The size of the SEO market is predicted to reach a whopping $1.6 billion by 2027. The opportunities for this industry are growing every day. SEO has become an indispensable and integral part of the revenue channel and overall digital marketing strategies.

However, because the developments in search engines and consumer behavior are constantly changing, it can be a struggle to stay on top of the search engine results pages. This does not mean it is impossible to be on top but there are local SEO mistakes to avoid to stay away from the blunders that can derail the success of your SEO efforts.

•  Not Understanding Your Target Audience

Your audience should be your number one priority in whatever SEO strategies you undertake.  Know your audience from the very beginning of your SEO process. Here are tips on how you can do this crucial step to avoid SEO failure:

• Understand how your customers behave in the market
• Provide instant responses and results to their queries (this means, REAL-TIME)
• Use a holistic method to understand your customers
• Understand what words your potential customers use to refer to your site
• Utilize historical and real-time data to understand the changes in the behavior of your customers

•  No SEO Plan and Roadmap

Where are you heading to? Having no plan and roadmap for your SEO strategies is a huge local SEO mistake to avoid. Even if you understand your audience very well but you don’t know, you will reap no success.

Determine where you want to be and set SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely or time-bound) goals. You can consider these in your planning stage:

• Evaluate your competition
• List goals and task to accomplish each goal
• Designate roles for each element in the SEO process
• Use available tools and platforms to increase the efficiency of workflow and strategies

•  Content that is NOT About Your Audience

This is an on-page SEO mistake that will rank you to the pit if you fail to focus the text of your content on your target topic that will meet the needs of your audience. Keep this in mind:  Search engines want to serve their users with only the most relevant content for their search terms.

•  Copied and Plagiarized Content

When you publish non-original content, a traditional SEO practice that is considered spammy, search engines will penalize you. In short, publish original content to avoid low rankings and downgrades.

•  No Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

One of the local SEO mistakes to avoid especially for small businesses is skipping title tags and meta descriptions which are essential parts of SEO. This SEO failure will lead you to rank lower in typical searches and decreased relevance in queries through voice search.

•  No Quality External Links

Another on page SEO mistake is not including a quality external link to your content. Quality links increase the ranking and reputation of your site. Make sure that you link back to the sites that have linked to you and create quality content that will naturally attract quality links.

• Overdoing Internal Links

Do not include internal links just for the sake of having them in your article. Make sure that your links are relatable to your topic, they add value to your content and are appreciated by your audience so that it will be favorable to search engines.

• Not Fast and Not Mobile-Friendly

A fast loading and mobile-friendly website are engine optimization techniques that you should not ignore. Many of your potential customers will be checking your site on their mobile handset and if your website will not perform well, you are missing a huge number of conversions. You will also be ranked lower on search engine results pages.

• Not Understanding how SEO Works With Other Channels

You will miss out on measuring the success of your SEO practices if your SEO is not integrated with other digital channels. SEO impacts many key marketing channels so you should be able to build and strengthen that relationship.

• Not Tracking Progress

Bad SEO practice is not caring about the numbers related to your SEO progress (if there are any).  Utilize analytics and use the right tools and technology to optimize your results all the time.  Know how your website is performing so that you can improve on user experience and all the other aspects that will contribute to your SEO success.

Recognize and Correct SEO Failures

It is wise to get acquainted with the local SEO mistakes to avoid keeping your SEO practices intact and to make sure that your SEO efforts are not a waste of time, effort, and money. Once you recognize a failure or something that is not working, correct it immediately to prevent further harm to your reputation online.