Content may be king, but without proper SEO, your narrative gold may never reach its intended audience, or any audience, for that matter. Search engine optimization can help to ensure that you have the best chance to achieve desired ranking on search engines for targeted user searches related to your brand or content.
Your Asheville social media services can do a lot to help you focus on trending topics and keywords and create innovative and compelling content, but you have to make sure your technical SEO is on point if you want to make the most of your marketing efforts. This means avoiding common technical mistakes that can derail your best laid plans and leave you with little improvement to rankings, traffic, or other conversions.
How can you collaborate with your partner in SEO and digital marketing in Asheville, NC to make sure that your website content is hitting the mark and achieving desired results? Here are a few common technical mistakes you might be making and what you can do to improve.
Site Performance Issues
In this day and age, users expect speedy response from websites, so if your content takes more than a few seconds to load, you’re likely to see some fairly major consequences as a result. First, you’re going to experience high bounce rates as visitors navigate away from your site to seek suitable content elsewhere.
It gets worse, though. When users back out and return to the search engine results page (SERP) in search of the next link on the list, Google can use that data to elevate more popular results, essentially penalizing your link. Page speed is also a factor in rankings, so if your pages take a long time to load, crawlers will count it against you when determining your rank among competitors for relevant searches.
You don’t want to waste the efforts of your Asheville social media services and let killer content sit idle because you haven’t bothered to deal with lag issues. Optimizing your site for speed is essential to making the most of your content and your SEO efforts.
Optimizing for Mobile
If you haven’t done this yet, you are way behind the times. You’re not only shooting yourself in the foot with mobile viewers that probably have to resize your pages to view them on a smartphone or tablet, but you’re also not in-line with Google’s mobile-first initiative, which means you’re missing out on ranking boosts that optimized competitors enjoy.
It doesn’t matter how innovative and engaging your content collaborations with your Asheville digital marketing partner are if no one sees them because your pages won’t load right or they aren’t getting ranked properly. With so many people now browsing content on mobile devices, you cannot afford to have a site that isn’t responsive.
Optimizing Social Links with Your Social Media Management in Asheville
You might think creating meta data for search engines can double up for social networks, but this isn’t the case. When you include titles and meta descriptions for search engines to find and display, you should know that it doesn’t necessarily translate to displays for social networks. You need to create a separate open graph title and description so that social networks like Facebook have the data needed to properly display pages shared on their platform.
Duplicate Content
Now that many browsers issue warning errors when users encounter unsecured websites (i.e. http versus secure https), most online businesses have taken pains to upgrade to SSL certificates that ensure their content is safe for user viewing. Unfortunately, this may leave you with a small problem: duplicate content.
If you previously had content at an http URL and you upgraded to https, you could end up with two versions floating around. The major downside is that search engines do not like duplicate content and they tend to treat it as plagiarism. This can put a serious crimp in your rankings and derail your plans for marketing and social media management in Asheville.
Since you don’t necessarily want to tackle upgrading all your old backlinks, you can simply implement 301 redirect to permanently redirect traffic to current pages, essentially bypassing old http pages and making it look like there is only one version of any duplicate pages floating around.
Indexing Issues to Address with Your Asheville Digital Marketing Team
If you’re working hard to build your online presence with your partner in digital marketing in Asheville, NC but you’re not seeing any uptick in ranking, traffic, or other results, the problem could be that your pages aren’t indexing properly. How can you tell? The simplest way is to search your website on Google and see how many results show up.
If the number is way off, your pages probably aren’t indexing properly, or alternately, pages that don’t belong there are showing up for some reason and muddling results. Your SEO expert can help you here, but you’ll want to make sure you don’t have orphan pages (with no links pointing to them) or noindex tags in your source code.
If you’re dealing with SEO issues that are impacting ranking and traffic for your website, contact the seasoned professionals at Barking Dog today at 828-450-2551 or online to get the SEO and social media marketing assistance you need to enhance your online visibility.