As a local small business in Hong Kong, you usually don’t have much resource or marketing budgets. Therefore some wise businesses aim to do well by acquiring new businesses (or new leads) through search engine optimization (SEO). When they first started, they could use advices (or consulting) from a SEO company based in Hong Kong who has a great understanding on the overall SEO strategy, is able to implement technical SEO for websites, and understands the local market and audience. During the implementation there are many aspects to consider and different rules to comply. Let’s go through some of the easy to miss and bad SEO practices.

Mistake 1: Register and verify your Hong Kong local business website with Google Search Console (which is the default official webmaster tool provided by Google). Regularly make good use of the messages and reports in it. Bing also has a similar webmaster tool. Sign up.

Mistake 2: The website (of a Hong Kong small business) that has pages that load very slowly and are constantly not responsive or unavailable for web requests is definitely on its way to deteriorate its own organic search ranking on the search results pages of Google, Yahoo and all other search engines. The solution is to ensure your web pages and especially your website’s most visited pages can be loaded with 3-5 seconds. Your website should be available 24/7 (or in all hours) even though the HK local business has opening hours only during normal office hours. A reliable web hosting service provider who is able to offer local hosting would be ideal.

Mistake 3: Avoid stuffing too many times of your main keywords on your pages.

Advice 4: Avoid placing too many outgoing links on to a single page, as it gives a bad impression to any search engine that you may be doing a massive illegal link building activity.

Advice 5: Avoid placing too many big ads above the fold on your homepage and any of your most important pages. This prevents the end users to have a positive user experience when using your website.

Advice 6: Avoid cloaking, whether it is deliberately implemented or mistakenly published. Cloaking on a web page may be hiding the real destination of a link or showing completely different versions of the page to search engine crawlers and human users. Such techniques may work for a very short period of time, but will definitely not last. The worst is yet to come. Your business site may be flagged by the search engines.

Advice 7: Publishing SEO friendly content is one thing. But avoiding duplicate content to be automatically populated on your website is even more important. Hong Kong local marketers usually won’t make the mistake deliberately to create duplicate (or identical) content on a single website on two distinct page URLs. But some of the content management systems (CMS) some HK local small businesses have opted-in to use may simply populate the same content onto many different URLs by default, or through some hidden settings. It is very important to understand how to operate in the CMS when publishing any new content, and check against any glitch after publishing.