Google SEO & 6 Common Mistakes You Might Be Making

Vũ Khôi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

Why Isn't Your Google SEO Working — and What's Causing It?

Google SEO has always been a top concern for everyone working in Digital Marketing. Markdao has mentioned more than once how powerfully search engines — Google in particular — have grown, which is why Google SEO has become an indispensable part of any overall Marketing strategy, given the enormous benefits it can bring to a business.

However, not every digital marketer succeeds, because they unwittingly make small mistakes without even realizing it. Let's now go through the 6 most common mistakes made when running an SEO campaign, and how to steer clear of them!

#1 Website pages load too slowly, hurting your Google SEO

Page load speed is an important factor that many people overlook. Research shows that if your website loads quickly, it not only satisfies users but — even more importantly — earns high marks from Google. But how do you check your page load speed while optimizing Google SEO? Google offers a handy tool for this: Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool not only tells you your website's current loading speed but also gives you an overview of the areas you need to review in order to improve it.

Images also contribute to slow page loads — the larger the image file, the longer it takes to download. So don't forget to resize your images to standard dimensions to improve loading speed.

Another tip is to enable browser caching and turn on gzip compression. Both of these help speed up page loads. What is browser caching? When you visit a website, your web browser has to download and store all of that site's information before analyzing and displaying it. Every time you visit the site, the browser repeats this process. Browser caching (also called Browse Caching) stores all of the site's information so that on subsequent visits the browser only needs to retrieve the saved data for display — which can significantly improve load speed. Why is enabling gzip compression recommended? While doing Google SEO, you'll notice this yourself: a website always contains static elements such as HTML, JavaScript, or CMS files, and without gzip compression the server spends considerable time loading these static elements before it can load and display the information you actually need.

#2 Choosing the wrong keywords when optimizing for Google

If you want effective Google SEO, first make sure you are using the right keywords for each page. One of the most common big mistakes is website owners optimizing for keywords that are far too generic. For example, if you run a relatively small car rental business, you shouldn't start with broad, short-tail keywords like "car rental" — hundreds of other businesses, including large car rental companies, are already optimizing for that keyword, which will make competing very difficult. Instead, make those keywords more specific (long-tail keywords), such as "cheap car rental in Ho Chi Minh City" or "car rental in District 2".

In practice, long, detailed keywords get fewer searches than short ones. But for small and medium-sized businesses, investing in long-tail keywords offers a relatively higher chance of ranking on Google than generic ones. Within one website, different pages can each target different long-tail keywords; optimizing several of them at once increases your chances of driving more visits to your website, rather than pinning everything on a single generic head keyword — which won't get your site onto Google's first page anyway.

#3 Failing to attract users to the website

Metadata is everything Google displays on its search results page when someone searches for a keyword. It consists of the meta title and meta description. The meta title, or page title, is considered the number-one factor in how Google decides your ranking. So make sure you optimize each page's title accurately, insert the relevant keyword into each title, and don't forget to mind the appropriate character count. If your meta title is too long, internet users won't be able to read it all on the results page — or worse, Google may skip your site entirely.

In Google SEO, the meta description — the tag shown below the meta title — isn't treated as a ranking factor, but it contributes to your page's click-through rate (CTR). From the Google results page, the meta description helps internet users understand what your page is about and whether it can answer their question. If you optimize the meta description well with concise, clear snippets of information, users are more likely to click through to your page, improving your CTR.

#4 Not creating quality content, undermining your Google SEO

Continuously updating quality, SEO-compliant content is essential to earning Google's favor, yet quite a few websites still fail to do this well. When doing Google SEO, remember to maintain quality content not only for the blog posts published daily, but also on every web page — with a minimum of 300 words. If a page contains just a few short lines, Google won't regard you as an expert in your field and will conclude that your site is not the best result for the search query.

That said, keep in mind that the content you produce isn't meant for Google's robots to read — it's meant for internet users. Google's job is simply to organize published information and return the most relevant results for each query. So if your content is quality, attracts readers, and keeps them on the page longer, getting into Google's good graces is entirely possible.

In Google SEO, writing quality content means writing it yourself and absolutely avoiding 100% copied material from other sources on the Internet. If you know anything about Google's algorithms, you should avoid this at all costs — or read up on those algorithms to understand just how serious the consequences of copying content can be. In addition, stop stuffing excessive keywords into your articles. As mentioned, internet users are the ones reading your content, not Google, and an article overloaded with keywords will irritate readers, driving them off your site at any moment.

#5 No call-to-action button

When someone visits your website, your job is to keep them there for as long as possible. This not only delivers good results for Google SEO but also for your business: the longer they stay and read your content, the more likely they are to become interested in the products and services you offer. And if they want to buy or place an order right away, call-to-action buttons are one of the best solutions. A CTA button doesn't need to be complicated — you can create a "Buy" button or a "Sign up for our weekly newsletter" button.

Make sure every page has one call-to-action button that clearly expresses the page's goal. Don't cram too many CTAs onto a single page, or customers won't understand which main action you want them to take. So think carefully and choose a precise goal for each page of your website while optimizing Google SEO. Also keep in mind that the CTA button should stand out from the overall page design — the more prominent it is, the more clicks it will attract.

#6 Mobile-friendliness is always forgotten in web design

In 2018, Google began indexing the mobile version of websites — known as mobile-first indexing. That means that alongside the PC version, Google also considers the web design of your mobile version when deciding your website's ranking. So don't over-polish the PC version while forgetting that the technology era is increasingly centered on smart mobile devices. Specifically: if loading your site on a phone takes a long time, the page stutters after loading, and — worse still — users have to zoom in just to read the content, then your website isn't mobile-friendly, and you need to fix it!

There are two solid ways to check whether your website is mobile-friendly. Option 1: test it with Google's testing tool. Option 2: open the website directly on your own mobile device and click the buttons, links, images, and so on to see how they behave. Can you successfully place an order or make a purchase on your own website? Are all page elements displayed correctly? If not, your task is to fix them so you have a flawless mobile web design version that boosts your Google SEO.

So there you have Markdao's rundown of the 6 most common mistakes in Google SEO — go back and check each of these, and above all: speed up your page loads, write quality content, and choose suitable keywords. In addition, if you're confident that more and more people are visiting your site, don't forget to add call-to-action buttons and continuously update your web design for mobile devices. All of this will help your Google SEO be optimized exactly the way Google wants.

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