Worst SEO Strategies You Should Avoid

13 Minute Read
Written by: Branko Ilishev
Jan / 18 / 2022

A physical store owner who was experiencing difficulties drawing customers through traditional marketing approaches merely had to reconsider their marketing message and channel selections prior to the advent of the digital age. Professionals didn’t have to be anxious about being overtaken by the competition or having their online store disappear from search results overnight. However, given the fact that digital marketing is now critical to the survival of all companies, issues such as these can develop.

There may be customers in your neighborhood who are looking for the products and services you provide, but they may not be able to locate you and your ecommerce business. By simply following the steps outlined in this article you will understand how to avoid typical ecommerce SEO errors such as black hat SEO techniques that can result in these issues and ensure that your company can be found online.

Why bother with SEO?

According to the results of a recent poll published in the Search Engine Journal, 93% of all Internet experiences begin with a search engine. According to the same survey, SEO leads have a 14.6% closure rate. However, outbound marketing strategies, such as direct mail, have a dismal 1.4% close rate, according to the report.

Organic search results account for more than 95% of all search-engine hits, according to a comparable analysis published by Smart Insights; sponsored search accounts for barely 5 percent of all traffic, the study claims. Aside from that, 57% of B2B marketers who responded to the poll believe SEO generates more leads than any other type of marketing endeavor.

Despite the importance of SEO, the majority of people choose the less expensive option. Why? Is it possible that there is a misinterpretation, a misunderstanding of how easy or difficult it can be to do the task? Why bother growing organically when you can make money by marketing your products?

The rise of Black Hat SEO

Every SEO agency is well aware that they can employ a variety of tactics to reach the same end result: a higher ranking in Google and other search engines. However, not all strategies are created equal: some of them are officially prohibited by search engines and might result in you being penalized if you employ them in your website. And, it is about black hat SEO techniques that we are talking about now.

What is black hat SEO?

SEO tactics that attempt to gain quick results by circumventing Google’s regulations are referred to as “black hat SEO tactics.” They are typically predicated on deceiving search engines in some way in order to climb the search engine results pages (SERPs) quickly.

Although black hat SEO can occasionally produce rapid results, it is never a good idea in the long run since if the search engine finds any attempt to cheat, the penalties are extremely severe, and the site will be penalized. As a result, we frequently end up generating the polar opposite of the expected outcome in our experiments.

Additionally, black hat SEO presents another issue, which is that it does not bring any value to the end user’s experience. As a result, while it may be beneficial in the short term, it ultimately has a negative impact on a company’s marketing objectives. It is usually preferable to take things one step at a time and lay a solid foundation upon which to grow your campaigns.

The most popular black hat SEO techniques

  • Keyword stuffing

It consists in repeatedly entering a term into your website in order for the search engine to rank you based on that keyword (or keywords). According to Google’s guidelines, a term must always answer to the demands of consumers and provide value to those users. It has an adverse effect on the quality of the material and the user experience when it is repeated over and over again without rhyme or reason.

  • Cloaking

When it comes to ethical SEO, one of the most essential criteria to remember is that websites must be the same for both users and crawlers. Cloaking is one type of trap that can be used to trick people into falling for it. It involves creating a website that is highly optimized for search engines but is unreadable to humans and then “cloaking” it with another page geared at users but that is not crawlable by search engines.

  • Spinning

Among the black hat SEO techniques is a technique known as spinning is a method of “hacking” the generation of content through the use of programs that change a single article in order to generate multiple variations of the same material, for example, by employing synonyms. Logically, this method provides no benefit to the reader, and Google’s algorithms are becoming increasingly adept at identifying it and flagging it for removal.

  • Hidden text

Users and crawlers both see the same material when using black hat SEO techniques like this one, which has been around for a long time and is against the rules. It entails hiding text that repeats the term over and over again. One of the black hat SEO examples is that when making the text the same color as the background or when making the text smaller in size.

  • Buying and selling links

Inbound links are one of the essential criteria in determining a website’s ranking, but they must be gained organically. Because of this, buying and selling inbound links is seen as a black hat SEO tactic that will result in a penalty and is among the not acceptable black hat SEO techniques.

SEO mistakes that should be avoided

Competing with your own content

The first common SEO mistake occurs as a result of an over-application of a fundamental SEO concept: more content is always better for SEO. To rank top on Google for search phrases when searchers are looking for a comprehensive answer to a query, such as educational information, content that is even longer than 2,000 words may be required in some circumstances.

This, however, is not always the case. Most likely, the most relevant result for the search query “pizza delivery near me” will not be a blog or an article. People who are hungry are not interested in reading lengthy content. Their best result will come from a nearby pizzeria with a decent local SEO strategy and a well-configured e-commerce system because they want a nice pizza as quickly as possible. The SEO material on your sites must be tailored to the specific set of consumers you are attempting to reach with your campaign. As a result, extensive content is not necessarily more effective than short content.

The most prevalent manifestation of this “more content is always more” mentality is the creation of duplicate material, which has a negative impact on SEO. Website owners believe that by posting several versions of an article, all of which target the same keywords, they will increase their chances of having their website appear higher in search results for that phrase. However, this is not the case, and it might negatively impact your chances of ranking high in search results.

Building a website without SEO in mind

The typical illustration of this error is a small business that eventually decides to go online or enhance its technology. They employ a graphic designer to put together a presentation in their spare time on their behalf. When the website is completed, it appears to be of high quality, and the loading speed is satisfactory; but, it fails to attract the visitors and clients that were promised or required to make the website worthwhile. The business owner realizes that in order to survive, he or she must increase website traffic and client conversions. After the site has been developed, the owner attempts to implement SEO without understanding how the site works or where to begin.

