Ashley Kimler December 9, 2020 
After you’ve invested your time and resources planning and implementing an SEO strategy, it’s easy to get frustrated when you’re don’t see an increase in organic traffic, sales or leads. Businesses expect immediate results and stop their SEO too early, inevitably stifle campaigns with their own impatience, and don’t rectify their mistakes.
The fact is, many businesses often do fail at SEO. In this article, we’ll look at three little known reasons why that is (and what can be done to fix them).
1. Not Mapping Your Keywords
Even after all these years, keywords remain the bedrock of any good SEO strategy. But what people don’t talk about all that often is the need for keyword mapping.
Keyword mapping is essentially creating a “keyword map” that helps you assign the right keywords to the right pages based on their topic. This then allows you to optimize each page for better SEO performance.
See, without keyword mapping, it will be difficult to avoid keyword cannibalization and duplicate content. Not just that, but you’ll find it hard to gauge exactly what terms each page you should be ranking for – and all of this can hurt your position in the SERPs.
But how do you improve your SEO strategy with keyword mapping? It can be done in a few simple steps:
- Take one single query and use it to identify a bigger set of keywords
- Group together keywords that all answer the same query
- Create a few potential URL ideas and bucket your keywords
- Use these buckets to come up with new content ideas
2. Not Conducting a (Thorough) SEO Audit
How do you know what’s working and what isn’t if you don’t carry out a proper SEO audit?
Short answer: You don’t.
An SEO audit arms you with the information you need in order to make adjustments to your strategy.
When you carry out an SEO audit, you can split it in three:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
On-page SEO includes all the things that are on your websites, such as keywords and content. Off-page SEO includes things like your backlinks profile and your PPC ads. Technical SEO is about reviewing page speed, internal linking and duplicate titles & descriptions.
As you carry out your full SEO audit, here are some things to check:
- Metadata and URLs
- Visibility on Google
- Titles and headings
- Backlinks profile
- Internal links
- Broken links
- Content (and its performance)
- Page speed
To make things easier, use SEO tools. And, make sure to use a tool that comes with an SEO audit feature so that you can automate an otherwise tedious process. Moz and Ahrefs are the first that come to mind.
3. Avoiding SEO Because You Have Zero Budget
If your business is already operating on a very small budget, you might decide that SEO is one of the things you can leave out altogether. After all, it’s not as important as spending money on a social media marketing campaign, right?
Maybe not (but that’s up for question). But here’s the thing: SEO can be done without a big budget.
See, the main pillars to a strong SEO strategy are keyword research, creating content, and building backlinks to that content.
As well as that, it helps if you carry out competitor research and build a high performing website. You’ll need to analyze your campaigns, too.
The good news is that all of these things can be done on a low budget.
How?
For one, tools can help. Free SEO tools that are available to everyone include Google Keyword Planner (great for finding new keywords), Google Trends (great for spotting trending keywords in your niche) and SEMRush.
You’ll also find that premium tools, such as BuzzSumo (great for finding new content ideas) come with free versions.
And if you’ve already got – for example – a great content writer on your team, you don’t need to spend any extra money on the content writing aspect of your strategy.
Wrapping-Up
SEO remains one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and sales online. For many, it remains one of the trickiest aspects of digital marketing to get right.
Use the tips in this article to overcome your current SEO fails. Utilize keyword mapping, carry out regular SEO analysis, and don’t forget to take advantage of all the free tools out there.
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