7 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make When Using SEO in 2023

Delving into the world of entrepreneurship is an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, filled with adrenaline highs and challenging lows. Along the way, small business owners can make some common mistakes that can hurdle their growth. In this SEO-focused blog post, we’ll dissect and discuss these pitfalls – the ‘mistakes small business owners make’, while offering insightful tips on how to avoid them to better position your business for long-term success. Once you know the biggest SEO mistakes to avoid, be sure to contact Renaissance Marketing for help implementing your SEO strategy.

Mistake 1: Neglecting Local SEO

Small businesses predominantly serve their local communities. Whether it’s a corner bakery, a law firm, a car repair shop, or any other local business, local customers are a major part of their customer base. Optimizing their SEO efforts to target their local community is not just beneficial for these businesses, but also vital. However, it is not uncommon to find small business owners neglecting Local SEO in their marketing strategies. Many mistakenly believe that because they have a local following, their local presence online isn’t crucial. Others might be unaware of what Local SEO is, or how significant a role it can play in their growth strategy.

Local SEO is a branch of search engine optimization that focuses on optimizing websites to be found in local search results. If search results are real estate for businesses to attract potential customers, Local SEO is an important part of the view. Essentially, local SEO is a strategic process that focuses on emphasizing the optimization efforts of local brick-and-mortar businesses. The consequence of neglecting Local SEO is a lack of visibility in the local community that the business serves. Without Local SEO, a business is not prominently displayed on search engine results when people search for local businesses in a specific area with good reviews from people nearby. This lack of visibility can cause them to miss out on potential customers.

Renaissance Marketing understands SEO mistakes to avoid. We help our clients pick location-specific strategies that include content, site structure, social media, and Google Business Profile listings. We understand that local SEO is a significant aspect of online visibility that can drastically improve a business’s exposure in their local community, driving more traffic, leads, and ultimately, sales.

Check out our Local SEO Guide!

Mistake 2. Overlooking Keyword Research

Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. Businesses that disregard this crucial step risk their digital content being invisible to their audiences despite their content being high quality. Because content is not aligned with what potential customers are searching for, skipping keyword research can result in low website traffic. This means you’re missing out on potential customers, and that’s why the use of accurate and relevant keywords is crucial for your business’s online success. A content piece crafted without considering relevant keywords will most likely become unproductive in the vast ocean of digital content that is on the internet.

High-volume keywords are terms frequently used in search queries. It means that a large number of internet users are searching for content related to these terms. Identifying and incorporating relevant high-volume keywords into your online content makes your content more likely to be found by search engines which leads to increased user traffic. However, it’s important to note that using relevant keywords is as crucial as their volume. Keywords need to be relevant to your business and the products or services you offer. Irrelevant keywords might fetch traffic, but they’ll not convert to customers because they don’t match user intent.

Renaissance Marketing helps businesses focus on the concepts that will help them get found, essentially zeroing in the scope before shooting the bullseye. If businesses are not investing time in keyword research by identifying and incorporating strategic high-volume, relevant keywords into their digital content, how can they hit their target? Good keyword research improves search engine rankings and ultimately drives more traffic to websites.

Mistake 3. Ignoring Meta Descriptions and Title tags

Meta descriptions and title tags are highly influential SEO elements that often go overlooked, but should be a key focus for small business owners striving to increase their online visibility. Meta descriptions are brief summaries that appear underneath the web page title in search engine results. They are a place where you can provide a succinct, compelling description of what your page offers, influencing whether a user will click through to your site or not. This is valuable real estate and shouldn’t be ignored! Including relevant keywords within these descriptions can significantly improve your page rankings on search engines, as it signals to Google and users what your page is about. If businesses ignore these critical areas, they not only risk low visibility in search engines but also face difficulty in compelling users to visit their sites.

Remember, your meta description and title tag act as a mini advertisement for your page. Even though they don’t directly affect SEO, their impact on click-through rates indirectly influences your page’s ranking on SERPs. Overall, the strategic use of meta descriptions and title tags is a straightforward and effective tactic for boosting search engine performance and visibility. They should be unique, informative, and relevant to your audience’s needs – this is what differentiates successful small businesses in a highly competitive digital landscape.

Mistake 4. Publishing Thin, Poor-Quality Content

Thin content refers to material that doesn’t provide significant value to the reader. This could include shallow articles, pages with little to no text, duplicate content, automatically generated content, or pages with a disproportionately high amount of ads. The issue with thin content is that search engines, specifically Google, aim to deliver the most valuable and relevant results to their users, and thin, poor-quality content doesn’t fit this criteria and can hurt a website’s rank. Also, poor-quality content typically lacks proper keyword optimization. 

This doesn’t mean to limit the quantity you publish, but rather balancing the quantity with quality. Valuable content attracts more backlinks, encourages users to stay on your website longer (potentially improving your bounce rate), and enhances your website’s overall authority – all crucial factors that can improve your SEO ranking. Businesses should aim to create content that educates, inspires, or entertains their audience, while also carefully integrating relevant keywords. Renaissance Marketing is proud to provide collaborative content updates for our clients that align with our overall marketing strategy.

Mistake 5. Overdoing SEO Optimization

Many small business owners are often so concerned with ranking higher on search engines that they forget about the basic principle of SEO – to provide valuable, relevant, and quality content to users. Some companies believe that if stuffing their content with keywords and piling on backlinks has worked wonders before, doing so excessively would fetch them even greater results. This is where they miss the mark. Over-optimization can lead to penalties from Google, degraded user experience, and potential loss of organic traffic.

