3 SEO Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make & How to Fix Them

Let’s talk about the three most common SEO mistakes entrepreneurs make and how to fix them. I have been reviewing websites for a long time and making websites myself, of course. I tend to see the same set of problems repeated over and over and over. So I thought I would make this little quick guide for you so that hopefully you can go double check your website and make sure that you are not making these SEO mistakes right now.

Mistake #1: Not Enough Content on Your Website

First of all, the most common thing I see is that people do not have enough content on their website and that is on a per page basis. Each page on your website counts individually and can actually be ranked individually. And this applies to both the main pages of your website and blog posts, because I know a lot of times we think, well, if my main pages are fine, but my blog posts are the thing I need to work on and vice versa, no, you definitely need to be checking how many words are on each page of your website. I recommend that you have a minimum of 500 words per page. That is the bare minimum, and my actual recommendation for the ideal number of words on a page is a thousand words. I feel like if you have at least a thousand words on each page of your website, you should be able to rank more easily because you have enough density in all the words that you’re using in order for Google to understand the page and rank the content.

So if your pages are a little bit thin, if you don’t have enough words on them, there’s a couple things you can do to help that. First of all, my number one tip is usually just to add testimonials, and I don’t mean images of testimonials. I mean write out the testimonials that you receive. And then the other thing that you can do is include frequently asked questions. This applies to both content pages, so like your service page or your about page as well as blog posts. If you write on a topic on a blog, and there’s a few things you know people usually always ask about that topic, include the FAQ on that page. You can also include testimonials on your blog post pages. Be sure that you’re including unique testimonials on all the pages so that you’re not repeating content. That is usually the number one thing. You can’t get Google to rank you if you don’t have enough content to rank.

So if you can just increase the amount of content that you start including on your pages, that should help you rank more easily. And if you’re wondering how you can find out how many words you have on a page on your website, you can go to one of my favorite tools, which is websitewordcounter.flap.tv. And you just paste in the URL of the page and it will tell you how many words you already have so that is super helpful in understanding where you’re at and how far you need to go in getting your pages up to scratch.

Mistake #2: Not Using the Right Keywords

The next mistake I commonly see for most entrepreneurs, is that they’re not using the right keywords on their website, whether that’s on their main pages like the about page or the services page or on their blog posts. It’s really common to just go for the obvious keywords and when we’re not used to doing SEO, that’s really, really common, but the problem is if you are a fitness coach, if you only try and target the keyword fitness coach, that’s going to be a really, really tough thing to rank for. That’s a 250 pound word. Like if you’re only used to lifting five pounds and you start to try and lift 250 pounds, you won’t be able to do it.

The longer your website has been around, the more authority it has, the more people link to it, the more likely you are to be able to use those bigger keywords and rank for them. But when you have a small site, which most entrepreneurs do, trying to rank for a keyword that big is difficult. So you actually need to be looking for the keywords that you can rank for, which are usually the longer, more complicated keywords, the ones with more words in them, things that are phrases, more detailed searches. Those are the types of things that you can start to rank for more easily because there’s less competition. And the way that you find those is by really getting in touch with your ideal client and what their problems are. And that’s why in the last few episodes I’ve had, you work a lot on that because that should be super revealing as to the type of thing you can start to create content around and rank for.

So instead of trying to shoot for that big, huge keyword which has so much competition, if you can start to harness the power of these smaller keywords, you’ll be able to rank for them more quickly and over time that’s going to effect the overall ranking of your website. They’re also usually very good for getting people to link to you. If you target a very complex keyword, one that has multiple words, then when people find that it’s usually solving a specific problem. So I can give you an example of this. For a fitness coach, if you were to try and rank for the keyword, “what is the difference between macro counting and calorie counting and which one is right for me?”. That’s a very long keyword, but because it’s so long, the chance of you ranking for it is much higher and the intent of someone searching for that keyword is that they need help with that topic and your ability to then harness that potential lead and have them become a customer is much higher. That is a thing you should really be looking at in terms of keywords is that we don’t want to focus on just the one big obvious keyword. We want to be really drilling down and finding multiple layers of keywords to use on a website and to use them really thoroughly in many different places. So you’ll have your main pages that don’t change very often and those types of pages, you may not have as much attention to long keywords, but whenever you create content that’s really your opportunity to be using these longer keywords. The phrases like I mentioned, and you should be trying to do that on a regular basis so that you can be harnessing more traffic from search.

Mistake #3: Wasting Space in Your Metatags

All right, last mistake that I see a lot of people make is wasting space in their meta-tags. Now, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, wait a second. What is a meta tag? That is a type of HTML that websites use. Back in the day we used to have to actually write the code for these in order to get them on a website, but I still have not found a single website builder that is being used right now that doesn’t allow you to create meta-tags right in the builder without having to actually write the code. You need to go look at your help section for your website builder, whether that’s Weebly or Wix or Squarespace or WordPress, whatever it is. You will be able to find a place where you can input your metatags and there are two parts to meta-tags. There is the title and there is the meta-description. The title is short. It’s about 60 characters long. It is what appears in search results. If you go to Google and you search for something, it’s going to show the blue link up at the top of the search result for that particular website. That’s the title.

And then the second part of meta-tags is the meta-description and that is longer about 120 characters-ish. It changes a lot. And that’s the part when you see a search result that is underneath the link, it’s usually in gray. It looks like a little paragraph description and it’s not the clickable part. When you go to make your meta tags, the most common problem I see is that people will waste space in the title using either their name, their business name, the name of the blog, and let me tell you your name and your business name are the very easiest thing for you to rank for. And if you keep putting those words into your metatags, eventually it’s going to affect your ranking because the meta-tags are a ranking signal. If you’re wasting keyword space on the easiest to rank for things which is your name and your business name, then that’s going to negatively affect you.

You want to use all the real estate in your tags, especially in your title on the keywords for that page, whether it’s a primary page of your website such as your services page or your about page or your homepage, or it’s a blog post. Since you have so little space to work with, you have to be very careful that you’re using the most important keywords for that page in the meta-tags and if you’re not sure how your meta tags are appearing, how they’re coded, how they look in search results, then I recommend you go to SERPsim.com. You can plug in the URL of a page and it will show you exactly how your meta-tags are appearing.

So those are the things that I find most common are a problem for most entrepreneurs, not having enough content on pages, using the wrong keywords on pages and wasting space in the meta-tags. Each of those things coming together. When you take each of those things and bring them together, it can make a really big difference in improving your SEO over time. Especially if you get consistent on those things. And the good news is, if if you have a page that’s not ranking very well right now, you can actually go back and fix things on that page and it will improve your ranking. So that goes for even old blog posts. If you have a blog post that you made years ago and it did pretty well at the time, but now the rankings are not as good anymore, if you go back and improve that page, improve the word count, add new content, rework the keyword strategy, improve the meta tags, you can actually bump that page back up to the top of search results. So no content that you create is ever wasted. You should focus on always go going back and making things better. Look for the things that aren’t performing as well and see how you can improve them because it’s been proven over and over again that you can actually re-rank a page in even just a day if you make improvements on your website and for your search engine optimization.

If you like this episode, head on over to Instagram @tinygiantmarketing and shoot me a DM because I have a list of more common mistakes that entrepreneurs make when they are trying to do their SEO that I can share with you. If you want this to be an ongoing series, let me know and I’ll make it happen.