 We've done a ton of videos on SEO. You know how important it is, but there may be a couple mistakes that you're overlooking. That's what we're talking about today on The Journey. Before you're ready to take on world domination with your new business, you've got to start with the local arena, and that begins with your online presence. Yeah, so let's cover some of those mistakes you might be making starting with not doing your research. Research is super important, right? We can't just expect SEOs just happen in work. We've got to do the work before that. Picking the right keywords is the key to success here. See, we did there. Exactly. You want to avoid those high-frequency keywords. Yeah, so things like shirts, right? So shirts can mean a plethora of different things, whether it's shirts for women, shirts for men, shirts for toddlers, whatever have you, and the people that are already ranking really well with shirts, they have a lot of dollars behind that investment, right? If you go out there as a brand new business and try to rank against some of the big dogs, you're just going to get flooded because they're everywhere. Yeah, there's no way you can compete. If someone's just going to type in shirts, they're just going to see the big giants. It's impossible to compete. That's basically a waste of money. But think about it from the perspective of an actual consumer. If I'm looking for a place to buy a t-shirt, I'm not going to Google and typing in shirts. Right. There's no intent there. Exactly. You want to be more specific. So I would be looking up, okay, vintage t-shirts in Austin. You want to use those long tail keywords that are actually what consumers are using. Absolutely. And the specific search in Austin is absolutely important. I know that if you're in Basin, Austin, or wherever you're Basin, you might want to serve everyone. But starting, like we said in the beginning, starting close to home where you know your audience, you know the people is sometimes the best avenue to go to. It's also important to monitor trends in your local area so that you can always stay one step ahead. And a tool you can use for that is trends.google.com. Yeah. You basically go and search your keywords, whether it's shirts in Austin or hip shirts or things like that. It'll kind of give you how it's been trending related to some other keywords, too. It'll give you some content suggestions and other related queries. Google Keyword Planner is also a great, great, great tool to use when it comes to researching different keywords. Because what you might think is relevant may not be relevant to your audience, what they're actually searching for. So you can see the volume of searches per month and then related keywords that you may want to focus on more. So Google Keyword Planner is a great tool along with trends.google.com. The next mistake you want to avoid is keyword stuffing. I mean, it's basically spamming in the eyes of search engines, especially Google. Yeah. I mean, I'm all for stuffing at Thanksgiving, but stuffing on your website is bad. So there's lots of practices back in the day where people would put white text on white background and just stuff it with a bunch of keywords they thought was relevant. It's a big no-no for Google or just stuffing in just random words throughout their website itself, where it doesn't really make sense for a normal person to read that. If you're selling shirts in Austin, having shirts in Austin in almost every other line, it's just, it's not going to flow. We don't talk like that. So make sure you actually put content and make it to where we want to read it, right? That's what this is all about. It's for the consumers, for the person looking at your site. The longer we keep them there, the better. Having it weird and awful and just all jumbled text everywhere, just shirts in Austin, shirts in Austin, shirts in Austin, you're not going to have a good time. Exactly. Right for your audience, not an algorithm. And even if you think you can outsmart the search engine, they're probably going to figure it out anyway, and it's just going to be for no cause. I like that though. Right for people with not the algorithm. Just have a little quote on my wall. Our next mistake is poorly written content. And this covers a few things. Starting with just duplicating content. I know there's people out there that will go on another site that is trending and has authority and just copy their content and put it on their own website and treat it like it's their own. Google sees this as duplicate content and it's going to actually derank those pages and give credit to the primary site or it may even hurt them too. So you're not doing a good service by copying content. You want to make sure that the content that you create is quality and original. Basically, don't be lazy. Create your own content and make sure that all of the content that you're producing delivers some kind of value for the consumer that's actually on your page. And then while you're doing those searches, you should also check out what your competitors are doing. So if you sell shirts in Austin, search that on Google or whatever your preferred search engine is and see what they're using for their titles and descriptions, see what might be working for them and which ones really capture your eye and would make you click as a consumer and try to not duplicate but use those best practices when it comes to your website. The next mistake to avoid is the bad link building practices. Google search is a constantly evolving system and you may be able to flip once, but it's not going to take long for them to figure it out and deter those types of bad habits. So when she talks about those bad linking habits, she's talking about creating back links on other websites. So you can think of back links like little tiny upvotes for your website. So other websites are linking to your content, basically saying, hey, this content is rad, it's awesome, cool, cool, cool. But what a lot of people have done in the past and thankfully avoiding now these days is paying for back links or putting their URLs on sites that aren't reputable or just doesn't make sense to their audience. Google does a really great job of linking sites together that are kind of in the same industry and niche. And now if you're on some random site that's talking about food and they're linking over to Austin shirts, it may not make sense. Or if it's just a malicious or poorly reputable site that's linking to your site, those are now downvotes, not upvotes. So if you are commenting or leaving links on other sites, here's some things you want to remember. Don't put too many links in one single post and also don't be too self-promoting. Don't be weird. Like, hey, this is the best brand. Go check out this link and here's their catalog with another link. It's obvious. Yeah, it just doesn't, people can smell the inauthenticity and they're not going to check out any of your links. With that too, like especially if you go to other review sites or blogs and things like that, don't just post a comment to post a comment or one that's irrelevant just to try to link back to your website. Again, the inauthenticity, no one's going to click that link. You want to add value to the conversation and continue that conversation as well. And if it makes sense, then link your content. Don't self-promote the entire time. Add value first and then want to make sense. Add your link. And if you're commenting, make sure you have an actual photo and an actual, you know, information on your page because everyone knows that whenever someone comments and it's just some sketchy photo, you're not really taking that seriously and the actual websites see that as shady practice too. Yeah, those admins might see that. Just think of you as spam and then they'll delete your account or move and all your content is gone. Our last mistake is ignoring databases for local businesses. So don't forget about Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, all of these sites play into your search relevancy. So don't forget that that's where people are searching. They're looking for local businesses and that's a huge way to become more organically relevant. Yeah, you may not use these per se yourself, but really when you're marketing your website and you're doing SEO and all these things, you want to think about where your visitor is searching for, whether it's Google or Google My Business or Yelp or Foursquare or wherever it is, you want to be where they're searching, not your preference where they're searching. Even if someone's searching on Apple Maps, all of that information is coming from Yelp nowadays. So it's really important to make sure you have all of those sites set up with all the correct information. By avoiding these common SEO mistakes, you can make sure that your website stays in good standing with Google and all those other search engines as well. Let us know in the comments down below if there's any SEO mistakes that we missed that you think are particularly helpful. Yeah, and while you're there, make sure you like this video and subscribe to our channel to see these episodes. First, this is The Journey. We'll see you next time.