Avoid These 17 Most Common SEO Mistakes

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SEO

9 Apr, 2024

seo-mistakes-to-avoid

SEO services constantly battle to keep your brand on top of upgrades and steer clear of technical site problems including SEO mistakes.

Even if you are already conscious of a large number of SEO issues with your website, it might be difficult to keep it in good condition in the always-evolving SEO industry.

Though you can give yourself a fair opportunity to keep SEO mistakes to a minimum and website speed to a maximum by having a good grasp of the most typical (and potentially dangerous) errors. 

Understanding how to fix SEO issues undoubtedly helps, and your SEO services for small businesses can provide a thorough guide. 

Here are the most common seo mistakes damaging your website! 

Want to know How To Fix SEO Issues and Mistakes?

  • Perform an SEO audit
  • Find and Redirect Dead Links
  • Optimize your Visuals
  • Get Backlinks on Relevant Sites

17 Most Common SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Which are the most common SEO mistakes? And how to avoid them? Online businesses or brands who want to have better growth through SEO and are going all-out into SEO could be tempting but can result in bad results if you aren’t careful. 

As you know, SEO is a very powerful tool that is simple to deploy, but hard to master. A well-planned SEO strategy could effectively grow search traffic, but having said that a poorly deployed SEO strategy with common mistakes can affect website rankings. 

Therefore, if you’re trying to optimize your website for the 1st time or find out why your SEO strategy isn’t working, experts at our SEO company are here to help you. They’ve compiled a list of the most common SEO mistakes you should avoid. 

As the goal of search engines like Google, Bing, etc, it is to provide the searchers with the best quality, accurate and valuable content that vies with what searchers are searching for. So, the beginning stage of any SEO strategy must focus on developing a website that is easily navigated, natural, and honest. 

The biggest SEO mistakes mentioned below could damage your chances of earning search traffic, but few mistakes are worse than others. If your website has a lot of these issues, you need to start fixing them and optimizing those sections of your website slowly and gradually or by finishing a checklist for a technical SEO audit.

1. Slow Website Speed

When visitors attempt to access material on your page, a slow site speed may discourage them. The SEO issue of slow site speed would inevitably cost you valuable SEO traffic. Spending time and effort driving traffic from SERPs is useless if the page loads slowly.

Page Load Time 

Measures how long your page can fully load and render after the browser delivers the message to the server. 

Your SEO company can concentrate on the following elements to gauge page load time:

The first metrics are monitored in the performance part of a Google Chrome report. It counts the number of seconds that pass after a user navigates to your page until your browser renders the first piece of Document Object Model content.

Page Load Time

Interaction Duration

The Time to Interactive metric measures the speed at which a website loads. TTI, then, is a measurement of how long it takes a page to become fully interactive. On the basis of information from the HTTP archive, the TTI score is compiled. Your SEO agency can use this score to improve interaction duration.

Time To First Byte

It is the interval of time between sending a request to a server and having the first data byte delivered to the browser.

Your SEO services will run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate its performance and learn more about how quickly your site loads.

Several factors could cause a delay in the time it takes for your page to load, including:

  • Image Format and Size: The SEO company you hire knows the use of photo editing software and image formats like JPEG XR, JPEG 2000, and WebP, they may reduce the bandwidth consumed by photographs by setting the image size to 72dpi.
  • Redirects: If certain redirects cannot be avoided, your SEO specialist will correct them and speed up serving. Complete a site audit to identify all internal URLs that are the source of the redirection, eliminate SEO problems, and fix them.
  • JavaScript and CSS: To reduce the size and speed up loading, your SEO services will compress CSS code and JavaScript by giving variables shorter names.

2. Google My Business Verification Code Error

It's rather typical to experience problems with the confirmation PIN you obtain for your Google My Business account, as this is a common SEO problem. 

Try switching your "private" profile to "public." If this does not work, it is recommended to request a new PIN. The issue can occur after you modify your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) information. 

Now the question is how to fix SEO pitfalls.

Google My Business Verification Code Error

Make sure you hire an SEO consultant that can mention all contact details consistently with your listing to prevent this. 

Your SEO services will frequently check SEO errors to target location-specific web pages for their content.

3. Bad or Fake Google Reviews

There will be both favorable and bad reviews of a product or service. Therefore one should anticipate both while evaluating SEO mistakes. However, the total amount of reviews boosts your company's social proof and influences localized search ranking elements. 

As per SEO services having just good reviews makes your website appear very suspicious, even though they help your website's trustworthiness. Several customers voicing their displeasure with your website simultaneously may discourage visitors and cause an SEO issue. 

