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5 common SEO mistakes that IT companies make

Most IT companies are geniuses when it comes to technology, computer protection, network security, and keeping your business running. Some maintain their own website and update it on a regular basis, but most just tend to have their website sit there without updates and hope for the best.

It is important for Google to see that you are continuously updating your website with fresh content, so that when their crawlers visit your site they see something new. In addition, the more content that is on your site, and the more pages you have, the more authoritative it makes your business look.

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However, sometimes IT companies can run into issues when adding content to their site or trying to do search engine optimization on their own. Here are 5 common things we have seen other IT companies doing, what they need to fix and what they should do moving forward.

1. Duplicate content

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There are a lot of IT companies that go to conferences, follow mentors, and do whatever these 'pros' tell them. But this isn’t always the best way to go about things. We have seen examples where these mentors send out articles and information to other IT companies, and these companies just copy and paste it to their site. They think that since it is great and useful content that they should put it on their site.

This is where they go wrong.

Google hates duplicate content; they even have an entire algorithm called Panda that targets sites with duplicate or “thin” content (meaning sites that don’t have a lot of content or pages on their site).

What IT companies should be doing instead is creating unique content on a consistent basis in the form of a blog that identifies them as an expert in their field. There are very few times when you should copy content to your site, and it should be minimal and include a link to the source. In most cases, when you think 'should I copy this to my site?', just don’t!

On a side note, if you are going to take someone else’s content and re-word it to be unique, you still need to include the source where you got the information. This is known as curating content and is very popular in online marketing and news industries especially.

2. Using keywords correctly

Before planning and writing content for your blog posts or the pages of your site, you should ensure you're doing the necessary keyword research. You need to properly manage and plan your projects for the keywords you want to target uniquely for each page and blog post before you just start writing.

This way you can optimize each page so that Google and other search engines can easily identify and determine what those pages are all about.

However, you will want to be careful of doing is what is known as keyword stuffing. This is where you put the keywords throughout the content in an unnatural manner in hopes of getting search engines to notice your page and rank you for it.

Generally, some say that your keyword density should be between 1-3% of the content on the page, but there really is no set range for this. It is best to just write the content knowing the keywords you want on each page, and naturally use them throughout the copy.

Keyword ratio also depends on the length of the content. If there are 1000 words of content on the page then it is all right to use the keyword in different variations and long-tails about a dozen times. But if the page only contains 100-200 words (you should really strive to get more than this on the page) and you use a keyword a dozen times, then it’d be obvious that you are keyword stuffing.

3. Not optimizing their websites

Optimising your website is about helping search engine crawlers and humans know what your page is about. A key part of this is using title tags, however, we often see companies use the same title tag for different pages, which is just as bad as using duplicate content.

Each page on your site should be unique and about a different topic, therefore title tags are important for SEO because they help the crawlers identify what that page is all about.

In addition, you want to optimize your tags, like your H2 and meta description, with the relevant keywords from that page. H2 tags are the subtitles used in your articles or pages, while the meta description is what shows up as the description of the page in search engines.

While keywords in meta descriptions alone don’t have any factor in your rankings, it does help to give searchers an idea of what that page is all about. If you can entice them into what they are looking for you will get more click-thru traffic, and if that page has what they are looking for, and visitors don’t bounce off of your page back to the search engine results, then Google takes that into account favourably in their 200+ ranking factors.


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4. No content marketing

Even though 86% of businesses are now doing content marketing, there are still a lot of businesses and IT companies that haven’t jumped onboard. The most basic form of content marketing is blogging on your website. The benefits of a business blog are that you get to highlight that you are an expert in your niche and can answer questions that people are looking for.

An easy way for anyone to see what people are searching for through Google is to use their autocomplete feature.

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Another way to do this is to ask the employees who frequently talk with your customers about the most common questions they receive. You can then write a blog post that answers those questions and promote it through your social networks to get it out there and get search engines to notice it.

Keep in mind that these content marketing pieces should not be promotional in any way. You just want to provide your readers with valuable information and resources.

If you provide the most amazing resource on the topic and you do outreach and promote it online and socially, chances are that experts will notice it and share it with their readers.

When you get social shares and links to your content from other sites, search engines notice this signal and the result should be an increase in overall rankings for the keywords that are relevant to that content. With increased rankings, you will also get an increase in organic traffic.

5. Website isn’t mobile optimized

Mobile searches have overtaken those from desktop searches and that trend continues to grow as more and more people get smartphones and tablets. This trend isn’t going anywhere, so if your website is not mobile ready, than you are potentially losing out on a lot of traffic to your competitors that do have a mobile optimized site.

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Google has finally announced something that has been a long time coming on April 21, 2015. This mobile algorithm update will potentially start a mobile search index that ranks non-mobile websites lower or potentially not at all.

All of these factors can hinder your SEO and web presence online. Be sure to use best practices by not using any duplicate content, only use unique content on your website, regularly update your site with fresh content, optimize each page of your website, and optimize it for mobile devices. If you do fix all of these and continue to practice these, you should see an increase in rankings and organic traffic to your site!

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Mike Juba
Michael Juba is a content marketing strategist at EZSolution, a design and marketing agency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Mike Juba