The #1 SEO mistake I'm making (and maybe you are too)

bycld111

5.6K followers

5 years ago

As I've been on the hunt to try to figure out why Google isn't ranking my content, I'm starting to figure some things out.

I'll give you a couple of ideas of what's happening, and then I'll tell you the #1 SEO mistake that I'm making (and you might be too).

First, just a little recap:

• I was starting to do well with rankings and traffic, but it never really took off like I had hoped
• I got up to around 3k visitors a month
• Then my traffic starting dropping
• I thought it was the Google core update in June

My current analytics are not looking great:

As easy as it would be to blame Google, I realize now it's not their fault.

Here are a couple of things I've discovered / remembered:

• I had a couple of good ranking articles in Google that brought me most of my traffic, but as those articles become less relevant, the traffic has dropped off (which is why I'm incorporating Dylan's strategy of writing about MLMs more.)
• It takes about 35 weeks on average for a new article to rank at it's peak rank. That's almost 9 months. Patience is definitely key here. (Review posts in the MMO space might rank quickly because they're not competitive, but they also die quickly.)
• Checking your competition for a keyword is HUGE. I know I failed to do that many times and I realize now that I wrote awesome articles that aren't going to go anywhere because there's too much competition for them.
  
  Jaaxy is the FIRST place you start looking at this, but it's not the last. Don't just look at the numbers. Go into Google and type your keyword and see what's there.
  
  For instance, I wrote an article called "How to Make Money at ClickBank". First of all, it should be "How to Make Money with ClickBank." Jay tells us all the time to use keywords that make sense when talking... this one is close, but not quite. I didn't listen to Jay. Not good.
  
  Secondly, I didn't check out the competition on Google for this keyword:
  
  
  

  

That's a lot to compete with! I would have been better off spending my time writing a completely different post.

• Finally, the #1 SEO mistake I've been making...

Relevancy

Relevancy, relevancy, relevancy.

This is something that Kyle hammers in his training and in his blog posts.

For instance:

• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/the-business-of-con...
• https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/kyle/blog/you-writing-for-pe...

Yet, it's still so easy to miss this. In fact, I know I do it all the time.

Jay also talks about it a lot in his trainings and why it's important to focus on 1 keyword per blog post.

It's so easy to think you're being relevant when really you've gone off the rails on your topic.

Here's an example from my site. I recently created a post called FU Money Review. I already see that I went off course in my title:

This post should be about the book F.U. Money, and here I am talking about Dan Lok and his courses.

The content is no longer relevant to the keyword "FU Money Review".

And here's what's happening:

• Time on page = 0 Seconds
• Bounce Rate = 100%

The reason that I personally veer off course (and I'm betting the reason why it may happen to you too) is that I'm trying to fill our posts with enough words for the search engines to rank me.

But now I discovered that if I fill my posts with irrelevant content, Google only sees the part that's relevant anyway. And they also see that people are bouncing from my site, which makes ranking even harder.

When writing posts, make sure they're very focused. It's not always easy. This is something that I obviously have a hard time doing.

Put Ourselves in the Shoes of the Reader

What information would they be looking for? How can we answer their question? What's the next logical question they would have and how can we answer that too?

Have you ever searched for something online and got frustrated because you couldn't find exactly what you're looking for? I sure have! And that's what we may be doing to our visitors.

Kyle talks about this in is post "You Writing for People, or Writing for Rankings?", which I posted above.

This one part that Kyle talks about really hit me over the head. (I bolded and underlined it for emphasis.) Completely logical and completely missed:

(This is referring to an example of an article "how to make money selling t-shirts".)

"They want a business, and a successful one within the t-shirt space. They want a business that is working for them 24/7 and they wake up to 'new orders' every morning. They want a consistent flow of traffic coming to their website, with an abundance of untapped opportunities at hand that they can use to scale and grow their business.

THAT is what you are offering them. Not a website builder, not a keyword tool, not a hosting platform, not expert support and help "

Going Forward

Even though affiliate marketing can be a frustrating business, I personally love how much there is to learn about it.

In a way, I'm glad these issues are happening with my site, because I can use them to not only learn some new stuff (or remember some stuff that we're taught here but that I have forgotten), but also share with you..

I hope my mistakes help you see what kinds of things to avoid with your own site.

Going forward, the #1 thing I will do when writing a bog post is to really think about the topic and the subtopics and make sure it's relevant to the user's experience. "Is this really what they're looking for, or is this going to annoy and frustrate them?"

I thank you for reading!

- Christina

P.S. Do you feel like you've been making any SEO mistakes? Do you have any tips about other ways I can improve my site and make it more user friendly / relevant? Is there anything you have done that has helped you improve your rankings?