The first problem with this error is self-evident: there aren’t enough customers. This, however, is really a symptom of the real issue, which is the failure to include SEO into the design of the website in the first place. As a stand-alone indicator, this indicates a fundamental problem in the website owner’s digital marketing approach.

A business owner who cannot be found on Google not only misses out on potential clients but also indicates that their website is not set up to provide the information that people need. It is possible that a website that commits this mistake has content that attracts customers, but that content will not reach its full potential because only a small number of customers will view it.

Failure to create attractive content

This common SEO error might manifest itself in a variety of ways. For example, it could be a long, difficult-to-read text with no spaces, or it could be content that makes readers bored from the very first sentence. Often, this SEO material is generated solely for the sake of achieving a certain word count without taking the time to evaluate the demands of the target audience. It is common for this to result in dull, unoriginal content that even the site owner has difficulty reading.

A little time spent organizing and evaluating your material will help you avoid many of the pitfalls that might result from careless writing practices. The use of bots to write your content is never a good idea because Google can identify the difference. Aside from the always-dry terms and conditions, you should never post any written content on your website that you wouldn’t want to read yourself from beginning to end yourself.

Rather than simply repeating a search word numerous times, you should make sure that your content delivers the best possible response to that term when you are generating content to try to rank for a certain search term. For example, material for the search term “best lemon cake recipe” should include these terms, but it is also crucial that the content tries to be the “best lemon cake recipe” in some way or another. It is encouraging visitors to interact with the content that will allow you to attain and maintain those top positions.

Hasty messages and missing keywords

Sometimes website owners are too excited to see the response to their latest blog post, or simply relieved to have it out of the way and all on one page, and they rush to publish content without devoting enough time to their meta tags, meta title, meta description, and meta content. This results in poor search engine rankings. They may even skip over the insertion of these tags entirely in some cases.

In order for these tags to be effective, they must describe the content of each page in a relevant and compelling manner. If you don’t do this, you won’t obtain the clicks or consumers that come from search results. Writing a meta title should always be considered a different endeavor in and of itself. After you’ve finished writing your piece, take a pause to relax and perhaps make your favorite coffee or tea. Alternatively, if your content is well-planned, you can write them ahead of time.

The importance of spending time familiarizing yourself with the best practices for each tag cannot be overstated. This article will assist you in accomplishing your goal: The most significant meta tags in HTML are described here. You’ll be able to ensure that the tags you post result in the most visually appealing listings possible on the results page in this manner.

Not making a search engine friendly URL

Your website’s URLs are not only for the benefit of visitors. They are also used for search engine optimization. Digital marketers that are unaware of this frequently do not give sufficient consideration to the phrases they use in their URLs. To make matters more difficult for search engines, your content management system (CMS) may have automatically generated this URL in a way that lowers its search engine ranking potential.

By not paying attention to the phrasing of your URLs, you are also missing out on the potential to include keywords in them. URLs are an excellent place to include keywords. Including keywords in your URLs boosts the likelihood of those sites ranking in Google’s search results and makes them clickable from Google’s search results page. Finally, putting dates in your URL will shorten the life span of your SEO-related material. Google is more likely to favor content that contains more recent dates, or no dates at all, over information that includes dates from years past in the URL of your website.

URL changes

Each page is identified by a unique URL. Changes to the URL may be necessary if we made a clerical error when writing it or because we are condensing material; nonetheless, we should make these changes as rapidly as possible without contemplating the impact on SEO.

Search engines use URLs to go to the various pages on your site. In Google’s search results, the URL is what directs the searcher to your page when they click on your site’s link to visit it. It is possible that the old URL will remain in the results for a time if you change your URL without notifying Google. In this case, visitors to the site will be presented with a “404” error page after clicking any of the links in this page’s search results, as this URL no longer exists. It’s understandable, given that this is detrimental to both visitors and your SEO ranking.

Remember that if you do not alter the address of any backlinks to the old URL, any pages that are linked to the old URL will be removed from your site. This is also detrimental to your SEO, as the enhanced ranking of backlinks will be exchanged for the penalty associated with the presence of broken links. This is also detrimental to your relationship with the individual who is linking to or from your site since they will be experiencing the same issues as you.

First and foremost, you must pay special attention when entering your URLs in order to stop this error from occurring. If you identify an issue within seconds of publishing it, it is doubtful that rapid alteration will cause difficulties. However, any URL that has been around long enough for Google to crawl should not be altered without first implementing a good redirect plan.

Conclusion

SEO mistakes such as implementing the black hat SEO techniques are extremely common. Thus it is critical that you carefully follow each of the steps listed above to avoid being a victim. The mere act of following it is insufficient; you must also have a thorough understanding of SEO and how to maximize its effectiveness.

The most effective method to avoid making costly SEO errors is to incorporate SEO into your overall digital marketing strategy from the start. First and foremost, by identifying the most valuable keywords to your company and then designing your website around these phrases. It would help if you also kept up to date on the most recent best practice suggestions for metatags, URLs, and the display of SEO material on the web. This will increase the effectiveness of your SEO by reducing the likelihood of using the black hat SEO techniques.

About the Author

Picture of Branko Ilishev

Branko Ilishev

Branko is your SEO prodigy. He manages the SEO team and finds creative solutions for your online visibility problems by thinking out-of-the-box. He also translates the collected data of analytics into understandable information that gives you concrete insights.