search engines recognize needless repetition and throw in the penalty flag for violations.