Whether it’s in iGaming or the financial trading industry, SEO plays a foundational role in all brands’ digital marketing strategies. Search engine results pages (SERPs) remain highly competitive and, according to Search Engine People, 60% of clicks go to the top three websites in search engine results.
While keywords have a huge impact on your rankings, other factors (such as server location, domain trust and domain history) also contribute. Performing regular audits is a vital part of ensuring your SEO strategy is up-to-date, especially when it comes to checking if any mistakes have occurred. To help you, we’ve outlined five common pitfalls and what to do instead.Mistake #1: Low Quality Links from Irrelevant Sites High-quality links are an integral part of Google’s search algorithm and there are many techniques for link building, all of which vary in difficulty. They are used by search engines to discover new web pages, along with helping to determine how well a page should rank in their results. Despite this, many sites’ backlinks lack relevance or authority.Solution: Create only high-quality, relevant backlinks When it comes to links, it’s not only a site’s authority that matters: the site’s relevance is also important. For example, if you were to run an online sportsbook or online sports-betting affiliate site but used a link from an influential site about nature, it wouldn’t be effective because the focuses are totally different. Make sure your links are not just from authoritative sites, but are also relevant to your page’s theme.Mistake #2: Low Page Speed We’ve all endured the frustration of a page that loads slowly, and this does more damage than just disgruntling customers. Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) as one of the signals used by its algorithm to determine search rankings.
It’s important not to get the two mixed up. Page speed is the time it takes to fully display the content of a specific page, whereas site speed is the page speed for a sample of page views on a site.Solution: Ensure that pages can load in a specific amount of time Your page should be able to load in under two seconds on desktop, whereas the mobile version should be entirely visible in less than a second. Running page speed tests will help to identify the specific issues causing the webpage to load slowly, while also ensuring you can hit these target times.Mistake #3: Ignoring Technical PerformanceMany companies ignore the technical performance of their sites. They instead focus solely on creating content and gaining links. This means that most of the efforts put into content development and outreach are lost because the site won’t perform well and the bounce rate will be higher.Solution: Perform regular SEO auditsNew issues will arise. In order to maximise performance, regular SEO audits are necessary. Advise your development team on how to fix any issues in the best way possible.Mistake #4: Errors Caused by Robots and Sitemaps It’s not unusual to find sites not following the right guidelines on sitemap and robots.txt implementation, leading to pages not being indexed properly. In SEO, the robots.txt file is created by webmasters to instruct web robots (typically search engine robots) how to crawl pages to their website.Solution: Analyse robots.txt Sitemaps In order to be found, a robots.txt file must be placed in a website’s top-level directory. Because it’s a case-sensitive file, it must specifically be named “robots.txt”, and not Robots.txt or any other alternative. As a general rule, the robots.txt file shouldn’t be used to handle duplicate content. Making sure your files are up-to-date with the best practices will solve any errors that may arise.Mistake #5: Duplicate Content It’s not only robots.txt files that are commonly duplicated. Duplicate content is one of the most common errors encountered on a daily basis. The problem can occur because of URL variations, copied content or separate site issues (e.g. HTTP versus HTTPs).
It presents issues for search engines because they don’t know which versions they should include and exclude from their indices. Moreover, they don’t know which versions rank for query results – nor whether to direct the link metrics to one page or not.Solution: Add tags and codesSpecifying which of the duplicates is the “correct” one is the solitary factor when it comes to fixing these issues. A site should be ‘canonicalised’ for search engines whenever it can be found on URLs. This can be done in one of three ways: using a 301 redirect to the correct URL, the rel=canonical tag, or using the parameter handling tool in Google Search Console. A ‘noindex’ tag can also solve this problem.
Have we missed any SEO mistakes? Tell us about solving them in the comments section below.
At Income Access, along with our search engine marketing services, we also offer content marketing services and social media consulting. To find out more, please reach out.
