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

Let this sink in: your website is your virtual storefront. And how you treat your virtual storefront will add or subtract to your revenue-earning potential.

Over time, people have been tuned to appreciate certain types of content, which makes it more important than ever to build your website with the target 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 visual elements to break the monotony.
• Has great content.

While all these factors ring true, we need to take a closer look at some existing – yet often unnoticed – mistakes that people make when and after building their websites.

In this post, we rounded up 5 fatal mistakes that might just leave your website in ruins in the future.

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

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 websites aiming to carve out a decent chunk of traffic from the internet.

But a majority of new websites focus more on the design of the website rather than its ability to rank well on search engines.

SEO is a broad umbrella term that covers all the measures and practices aimed towards making your website search engine-friendly. The main goal of SEO is to bring your site to the front page of search engine results.

Before we dive into the fabric of SEO, it is important to point out that boosting your ranking starts with tapping into organic traffic (through non-paid means, of course) 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, usually over a long period of time. Doing this requires heavy investments in:

• Blog content creation – Blogging regularly attracts decent genuine traffic to your website. It attracts people who genuinely care about the industry, products, and services. Providing educational value to your audience brings out your website as an authority in your field.
• Social media marketing – The number of social media users is estimated to hit 6 billion by 2027. From these numbers, it’s easy to see why many companies today share short, digestible, and engaging content on social media.
• Email marketing – If you thought that 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.

Now, back to SEO…

The whole idea behind SEO is to bring more and more traffic to your website by:

Adding Relevant Keywords Naturally Throughout Your Content

Google and major search engines love keywords. Search engines love your content even more when relevant keywords are placed naturally throughout the text.

The problem is, that after generating keywords from their favorite keyword research tools, 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 long-tail keyword such as “Dental Service Washington DC” can be rearranged to “Washington DC Dental Service” to fit better into the body of the article.

Factoring in Relevance in Your Content Creation Process

Relevance is yet another ranking factor that many content marketers ignore when developing content for websites.?

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

As our attention span drops below that of a goldfish, content marketers have to answer user queries fast. Think about what your audience would type on the browser. What would they be looking for? Create content around your findings and include closely related topics as part of your broader answer.

Building Trust with Search Engines and Your Audience

Trust is the backbone 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 right answers.

Building trust with your audience starts with creating great quality content that demonstrates your expertise and provides practical solutions to real 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 such content on a consistent basis.

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. Nothing stays the same forever, because things keep changing. As such, it is important to keep up with these 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 the content in your web pages. What you want to start with is the existing links. Specifically, the broken links on your website.

Broken links contribute to a negative user experience. Fix broken links to allow Google and other search engine spiders to crawl your web pages effortlessly.

While updating your website, you might want to refresh old information 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 insights.

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 help entrepreneurs and businesses 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

Digital and content marketers are easily swayed by flashy metrics that barely reflect the actual status of their websites. They focus more on the content creation process and completely forget about the results they were hoping for.

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

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 backward to develop a process that leads to the goal.?

For instance, if you aim to win more traffic to your website you can start by:

• Writing down the goal (i.e. getting 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 human writers and some AI input.

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 Important Decisions Too Soon

Websites are tricky business.?

Running one can leave you on an emotional roller coaster when you get high traffic and more leads than you can handle in one day and almost nothing the next day.

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

For starters, you might want to wait at least three months to really see how your content performs. In some cases, you might need to wait between six to eight 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 traffic surges 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 far smaller numbers – or no traffic at all. If you’re the kind of 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.

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 into 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.

At first, new website owners focus only on a handful of traffic sources that seem to work. If, for instance, organic search brings in more traffic than other channels, they seem to focus only on that and ignore other potential traffic sources.

The problem with this is that your site may become more vulnerable to fluctuations, such as the occasional search algorithm updates that tank hundreds of websites.

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

• Paid search – Paid search is a broad topic that deserves a separate article. A PPC campaign launches your website to the top of the results page for a charge every time someone searches your keywords. The money you pay for every 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. Some traffic flows from the host's website to the guest's website.

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're genuinely pursuing growth for your website in the long run.?

What other mistakes have you spotted that nobody is talking about? We would love to hear them in the comments!