You can use unfavorable evaluations to strengthen your bonds with your clients, better understand your audience, and attract new clients with the assistance of your SEO company. 

Bad or Fake Google Reviews

Your website will get more credibility if you post on social media about different types of SEO problems encountered and the solutions implemented.

Additionally, you can encourage individuals to publish evaluations about your services on social media and industry-specific review websites. Besides, your SEO company proposes that you can readily answer their inquiries to come across as a sincere person.

4. Plagiarized Content

Content that is identical to or similar to some other content piece on your website is referred to as duplicate content. Even while Google does not punish duplicate material, it is likely to have technical SEO problems and impact your website rank. 

As per SEO services, search engines rarely display identical versions of two pieces of material in the SERPs; they opt for the one the readers find more pertinent.

Your SEO agency will prioritize content as it is the king for websites; having original content that enables audiences to learn all there is to know about your goods or services will assist you in emerging as a pioneer in the industry.

Plagiarized Content

To correct this SEO issue, make sure that no material on your website has already been published elsewhere before doing so. For instance, you can look for copies of your webpage online using tools like Copyscape to eliminate the biggest SEO mistakes and duplicate content.

The failure to promptly fix broken pictures is the following SEO errors.

5. Absence Of Location-Specific Pages

A Google Report indicates that searches containing "near me" and location-specific keywords have increased, particularly among mobile users. 

In addition, 93% of consumers who use their mobile devices to look for local businesses do so within a day or so, and 79% of consumer searches end in a purchase.

As per SEO services, mobile consumers have grown, making local presence crucial for many firms. High-quality, location-specific, or regionally optimized content is crucial to global and local SEO.

Your position in the local search results ought to be a lot more approachable if people can recognize your brand as having a local presence. Having properly optimized, location-specific, unique pages will help you enhance your rating in local SERPs and potentially rectify this SEO mistake. When you have a single website, precise location signals are inevitable.

Your SEO company can share valuable insights on your location-specific pages. 

6. Outdated Content On Your Website

Your website's outdated content may reduce its authority. For a given query, there are many search results on the SERP, but not all are pertinent to the readers. 

The search engine will filter out your website if it determines your content is no longer relevant or up to date. 

A skilled SEO consultant knows that indexing and crawling irrelevant sites will waste your site's crawl quota. Your website's traffic may even suffer as a result because such pages may see a sharp increase in bounce rates.

Reasons To Update Outdated Content

Make sure the data you upload contains relevant and high-quality information to address this SEO problem. Your SEO company will ensure you provide search engines with the most relevant, well-optimized material possible.

7. Missing Alternative Texts And Images

SEO services concentrate on alt tags, also known as alternative tags, which are HTML characteristics of photographs that aid in the content description. Alt tags should be fixed in terms of on-page SEO issues. 

There are times when the image element of your website renders poorly because the filename, file location, or extension was incorrect, among 5 common SEO pitfalls. 

In these situations, the image's alt tag will indicate its contents and how it will be used on the page. Additionally, it strengthens the target keyword by facilitating crawlers' understanding of the content on the page. 

Biggest SEO mistakes include missing or broken alt tags.

Alt tags are quite easy to use for your SEO agency. Identify the image component in your HTML code and give it an alt tag. Here is an illustration of one such image source:

Images with the src="image.jpg" with the alt and title "image tooltip"

If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add them to your photographs.

8. Skipped Mobile Optimization

Several users use mobile devices instead of PCs because they live in a mobile-first society today, and your SEO company will notify you about this. Given that mobile-friendly websites account for more than half of Google's search results, there are several benefits to having them. 

At the same time, if your page is not mobile-friendly due to common SEO problems, you will probably lose visitors. 

If you haven't used this feature, your website also lacks the most cutting-edge design forms.

Percentage of web traffic from mobile devicesYou can fix SEO problems and rank higher on SERPs by having a mobile-friendly website. A website that is optimized for mobile devices has the most innovative design. The website will fully restructure itself for different devices due to mobile optimization. When your SEO company optimizes your site for mobile, both design structure and website speed are enhanced.

SEO services use the mobile-friendly test tool to see whether or not your page is mobile-friendly. If you discover that your website is not mobile-friendly, do the following steps: 

9. Broken Links

SEO services believe that a 404 error creates a negative first impression when consumers who have found your website through a search engine do so. Broken links on your site will even reduce the number of times Google bots will crawl your web page in a particular period of time or your crawl budget. 

Some of your crucial pages won't be indexed or crawled if search bots meet numerous broken links due to an SEO issue and go on to other websites. Additionally, SEO services know this harms the domain authority of your page.