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of loading webpage content with keywords in an unnatural manner. Such excessive use of keywords can lead to content that is forced, unreadable, and devoid of value. Google ranks content based on quality and relevance, and keyword stuffed content may be demoted, as it fails to offer actual value to the users. Google’s algorithm has become more sophisticated over the years and now can understand the relevance and usefulness of content, beyond mere keywords and backlinks, and rank that accordingly. Unnecessary repetition of keywords, or links from low-quality, irrelevant sites, can trigger Google’s ‘over-optimization penalty’, which would significantly diminish your site’s search engine performance.

Instead, SEO should be implemented mindfully, without sacrificing the quality of content or user experience. Great content that is naturally incorporated with relevant keywords, supplemented with valuable backlinks, will prove much more successful in boosting website traffic and improving search engine ranking. Renaissance Marketing understands that the user experience matters the most and that good, relevant content will always have an audience. 

Mistake 6. Not Using Analytics Tools

Among SEO mistakes, not tracking your online progress is a grave one. Analytic tools, such as Google Analytics, are powerful instruments that provide crucial information about how your website is performing. This is an integral part of SEO efforts, which small business owners often tend to miss out on. Without data to support strategies, it’s simply guesswork. Google Analytics, for instance, gives you insights into which of your pages are attracting more visitors, where the visitors are coming from (both geographically and in terms of referral platforms), how much time they’re spending on your website, and much more. All of these details can guide your future SEO strategies.

By not using analytics tools, you miss out on these insights, which can mean missed opportunities for growth and improvement. You won’t know what’s working and what isn’t, where you’re struggling and where you’re excelling, and you can’t make informed decisions or smart strategies without this knowledge. Utilizing analytics tools is essential for any business owner engaging in SEO. They not only provide valuable insights but also guide and shape your SEO strategies moving forward, ultimately ensuring that your digital presence is as effective as possible. At Renaissance, we set up and monitor analytics for our clients. We adjust strategy and provide high-level reporting to our customers so they can focus on running their successful businesses.

Mistake 7. Not Being Mobile-Optimized

In today’s tech-centric era, with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, internet access is primarily mobile. As of 2023, most online browsing, whether shopping, news-reading, or information-searching, is done through these portable devices. Thus, it is imperative to ensure that your small business website is optimized for mobile use. Mobile optimization refers to the process of adjusting your website content to ensure it is accessible and viewable on mobile devices. It accounts for dimensions, resolutions, hardware capabilities, and accessibility options that smartphones and tablets offer. A website must not only appear good on mobile devices but function well too, maintaining smooth navigation and quick loading speeds.

Failing to make your website mobile-friendly can create several issues. For starters, a poor mobile interface leads to a negative user experience, which can frustrate visitors and drive them away from your site, potentially losing you business. Mobile optimization also directly impacts your search engine rankings. Since 2015, Google has elevated the importance of mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor in its algorithm. This means that websites not optimized for mobile use stand a good chance of being pushed down in search engine results pages (SERPs), regardless of their content relevance. Need help with your mobile optimization?

Online Advertising FAQs

1. How can online advertising help my business?

In short, we know that online advertising, including SEO, provides cost-effective, measurable results that lead to accelerated sales.

Online advertising maximizes brand visibility. Today, consumers primarily use digital platforms for shopping. Effective online ads can make your brand a familiar name among this vast audience, leading to increased brand awareness, recognition, and recall. Moreover, digital advertising can be the best way to reach your target market. It allows for pinpoint targeting, where you can tailor your ad campaign based on various demographics, behaviors, and interests. By advertising to virtually everyone, businesses waste resources reaching people who have no interest in their product or service.

Online advertising can accelerate sales while being cost-effective. All ads, especially those tailored with clear calls to action, can convert potential customers and boost sales. Digital methods often deliver higher Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) compared to traditional advertising methods. Unfortunately, many small business owners believe that online advertising is costly, a misconception that discourages them from exploring this opportunity. Most ad platforms allow for flexible budget settings, making it accessible and affordable for everyone.

2. What type of online advertising is best for my business?

The best type of online advertisement for your business hugely depends on the nature of the business and the target audience.

A crucial step small businesses often miss is correctly identifying and understanding their target audience. Without this knowledge, your advertising will always miss its mark. You need to consider factors like customer demographics, their interests, their online behavior, and their needs.

There are many types of online advertising options available, which include SEO, Pay-per-Click (PPC), social media ads, display ads, and programmatic advertising, to name a few. Each of these types has its pros and cons and works better for some businesses than others. For instance, PPC – where advertisers pay a fee each time their ads get clicked – is a great way of buying visits to your site.

SEO plays a crucial role regardless of the type of online advertising chosen. SEO helps improve the visibility of the business online, making it easier for potential customers to find you. It’s integral in driving organic traffic to your website that can translate into sales. At Renaissance, we view SEO as essential to any good digital marketing campaign because we know it will yield sustained growth for our customers. Renaissance can help research your target audience and recommend a mix of advertising methods to give your business the best results. Need help? How to Calculate Your 2023 Marketing Budget

Renaissance Marketing is Your Small Business SEO Partner

At Renaissance Marketing, we pride ourselves on being a trustworthy partner in your SEO journey. We understand that the realm of digital marketing can be daunting and costly. However, our dedicated team at Renaissance is committed to offering exceptional service and transparency as we navigate your business towards success. By making consistent efforts to avoid the above biggest SEO mistakes and strategize wisely, small business owners can fully leverage the potential of SEO to enhance their digital marketing efforts, connect with more customers and scale their businesses successfully.