5 Fatal Mistakes That Will Cost Your Website in the Long Run

Let this sink in: your website is your virtual storefront/office. And how you build it will add or subtract your revenue earning potential.

Over time, internet users have been tuned to appreciate certain designs and certain types of content, among other critical elements of a website. As such, it has become more important than ever to build your website with the audience in mind.

It has been echoed through time that a good website:

• Has a great design.
• Is easy to navigate.
• Has images and other visuals to break the monotony.
• Has great content.

While all these factors are true, we need to take in a closer look at some existing – yet often unnoticed – mistakes that people make when and after building their websites. In this post, we’ll explore 5 fatal mistakes that might just leave your website in ruins in the long run.

1. Shifting Focus Away from SEO Because It’s “Difficult”

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the single most important factors for the success of a website. I cannot stress enough how important SEO is, especially for small businesses aiming to carve out a decent chunk of traffic from the web.?

Unfortunately, most startup websites focus more on the design of the website rather than its ability to rank well on search engines.

But first, what is SEO?

SEO is an umbrella term that covers all the measures and practices aimed towards making your website search engine-friendly. The goal of SEO is to put your website at the top the search engine results page.?

But before we dive into the fabric of SEO, it is important to point out that making your website appear in Google’s first results page starts with tapping into organic traffic ( through non-paid means) and “purchasing” traffic from paid searches.

The former offers budget-friendly ways to cut across the noise and bring your website to the first results page. Doing this requires heavy investments in:

• Blog content creation – Blogging is a solid way to attract decent traffic to your website. Not only does it bring educational value to your audience, it also brings out your website as an authority in your field.
• Social media – Statista estimates that the number of people using social media is expected to hit 6 billion by 2027. From these numbers, it’s easy to see why websites are such a rich source of organic traffic because that’s where your target audience dwells. It is important to leverage social media by posting short, digestible, and engaging content (videos, images, and articles for your ideal audience).
• Email marketing – For anyone that thought email marketing was dead, think again. You would be surprised to learn that an astonishing 89% of marketers swear by email marketing as their primary lead generation channel. And it so happens that your website is a great source for collecting prospect emails through a lead form.

All these channels (and many more), when put together, cement your marketing efforts and edge your business towards positive growth.

Now, back to SEO…

The whole idea behind is to bring traffic to your website by placing your website in a place where it can be seen by your ideal audience. This can be done by:

Adding Relevant Keywords Naturally Throughout Your Content

Google loves keywords, but loves your content even more when relevant keywords are placed naturally throughout the text.?

The problem is, after generating keywords from their favorite keyword research tools, many content marketers end up jamming ridiculous phrases at the wrong places throughout the text.

Try this instead. If keywords don’t sound natural where you’ve placed them, find other locations. OR use their variants instead. A longer keyword such as “Dental Service Washington DC” can be rearranged to “Washington DC Dental Service” to fit better into the body of the article.

The idea is to tell people and search engines what your website is all about without stuffing keywords into your content.

Factoring in Relevance in Your Content Creation Process

Relevance is yet another ranking factor that many content marketers forget to factor in when developing content for their websites.?

This is evident from the sheer number of web pages that barely scratch the surface on answering the user’s queries.

As the average attention span drops by the day, content marketers have to try their best to answer user queries fast. Think about what your audience would type on the browser. What would they be looking for? What would you be looking for if you were them?

To figure out what your audience wants for free, go to your browser and start typing in your query. A list of the most popular search queries will appear. From this, you can extract what your audience would want to know. Try out other possible queries and use these as the basis for your keyword strategy.

Building Trust with Search Engines and Your Audience

Trust is the back bone of Google’s engagement with businesses and their websites.?

For any search engine to give prevalence to your content, it must first trust that you have the answers.

Building trust with your audience starts with creating great quality content that demonstrates your expertise provides solutions to people’s problems. What you put out to the world should reflect your experience and authority in your field. But more importantly, it should provide a solution to a problem.

Quality content is important because it attracts more backlinks, including those from high-quality websites. To? Google, this is another strong indicator that the information brought out on your website is trustworthy (hence the more high-quality backlinks you have, the more trustworthy your site is).

Once you’ve created high-quality content, you need to focus on creating even more content on a consistent basis. This will signal Google that you’re active.

There’s more to SEO. But at the core of it all lies great content. Once you get good quality content, everything else shouldn’t be hard to put in place.

2. Failing to Update Your Website Regularly

The internet is a dynamic place. People are dynamic. Companies are dynamic in nature. Nothing stays constant forever, because things keep changing. As such, it is important to keep up with the changes at all times.

Updating a website sounds like a tedious task – which it is. Things can quickly escalate if you have a couple hundred pages that need to be updated every now and then.

Let’s start with your written content.

Several items make up a vital part of your web pages. What you want to focus on more is the existing links. Specifically, broken links on your website.

Here’s why broken links need to be cleansed:

Broken links contribute to a negative user experience. Ever clicked on a link only to find a 404 error on the other end of the barrel? If you’re like most people, you’re likely going to bounce off to another source of information that provides answers in completeness.