Your SEO consultant may find out which pages on your site are returning 404 errors by using Google Search Console's crawl stats report.

Even broken links can be found using Ahrefs. You can use Ahrefs to discover broken links by following the path shown below:

Site Explorer > yourdomain.com > Pages > Best by Links > Add an HTTP response filter for "404 not found"

The damaged web pages should be fixed as soon as possible to boost your SEO. How to fix an SEO issue can be a challenge; you can modify or recreate the page's content to address broken links.

Use 301 redirects to point visitors to information that is similar to your website.

You can redirect visitors to the website for a fast remedy regarding external links. You can simply delete the domain or substitute another source if it is useless.

10. Inactive Contact Form

Only 49% of the 1.5 million users who see a form complete it, as per a recent  study Furthermore, just 16% of those watchers finish it. There are a number of factors that can prevent contact forms from converting, including:

  • A surplus of form fields
  • Unreadable or inoperative submit button
  • The dropdowns either have too few or several selections
  • Make your contact form interesting to fill out to maximize its effectiveness. Reduce the number of form fields you offer to avoid another SEO issue that will increase conversions.
  • Ensure that your contact form is straightforward and only requires five fields.
  • Aim to align the form.
  • Use a memorable CTA that stands out.
  • Test your form's design with A/B comparisons for elements like position, color, size, mandatory fields, etc.
  • Google has an autocomplete plugin that can be used to enable auto-fill for your form.
  • Make sure your form is mobile-optimized.
  • Avoid using CAPTCHA

11. Unindexed Pages

An SEO specialist can explain that indexing entails adding your websites to Google's list of searchable web pages. What Google's bots do not crawl cannot be ranked, which means there are technical SEO issues. Your pages may not be indexed for a number of good reasons, including

  • 404 Not Found
  • Where your sites contain meta tags with the source code META NAME=" ROBOTS" CONTENT=" NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">, those instances are highlighted. It won't be indexed.
  • You don't have an updated sitemap.
  • Duplicate content
  • Poor standing or power

Google Search Console is the finest tool for resolving Google indexing issues. You may check whether a URL is indexed when you send a URL inspection. There may be a possibility that there is an SEO issue. 

You may mimic how SEO services use search engine bots to scan your website with the Deepcrawl tool, a thorough website crawler often used across industries. Without compromising website performance, your digital marketing service provider can delve deep and obtain an exhaustive report of each URL.

Enabling pages in the robots.txt file. After completing this, give Google bots time to crawl your pages again. 

Use the Screaming Frog tool to have "Googlebot," "Slurp," "Bingbot," "DuckDuckBot," "Baiduspider," or "YandexBot" crawl your website. Your SEO services can better leverage these tools better to fix your SEO mistakes. 

Verify that any page that is currently not included in the index can be included by looking at the "Indexability" column.

Make sure your XML sitemaps are optimized so they don't contain too many broken or misdirected pages.

12. Text To HTML

Another SEO error that won't receive much attention is this one because it has more to do with technical SEO problems. Despite the fact that the content on your website is presented in text form, it is the HTML code—which includes headings, links, JavaScript, graphics, and other elements—that powers it. 

From what the search engine learns on the same website, text to HTML compares the proportion of textual information to that of the HTML code.

According to an SEO specialist, an ideal text-to-HTML ratio is between 25 and 70%. Because Google also utilizes this statistic to determine if a web page is relevant, a low text-to-HTML ratio indicates that your website has serious on-page technical SEO issues.

Low ratios could mean:

  • Websites that take a long time to load because of too much code
  • Hidden text is a search engine robot red flag
  • Flash, inline style, and JavaScript usage in excess

Your SEO services will ensure that an HTML-heavy webpage can negatively impact loading times and user experience. Hence a low text-to-HTML ratio is a crucial indicator to enhance page load speeds. 

To correct this SEO problem, add pertinent on-page text when required, transfer inline scripts to different files, and get rid of extra code. To keep the content of your webpage as little as possible, your SEO company utilizes UX website design ideas, and plain text whenever possible.

13. Messy Never-Ending URLs

A web address that identifies the whereabouts of a web page in the digital space is known as a URL or universal resource locator

To avoid Google truncation or for URLs to display properly across all browsers, your SEO company will prefer URLs no longer than 2083 characters, or 512 pixels.

By enhancing user experience and increasing search exposure, URLs can help SEO.

