A study from Reboot Online revealed that many of the top marketing agencies in the UK had made mistakes when it came to SEO. Of the top 30 companies profiled, 5 common mistakes were found.
The first issue regards poor page speed, with 70% of companies in the study scoring poorly. On Google’s Page Speed Insights, the average score was 41/100. Since Google is now using page speed for mobile search rankings, and most people do searches on their phone compared to desktops, this a significant. Yet, even the slowest agencies analyzed were still found on page 1 of Google, indicating that this new ranking metric might not be as important as other factors.
Another problem is that 63% of these companies had failed to link to their own internal content. This inhibits Google’s ability to understand the idea and theme of the website, and if you mention something incidentally on a page on your website, not using an internal link blocks Google from learning that there is a more relevant page on your website related to that topic. This behavior typically results in a site being found on page 3 of Google.
The study shows that 57% of companies had pages incorrectly indexed by Google, and this was more prevalent if a website was found on the second or third page of Google, with that number going up to 70% and 75% respectively for incorrectly indexed pages. Some pages that can be unnecessarily indexed are blank pages or ‘thank you’ pages after a form has been submitted.
Thin content, when a page does not have useful information for a user, was an issue for 52% of the profiled agencies, though they were fluctuations based on whether the media company was ranked on the first or third page of Google, with 13% having this problem for the former, and almost a third experiencing this issue for the latter.
A staggering 47% of the study’s subjects had not optimized their pages for keywords, which means using H1 headings and making the most of LSI keywords on landing pages. The effective use of keyword tags will tell Google what your website is about, which will boost organic traffic to your website.
Some other issues were found: 27% of the companies had duplicated content from other sites; 33% of the companies had subpar backlink quality; and, finally, 20% had poor meta tags, which is unfortunate because these tags appear on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and these agencies were found to be doing many things well. For instance, all 30 of these media agencies had a blog, used https, and displayed their contact information, while the vast majority had an ‘about’ or ‘meet the team’ page and had a social media presence.
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