You want to drive relevant traffic to your website and turn visitors into customers as quickly as possible. The sooner you do, the sooner these customers can increase your sales online.

​Avoid these seven digital marketing mistakes below that slow down your online business growth and opportunities. Not only do these mistakes make you more invisible on the internet, but they also turn off potential customers when they do find you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) includes many seemingly small things that affect your company’s ranking on a search engine results page (SERP). Customers rarely look past the first page of results. Appearing in the top 10 means you get more attention from potential customers.

Ignoring all the little nooks, crannies, and tweaks that make for good SEO could spell a website’s death by a thousand tiny metaphorical papercuts.

​Proper SEO ensures your customers find you when they search keywords or phrases related to your business. Work on your SEO daily, or partner with a professional SEO company that can take that part of your business off your plate. Those duties include:

Create content that uses words your potential customers are searching for. Do your research to find relevant, long-tail, and locale-specific keywords for your content.

​There’s always a catch, though: Don’t over-stuff your content with keywords. Using too many keywords at once is a turn-off to customers and the search engine crawlers ranking your website’s quality.

You can’t write about just anything–high-quality content wins over quantity. It must also be original–no duplicated info from anywhere else on the internet. No generic, AI-derived content, either. Your visitors and search engine algorithms will notice that it lacks a certain human touch.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. You want to accrue high-quality website backlinks to build your domain authority. First, focus on writing quality, value-first content to start building a backlink portfolio. Over time, backlinks can become votes of confidence from other sites to your website. Regularly check them to monitor their quantity and quality, ensuring they come from reputable, relevant sources and websites. Backlinks that don’t fit these criteria should be proactively disavowed to protect your site's authority.

Customers expect fast load speeds–currently 2 seconds or less. If your page has trouble loading, customers quickly move on to other search engine results. Slow load times create a poor user experience. They can negatively impact quality metrics in analytics and signal to search engine crawlers that your website is slow and has a less relevant search result for users. Your website gets demoted by the search engine because “obviously” something about you didn’t satisfy the customer, resulting in poorer rankings on SERPs.

Here are some things you can do to optimize your load speed:

Search engines, especially Google, search the mobile version of your website first. You’ll suffer in SERP rankings if your pages aren’t mobile-friendly and responsive. That means they should condense and stack to fit a mobile device’s smaller screen size so there’s no need to side scroll, and the usual tabs on a desktop browser are accessed from inline menus instead. Also, web page information should be more streamlined for easier mobile use and navigation.

SEO includes so much. In addition to keywords, content, links, speed, and mobile friendliness, you must also consider components like meta descriptions, alt tags, optimized title tags, schema markup, diversified content to boost posts, and consistent posting schedules to avoid stagnation (just to name a few).

While ads can help you make more money off your website, they can also create a poorer user experience (UX). Too many ads clutter your page space, affect load times, distract and frustrate visitors, and impair your site’s performance. All this adds up to high bounce rates, lower engagement, and lower SERP rankings.

Google’s algorithms prioritize websites that provide a positive UX. Overusing ads can lead a search engine crawler to assume your site offers a poor one.

​First, focus on providing high-quality, informative content that meets your audience’s needs and interests. Then, use ads sparingly.

Easy-to-navigate content helps visitors find the information they need, and it also helps search engine crawlers better understand and index your site.

A haphazardly structured website is complex for both visitors and search engines to scope out. Turned-off customers and confused bots result in lower SERP rankings.

​To give your website a clear and logical structure that also makes sense for search engines:

Understanding your audience’s wants, needs, and pain points helps you customize your content to your visitors. You’ll create more irresistible lead magnets, copy, and content that potential customers find helpful. They’ll linger longer on your site, convert more often, and drive up your SERP rankings.

Social media helps you promote your brand to more of your target audience and build stronger relationships with current and potential customers. However, each platform (and the crowd it caters to) has a particular code of conduct. Breaking these could get you ignored or excluded, so research before posting.

Test. Track. Adapt.

Make one change to your site at a time and test it out before making more changes. Consider A/B split testing to determine which option performs better.

Analytic tools show your website’s performance and visitors’ interactions. Regularly track how you’re doing.

​People constantly evolve. You must evolve with them, adapting to new trends or technologies to maintain a competitive advantage.

Sending regular emails to subscribers can help you promote your business, new products, and sales. You can nurture leads and share valuable content with an audience who elected to hear more from you. Continue email marketing when working on driving traffic to your website.

Every step you take in the right direction is progress for your online business, no matter the speed. Take steps in the right direction by avoiding or fixing these common mistakes. You’ll have the ability to improve your visibility and click-through rates, and there’s no telling the positive impact you’ll see on your conversions and revenue.