The following are some key elements that reduce the readability of your URLs and discourage your audience from clicking on your link:

  • Overuse of connections or stoppers
  • Including space>, %, and # special characters
  • Using HTTP rather than HTTPS
  • Including more directories in your URLs beyond two
  • Your links on social platforms may be more clickable if they have readable URLs.
  • Longer URLs tend to rank lower than shorter ones, which promotes direct traffic.
  • The safe variant of HTTP is called HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure). This indicates that data on a domain is encrypted, greatly enhancing security.
  • URLs must have pertinent keywords.
  • When separating terms in the URL, use hyphens instead of spaces.
  • The URL's characters have to be lowercase.

14. Inappropriate Meta Tags And Description Lengths

The title of a website page is specified by the HTML element known as the meta title, sometimes known as the title tag. The meta description is a tag that gives a brief overview of your website's subject matter. These are shown for each result on the SERP.

Meta Title

The best way to write a meta title is to use the following format: primary keyword, secondary keyword, and brand name.

The ideal meta title length is between 50 and 60 characters, depending on the character width. Anything above this character limit can lead to an SEO issue.

Meta titles are visible not only on the SERPs but also on the internet browser and on media platforms.

Meta Description

A meta description should be between 50 and 160 characters in length. Although meta descriptions don't directly become an SEO problem, they impact CTR and subsequent ranks. 

lack of Meta Description data

In other terms, meta descriptions may have an indirect effect on SEO.

Among the issues with meta descriptions are:

  • Redundant meta descriptions
  • Long meta descriptions that miss intended keywords
  • Filling out your meta description with alphanumeric characters

In your meta description, use unambiguous CTAs. To prevent the loss of keywords due to Google truncation, use your chosen keywords and make sure the meta description and title tags are within the recommended length.

Avoid stuffing title tags with SEO keywords. Your title tag's keywords should be separated by pipes (or vertical bars). Make sure your titles make sense to the audience and aren't just a list of meaningless keywords.

The initial text found on your website may be registered by social sharing services even if you don't use the meta description tag, which might not improve the user experience. Additionally, ensure that all of your title tags and meta descriptions are distinct.

15. Targeting Wrong Keywords

Remember that the keywords you are targeting should be relevant to your page; generic keywords have the capacity to drive more traffic, but if those keywords don’t match with what’s on the page, visitors won’t convert, and the bounce rate will increase. 

Therefore, when selecting keywords for optimization, it's necessary that they’re as accurate as possible. For instance, if yours is an eCommerce website that sells pineapple cakes, you must choose target keywords that searchers use when they’re searching to purchase a cake. 

The generic keyword “pineapple cake” has high traffic, but the people looking for this keyword are probably searching for recipes. In such a case, low-volume keywords or low-traffic keywords that represents buying intent, such as “buy pineapple cake” or “pineapple cake for sale,” most probably lead to conversions and reduce bounce rates. 

An effective SEO strategy must begin with proper keyword research, and companies should keep in mind that normally the high volume or high-traffic keywords are not the ones that can drive traffic. For best results, you should opt for long tail, relevant and intent-based keywords for low competition. 

16. Too many inbound anchor text links

Making use of too many exact match anchor text can help in creating an effective SEO strategy, which indirectly affects the latest Google algorithm; SEO needs to be more strategic with respect to its anchor text. 

A web page with a lot of inbound links utilizing the exact match keywords could look unnatural and might trigger Google’s Penguin algorithm. It's essential to use exact match anchor text, but having said that, you must vary your anchor text and ensure that you don’t add a lot of internal links pointing to the same page. 

Although Google engineers have stated that a quick uptick in natural links isn’t a point of concern, only when a link appears unnatural. This most common SEO mistake is to participate in link-building SEO strategies that aren’t natural so as to manipulate search engine rankings. Also, remove bad backlinks to improve ranking.

17. Shady Link Building

Getting links using unnatural methods is a fast way to get a manual action penalty to your website. However, it isn’t the most common SEO mistake that it once used to be. Few marketers figured out that they can buy links between websites they own, build a private blog network for generating backlinks and even write guest blogs on other websites to help generate a lot of backlinks. 

The fact is that any unauthorized link-building strategy is considered illegal by Google and is not encouraged. Instead of that, websites are inspired to write user-friendly, legitimate, and high-quality content that’ll help in gaining links naturally. 

Therefore, avoid the following practices:

  • Paying services in order to link back to your website with others 
  • Developing content designed for other websites and asking for backlinks in return
  • Paying for links
  • Intentionally trying to earn backlinks from websites that aren’t relevant to your website subject
  • Creating your own personal website or blog so as to link back to your major website
  • Stuffing the content with too many links on a single page, similarly for internal inks on your domain. 