When it comes to broken links, or dead links as some like to call them, we can look at the issue from two perspectives:

• Broken internal links – Internal links are supposed to take readers to a specific page on your website, for instance, your sales page. If the link is broken, your conversion rates could see a steady decline from a latent cause.
• Broken external links – External links take readers to third-party websites and other information resources. They may redirect readers to a YouTube video, another article, a statistic, a research paper – you name it.

Fixing broken links allows Google and other search engine spiders to crawl your web pages effortlessly. But that’s only half the solution.

While updating your website, you might want to refresh old content and replace it with new ideas. This is crucial for websites that serve rapidly evolving niches, such as travel. Look for outdated bits of information and replace them with new, fresh ideas.

Of course, updating old content demands a lot of time and attention to detail, which might look overwhelming. If that’s the case, consider getting in touch with a professional content writer to do it for you. At The Alternate Writer, we create, recreate, and repurpose old content so you don’t have to spend a fortune developing new content with the old content still good to use.

3. Leaning Towards the Process and Completely Forgetting the Goal

Many digital and content marketers are easily swayed by flashy metrics that barely reflect the actual status of their website. They focus more on the content development process and totally forget about the results they were aiming for.

It is not uncommon to find a content marketer or website owner pestering their dedicated content writer(s) all the time for pesky details that add nothing to the site. Some situations writers have to deal with include:

• Misplaced punctuation marks, such as commas.
• The use of passive voice.
• Choice of words.

Unless these minor details somehow alter the meaning of a sentence or impact how the message of the article is delivered to the audience, they should not be a cause of alarm. Besides, you and the dedicated writer have other more pressing matters to tend to rather than argue about where the comma should be placed in the sentence. There’s Grammarly for that.

Now, going back to the process, you need to ask these two questions:

Would you rather:

1. Have a beautiful website with tons of content, great designs, and easy-to-navigate pages but lower conversion rates.
2. Have a bare bones website with just enough content to get you the leads that power your business?

A smart content marketer knows that the process should lead to the goal. Because without the goal, you cannot justify the means.

So, instead of shifting your attention to merely having a process, focus on the goal to be achieved instead. You can start by writing down the main objectives and working backwards to develop a process that leads to the goal. For instance, if you aim to win more more traffic to your website you can start by:

• Writing down the goal (i.e. get more traffic to the website).
• Identifying the challenges that litter your path.
• Jotting down the opportunities that could lead to you getting more traffic.
• Pointing out the resources that you need to get more traffic, for instance, large volumes of quality content with some help from your AI writing assistant.

While at it, you might want to run your own experiments because no process works the same for all companies.

The point is, focus on what matters the most – getting the results you want.

4. Drawing Conclusions and Making Vital Decisions Too Early

Websites are tricky business. Running one can have you in an emotional roller coaster when you get high traffic and more leads than you can handle at one point to almost nothing the next day.

With websites, it’s always best to give your content time to hit its full potential before drawing conclusions.

For starters, you might want to wait at least a month to really determine how certain pieces of content perform.

In some cases, you might need to wait between two to three months to see your content in action. In some cases, you might have to wait 8-12 months to see some traffic surges from certain pieces of content.

Now, here comes the problem:

If you just built your website, you might get too excited when you see some numbers surging in the early days. Some articles will pick up traffic immediately, which is a good sign that they’re resonating with the ideal audience.

Other articles may experience some smaller numbers – or no traffic at all. If you’re the person who pulls down bad investments the moment you see them, you might be tempted to take down these articles, repurpose them, or discard them altogether.

I would advise you not to make hasty decisions. Great content ages like fine wine.

As mentioned earlier, it takes Google a couple of weeks or months before they can fully trust your website. On the bright side, once they do trust your website as an authority, you will start to see some decent traffic streaming in to your website.

5. Not Diversifying Your Sources of Traffic

We all know too well that putting your eggs in one basket is a big mistake, especially for the long run.

At first, beginner website owners focus only on one source of traffic that seems to work. If, for instance, search brings in more traffic than other channels, they seem to focus only on that and ignore other potential traffic sources.

The problem with relying on one source of traffic is that your site may become more vulnerable to fluctuations, such as the occasional search algorithm updates that may tank your rankings.

Thankfully, there are several marketing channels you can look to and build your traffic, including:

• Paid search – Paid search is a broad topic that deserves a separate article. However, its main role is to drive traffic to the website through PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns. A PPC campaign launches your website to the top of the results page for a charge every time someone clicks on the page. The money paid per click depends on the demand for the keyword. Keywords are auctioned and the number one spot goes to the highest bidder.
• Guest posting – Guest posting grants you the golden opportunity to get quality backlinks to your site. Only that this time, you’re in control over who links back to your website. With guest posting, you can create a valuable article for the host website and get rewarded with one or two links to your site. Here, some traffic flows from the host to the guest website. Additionally, having more backlinks to your site from guest posting can signal relevant and trustworthy information and boost your rankings.

Last but not least, you can tap into your existing online assets for more traffic. For instance, try to answer people’s questions on Quora and Reddit. Write an original, fact-filled article and publish it on LinkedIn. Write stories for your audience on Medium.

The idea is to leverage all your assets to work for you.

Conclusion

In conclusion, try to avoid these mistakes if you truly value growth for your website in the long run.?

What other mistakes have you spotted yet nobody talks about them? I'd love to hear them in the comments!