Hi, and welcome back to the simple SEO podcast today. I want to dig into. Five super common SEO mistakes. That people make, they keep you from ranking higher on Google or getting organic traffic to your website. So let's jump right in because this lesson is going to be super actionable. It should be very helpful. And hopefully. It will give you some ideas of what you've maybe done wrong in the past and where you can adjust things to get better results from your SEO. So the very first thing that I see very, very often. Is it people choose the wrong keyword. This is honestly one of the single most common mistakes from an SEO standpoint. So generally when people are searching for keywords, they're trying to figure out which ones they should use. They think about. Very big keywords. Based keywords things that have like one word or maybe two words. And they end up being way too competitive, especially for a small business website. So when I teach my free classes, this is almost always. One of the most common mistakes that I see when I ask people to brainstorm keywords for their business, they come back with things like shoes. Pillow cyber crime, um, party wedding venue, things that are great key words, but not for a small business, because they're going to be super, super competitive keywords. They have tons of search volume. And generally speaking. And there are ones that really big websites are going to rank for. They're not ones that little websites like you and I have are going to have a chance of ranking for. It's the same for me. I can't rank for how to do SEO on your website. Are you kidding? I'm never going to rank for that on Google. It's too competitive because everything really, truly related to SEO. Is. I mean, it's all owned by the SEO tools. It's all owned by the big brands and the big businesses. So it's the same thing. What I want you to think about. Our keywords that are not quite as competitive, there's going to be a big, big difference for you. In ones that are less competitive. So you want to look at something that's more long. Tail might even be a phrase. It could be 3, 4, 5 words, all strung together. It could be a question. What I want you to do. It's just kind of Google and kind of get an idea for what keywords might your ideal customer use. And then which ones are people like you ranking for and which ones are big businesses ranking for. And I want you to make sure that when you're checking to see who's ranking on Google, that you're using, what's called an incognito browser window. This is going to be really important. Because Google. Gives us personalized results, which means if you are using your Chrome browser and you go to your website on a regular basis. You may see your website higher in the search results than someone else would. So it's going to be really important that you look for a keyword where you have a really good chance of ranking. That is the number one mistake that I see people make when it comes to SEO is just. Going for a keyword, their website's never going to rank for that's going to be the first thing. The next thing I see. It's people using the generic title tags or meta descriptions that maybe you have the Yoast SEO plugin on WordPress, and you let Yost just create your title, tags and meta descriptions. That's not ideal because what they use for your title tag and your meta description are just like the first sentence of your copy. And your page name. It's not optimized. It may or may not have your keyword in it, depending on what you've named your page. Now, hopefully it's got your keyword. If you follow along and you learn what I teach you, we always talk about our keyword should be in our title because the content that we're creating should be about the keyword that we're using. But sometimes it's not in there. And if you have a title tag and a meta description, That are just generic or boring or even worse. You haven't optimized them at all. You have nothing there. Google's just going to pull information from the page that it thinks it might be about. And you really have no control over what shows up in the search results. And what I want you to understand is your title tag and your meta description show up in the search results. They're two-fold, they're benefiting you in two ways. One way is they're helping Google understand what your content is about so that Google knows, oh, this page is about this keyword. But they're also inviting your reader or potential reader. To click through and come to your website because you have the information that they need. So not optimizing your title, tags and meta descriptions on your website is a mistake that I see people make quite often now. If you're not sure how to do this, you don't know what the best practices are. I want you to go ahead and get the. Beginner's guide to SEO. It's on my website. It's at etched marketing.com forward slash freebies. Be sure to download that because that's going to walk you through this. It's going to show you what they look like. It's going to tell you how to format them. It's going to tell you what the best practices are, how long they should be. All of that. It's going to make it really simple for you. So make sure you get a copy of that. Then another mistake. I see. Is that people don't actually encourage clicks in their title tags. Your title tag can get more people to click through to your website. If you include a call to action term or verb, if you have the space. So your title tag is a maximum of 60 characters. So you are going to have limited space there, but if you can include a call to action, we've seen in research studies up to a 30% increase in the number of people who click through and visit the website just by having that call to action term in the title tags. So that's a really important thing that you could be doing. Another thing that you could do that. I see a lot of people miss. When we talk about SEO is. To optimize your images. So when you have images on your website page and you should, we need to have images, especially if we have like blog post or podcast show notes. Ideally we want to have pictures every hundred and 50 to 300 words. You really want to break it up and make it easier for people so that they can understand. They can see, they don't get overwhelmed with giant stretches of copy. You want to have space? You want to have bullet points. You want to have pictures, all of that to make it easier for people to read it. Those pictures can help you rank in Google image search. They also are something that Google looks at to understand what your page is about. So you want to optimize your pictures. The first thing that you want to do when we're optimizing pictures is you want to actually minify and all minify means is make your image file smaller because generally speaking, picture files or video files are huge and they slow things down. They slow down the load time on your website. And I know this is sounding a little bit technical and it is a tiny bit technical, but you can do this. And using different tools. There are free minification tools out there. I use JPEG mini. I upload my regular photo and it goes ahead and it turns it into a minified version of it. So that's the first thing is make your picture file smaller. You wanted in kilobytes, not megabytes, KB, not MB. That's going to load a whole lot faster. When you use a minification tool, it actually keeps the quality of your photo, but makes the file size smaller, a smaller file size loads, faster, which is going to be a better user experience. The other thing we want to do is name that file. We want to use our key words in that file name. So you want to do. Something like. Um, Keyword dash keyword, dash keyword, whatever your keyword is, you want to use that in the file name? Rather than just publishing it as like image 6, 7, 8, or image 5, 7, 9. That's going to make a big difference for you. Another mistake I see is people don't do their on-page optimization. They don't include header tags in between their copy. They just have one big block. Of copy and having header tags, that's going to be the bigger font that kind of separates the paragraphs on your page. Not only is it really good from a user standpoint, like a readability standpoint, it makes it easier for people to read your copy on your page. But it also is one more place that Google's going to look to understand what that page is about when you use your keyword in those header tags. Along with your copy. It makes a big difference. All right. So for today, the mistakes I want you to watch out for would be choosing the wrong keyword, really going after a keyword that is too competitive for your website. I want you to understand the difference between that, um, your title, tags and meta descriptions, either not being done or being done by your system or being incorrect, not encouraging a click, not asking people to click through potentially with that call to action term. Not minifying or updating the optimization, the file name on your images and not using header tags on your copy. This is one of those where you can take what you've learned in today's lesson and go look at your blog posts. And if you're not sure how to use title tags or what to do, or how to make any of this work. Go peek at my blog. You guys, it's there as an example for you. Generally speaking, it's going to have title tags. It's going to have are title tags and meta descriptions. It's going to have header tags. It's going to have copy blocks. It's going to have. Some bullet points or things. It's going to have some images like you should be able to find what you're looking for to understand how to format it. Just by taking a peek at my blog, it's there take a look at it. Obviously don't copy what I'm doing, but what I'm doing, isn't going to be applicable to your niche anyway. So take a look at the formatting to kind of help you understand visually what we're looking for. And then also, if you don't have it, get the SEO, the beginner's guide to SEO that's on the freebies tab at the website, etched marketing.com forward slash freebies. That's going to help you see and understand even more about how we're doing this and what we're doing from an SEO standpoint. And then if you're ready, take SEO 1 0 1. Which will help you learn even more and then join me in simple SEO content. And we will put all of this. Into action for your business. And I will walk you through the process step by step by step showing you the framework that you need to create great content that connects with your customer and gets shown to them by Google. All right, that's it for today. I'll see you back here next week. Bye. For now.