Final Thoughts

An essential component of any digital marketing plan nowadays is search engine optimization. Even the most talented individuals are prone to common SEO blunders. It's best to become well-versed in the difficulties others have encountered and steer clear of them in your marketing initiatives.

To resolve your SEO concerns and redesign your website, contact SEO services for small businesses provided by JanBask Digital Design.

Looking for Best SEO expert?

  • Reach Potential Audience
  • Drive Customer Engagement
  • Increase in Leads and Website Traffic

FAQs

1. What are some common SEO mistakes?

Since there are a lot of online resources regarding how to enhance SEO practices or the best practices to apply on-page and off-page SEO strategies, some of the most common SEO mistakes can’t be overlooked:

  • Slow site speed
  • Negative reviews on Google
  • Faulty Google My Business verification code
  • Lack of location-specific pages
  • Duplicate content
  • Broken images
  • Missing alt tags
  • Outdated content on site
  • Not optimizing your website for mobile devices

2. Who Needs SEO?

Any digital business that sells products or services can benefit from SEO, and a website without SEO won’t be visible to prospective customers even if they search using relevant search terms in search engines. 

3. How Does SEO Work?

Search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have crawlers that gather information related to web pages on your website. This information helps them evaluate whether your website has the relevant information the web users seek.

Therefore, a proper SEO strategy is required if you wish your website to get noticed among millions of websites vying for similar search terms. 

4. What Are SEO Best Practices?

SEO best practices are tasks that have been developed to enhance the search engine rankings of a website. These best practices include: 

  • On and off-page optimization,
  • Keyword research,
  • Building a backlink strategy,
  • Creating new content, etc.

5. How Long Will It Take to See the Effects of SEO?

In simple terms, the more you focus on your SEO strategy, the earlier you’ll see the results. Using a powerful SEO strategy, the desired results could be seen in as little as 3 months, and as you keep investing in your SEO strategy, you’ll continue to reap the benefits over the years. 

6. Can I Do SEO On My Own?

SEO isn’t a definite process, as you can fix your car or build your furniture, but it’ll be better if you outsource it. Because SEO requires you to invest time and needs in-depth knowledge, that’s why it's suggested that you collaborate with a professional SEO company. 

7. Why Has My Organic Traffic Dropped?

It could be that your website was ranking well at some point but abruptly saw a drop in traffic; this could be due to a number of factors: 

  • Google updates
  • Changes made to your website
  • Irrelevant content
  • Losing links on your website
  • Site errors and more

8. What Are Google’s Key Ranking Factors?

Google is known for doing continuous updates, so staying updated with the following ranking factors are an essential part of SEO strategy. Let’s have a look at a few of the important Google ranking factors -

  • Page load time
  • Responsiveness 
  • Relevant internal linkings 
  • Adding relevant keywords
  • Adding title tags, headers, and meta descriptions on all of your webpages
  • Using a well-structured URL
  • Add multimedia elements like images and videos, to your webpages
  • Updated content
  • Backlinks 

9. What Is a Google Penalty?

Anything that gives search engines like Google crawlers an indication that someone has tried to manipulate the search results or not followed the search engine’s guidelines can affect website rankings. And 

Google issues penalty means your website won’t be visible in SERP, i.e., your target audience won’t be able to see your website in a search result. 

10. Does My Website Speed Affect SEO?

Website speed is crucial because it is not only a direct ranking factor; webpages that take longer than 3 seconds have a substantial bounce rate.

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K

Kash Sanchez

It is great to learn so much about SEO mistakes for digital businesses.

R

Reid Morris

I have been practicing a few of these SEO mistakes, thanks for sharing the article.

JanBask

Glad you found it helpful! Stay updated for more such useful blogs!

K

Kameron Rogers

Glad to read an extract on SEO errors.

A

Andre Reed

How to fix SEO issues had been on my mind for quite some time.

G

Gunner Cook

Your article saved me from repeating SEO issues.

JanBask

Glad it helped you! Stay updated for more such useful blogs!

J

Jake Morgan

With your article it’s easier to fix SEO problems.

JanBask

Glad you found it helpful! Stay updated for more such useful blogs!

L

Louis Anderson

It is great to learn so much about SEO mistakes for digital businesses.

C

Caden Thomas

I have been practicing a few of these SEO mistakes, thanks for sharing the article.

M

Maximiliano Jackson

Glad to read an extract on 5 common seo pitfalls.

H

Holden White

How to fix SEO issues had been on my mind for quite some time.

P

Paxton Harris

Your article saved me from repeating common seo problems.

N

Nash Martin

With your article it’s easier to fix SEO problems.


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