SEO mistakes can be easy to make, especially when you’re just starting out – either as a new SEO, or as a fledgling business.

By being keenly aware of specific pitfalls that new businesses and SEO rookies can fall into when attempting to optimize their site and their content, you can steer clear of the most common mistakes and oversights, implement best practices, and fast track your search visibility success.

Here are eight missteps you’ll want to avoid:

1) Not starting SEO sooner

Businesses can (and too often do) invest years creating compelling content that is exactly what its target audience is looking for. However, even the best content won’t do much good if its intended audience can’t find it or doesn’t know it exists.

Engaging in SEO to ensure that content is visible and prominent – not buried beneath other search results – can be as critical to success as the content itself. Smaller businesses in particular tend to prioritize content creation over SEO strategy, but the two really need to go hand-in-hand. The best time to begin SEO is earlier than many companies think.

2) Not choosing low-competition keywords

Emerging websites are not likely to have enough pull to earn high search rankings on competitive terms. Expect this to remain true for some time, even if following every best practice in the book; starting out in any new endeavor means working your way up, and this certainly rings true for SEO.

Unfortunately, many new businesses make the mistake of focusing exclusively on high competition keywords out of the gate and fail to achieve results as far as how they rank in results.

A better strategy is to begin by finding and

Read more from our friends at Search Engine Watch