SEO Pitfalls To Avoid
We’ve chosen to address the topics below due to their ability to cause serious harm to your online presence, including Google penalties that can be extremely difficult to recover from.
What is a Google Penalty?
A Google penalty is a negative action taken by Google as punishment for not adhering to their guidelines. It can cause your website to go from ranking number one to not being found in the first 50 pages. When this happens, it’s difficult for your website to regain ranking.
Below, we’ve highlighted some of the most common reasons that sites fall victim to SEO problems or penalties.
Multiple Practice Websites For The Same Location
Having more than one website for your practice could have a negative impact on the SEO efforts for your Smile Marketing website. A simple explanation is that you are competing with yourself!
Hiring An Additional SEO Agency
A sad reality is that there are a lot of so-called SEO gurus out there using methods that can get you a Google penalty. Some of these strategies may produce instant page one results but if they are against Google’s guidelines, you could be penalized. These strategies, often called black hat, can often sabotage the foundation we’ve carefully laid to secure the trust of Google.
Need a second opinion about an offer you’re considering? We’d be happy to let you know what we think. If you decide to go with another SEO team, we’ll provide them with the details of what we’ve done on your behalf so they can take over. It’s important to have only one responsible party for your SEO.
Remember, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”
Unnatural Reviews
When it comes to your Google Business Listing, reviews are crucial. Reviews that look unnatural to Google can end up caught in their review filter, or worse, can result in a Google Business Listing being removed from Google local ranking. Unnatural reviews might include those that were asked for in return for some sort of compensation or contest, reviews left from a practice computer, or multiple reviews left at one time.
Unnatural Link Building
If you are approached to buy links to your website or trade links with people you don’t know – say no.
Why? Because websites don’t get links – they earn links. According to Google’s guidelines: “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” In short, links to your website that have not been earned through natural means put your website at risk for a penalty. So how do you get “natural” links? Click here for ideas.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is putting search terms that you want to rank for many times on your web page to try and trick Google’s algorithm into ranking your page above others.
As you might guess, Google doesn’t appreciate this. To stop keyword stuffing, they have put forth an effort to catch webmasters who use this approach and if detected, your website ranking will be penalized. It’s very difficult to recover and get exposure for your website on Google after receiving a penalty. The best content strategy is to create interesting and engaging articles that describe the best features of your practice. Our SEO team will then make sure that it’s optimized for search engines.
Call Tracking
Call tracking is the practice of using an alternative phone number to track calls coming in from a specific channel. For local businesses, Google tracks your practice name, address and phone number (NAP) across the Internet. NAP is like a local business’s online fingerprint. Having a different phone number on your website will create NAP confusion to Google, much like an unmatched fingerprint. Check with your call tracking provider to ensure that they are using Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) to prevent any NAP issues.