HVAC Digital Marketing Agency Discusses Key SEO Mistakes

Digital marketing company All Systems Go Marketing (ASGM), based in La Mesa, California, recently published an article that discusses basic SEO mistakes.

In their blog post, “Recognizing Basic SEO Mistakes”, ASGM discusses search engine optimization (or SEO), described simply as the process of optimizing a website in order to “convince” search engines that its content is good enough for the searcher to see.

The URLs that are deemed good enough by the search engine will rank higher than other URLs in the search results for a particular search query. Mastering SEO, among others, is a core skill with digital marketing.

Although there are much more complicated factors to consider when doing SEO, a website will usually not gain much visibility without paying attention to the basics. In the article, ASGM talks about the following factors: Indexation, Keyword cannibalization, Site architecture, Internal linking, and Site speed.

To any seasoned SEO practitioner, these factors will come as common sense. However, for an entrepreneur trying to make it big with as small a team as possible, knowing these can either make or break their website’s digital marketing campaign.

Indexation

One of the overall goals of SEO is to rank a website high on the search engine results pages (usually shortened to “SERPs”). However, ranking is impossible if indexation isn’t accounted for.

Indexation or indexing is a search engine’s way of storing a URL into its database. To explain this simply, when a URL is indexed, the search engine becomes aware of that URL’s existence. A URL cannot compete for rankings if it isn’t indexed because the search engine has no idea at all that the URL exists on the web.

Keyword Cannibalization

A website is made up of several pages: a homepage, landing pages, blog pages, etc. Each of these pages serves a different, specific function for the business. However, some of these pages are more valuable to the website than others.

There can be a hundred links on a single page, and it can be easy to imagine these links competing for value.

As stated earlier, each page exists for a specific purpose. For some pages, this purpose is to feature specific products (or keyword phrase) such as “birch wood chairs”. However, if another page on the same site is ranking for the keyword “birch wood chairs”, these two pages are essentially competing for rankings for the same keyword phrase. This phenomenon in SEO is called “keyword cannibalization” and should be avoided as much as possible.

Site Architecture

After a website is indexed, internet bots, called search engine spiders or web crawlers, will crawl the website.

Crawling is the act done by a spider in order to collect information on a website for the sake of determining where it ranks on the SERPs. The spiders crawl a website by jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink, gathering information on each page.

However, when a website’s architecture is disorganized (e.g. nonsensical or redundant website sections and subsections), it becomes difficult for a spider to crawl a website. Other than that, it also makes for a poor user experience.

Internal Linking

Generally, when a user navigates through a website, they should be able to go from a specific section of the website to another with relative ease. This can be achieved with proper internal linking.

Internal linking is the act of creating links on a website that go to another page on the same domain.

Improper internal linking usually creates problems not only for users, but also spiders. Links are the only way for a spider to crawl a website, so, if internal linking is executed improperly, rankings will suffer.

Site Speed

From the article: “Recent studies reveal that if a mobile site takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors abandon it.”

Slow-loading websites are usually very frustrating for the visitor. As such, websites will slow loading times tend to not be very popular, and thus have high bounce rates. A high bounce rate means that there is a high probability that a visitor will leave a page after landing on it.

Other than high bounce rates, which is more of a problem for conversion, slow-loading websites are penalized by search engines and will rank lower.

Craig Wright, speaking in place of ASGM, states, “Every entrepreneur needs to be aware of their website’s situation in terms of SEO. It can make or break their digital marketing campaign.”

All Systems Go Marketing has been providing clients with expert digital marketing strategies and techniques for 20 years. They place a clear focus on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) companies that operate on a smaller scale. ASGM’s main services include SEO, PPC, and social media marketing.