SEO Mistakes To Avoid: 11 Common Mistakes To Steer Clear Of

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – it’s the act of optimizing your website to appear higher up on search engine search results. This is usually done through a mix of widely accepted techniques, from improving user experience to publishing regular, relevant content.

From searching for local businesses to finding something to entertain us, we have all used search engines to find the things we need. This is why it’s a powerful marketing tool. SEO helps businesses drive traffic from those who are interested in the products and services they offer.

Below we use an online baked goods company as an example – let’s call it The Happy Baker.

The Happy Baker creates a website to sell its delicious baked goods. As part of its SEO strategy it optimizes its website for the search term: 

“doughnuts delivered in New York”

They did a great job at SEO, so now whenever someone Googles “doughnuts delivered in New York”, they appear at the top of the search page. This drives hyper-relevant traffic to their website which results in multiple sales every day. 

But why does being at the top matter?

Well, because stats suggest that on average the top result receives a massive 27% click through rate…and 75% of searchers never scroll past the first page of results!

It’s clear that good SEO can make a huge difference to your online business. Now we’re going to walk you through 11 common SEO mistakes to avoid, and give you some actionable tips on how to steer clear of these SEO errors.

It might seem like a silly question. Yet if you fail to be specific about your marketing goals, it will be impossible to ever achieve them.

Your goal might be something as simple as “sell 100 more doughnuts every week” or “get 50 more inquiries each month.” Once you have an endpoint in mind, it becomes possible to create a strategy for achieving it.

Your SEO strategy will detail everything you plan to do to achieve your end goal. This is likely to be a mix of tactics. Your strategy can also be used to forward plan time investment and responsibilities – offering you an easy-to-reference document that can be used to ensure you are always heading in the right direction.

We’ve all been there…

You open a website hoping to find some useful information, or perhaps even hoping to make a purchase. One second passes… two seconds… three… four… the website takes forever to load. So, you lose interest, close it and look elsewhere.

Slow site speeds won’t just frustrate users, many experts claim that it can also negatively impact how well your site will perform on search engine rankings.

Getting loads of website visitors might make you feel good, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything positive for your business unless those visitors have an actual want or need for the product or service you offer.

This is why finding the right keywords to target is crucial to SEO success. The right keywords for your business will not only drive traffic but also include buyer intent. For example, someone searching “how to make doughnuts” is likely to be much less valuable to an online baked goods company than someone searching “doughnut delivery.”

Duplicating is not only unoriginal, but it can also impact how favorably search engines view your website. This is true whether you duplicate content from another site, or use your own content in multiple locations.

Repeat content is seen by search engines as creating a poor user experience.

Meta descriptions and alt tags are an important part of telling search engines what your content is all about. Although search engines will typically assess your content in its entirety, your meta description and alt tags will make it clear what the key themes of your content are, making it easier to rank you for the right terms.

Internal linking helps search engines like Google understand how your website is structured. By giving them a clear picture of the hierarchy of your site, it allows search engines to place importance on the most crucial pages.

For example, “The Happy Baker” may have one key page that is used to give information on its delicious doughnuts and allows customers to buy online. The website may also have a blog, where content is published around all things baking.

Ensuring that as many of these blog posts naturally link to the key doughnut page as possible will show search engines that this page comes high up in the hierarchy of your site.

It is estimated that a massive 59% of all internet traffic came from mobile devices in 2022. This goes to show just how important it is to make your site work well on mobile.

Search engines also understand this importance and will penalize websites that don’t perform well when viewed on mobile. In practice, this means that when a user views your site via their mobile device it must look great and be easy to use.

Website analytics can tell us a huge amount about the site itself, our business, and our customers. They are also really useful in helping us make SEO decisions, especially in the case of search dedicated analytics platforms such as Google Search Console.

These platforms can tell us key information on important SEO aspects of your site such as:

• Which keywords you are ranking for
• Mobile usability
• Top linking sites
• Site maps

Making it easy for search engines like Google to crawl your site will help boost your rankings. After all, if they can’t easily crawl your site then they cannot tell where to rank you – so are likely not to rank you at all. In short, if Google’s crawlers can’t index your webpages, then your website is basically invisible, and you won’t show up in search engine results.

Googlebots crawl your website following hyperlinks to discover new content, and it then adds these new pages to its index. If you’re not in Google’s index, you’re not in with a chance of being listed in search results. That’s why it’s so important to create pages that are easily crawled by Google!

You can request indexing via Google Console, which is a good idea when you’ve published new pages to your site.

Ways you can make your pages easier for crawling include:

• Consistent internal linking between relevant pages
• Adding pages to your sitemap
• Building links from other, high-quality sites into your pages (called “backlinks”)
• Avoiding duplicate content

“404 ERROR”

We all hate to see these words, including search engines.

Faulty redirects are where a link, often connected to anchor text on a website, leads to nowhere. This creates a bad user experience and therefore leads to websites being penalized by search engines.

Location-specific pages are incredibly important if you run a business that targets specific geographical areas. This is because they will help you appear in searches for those looking for your products and services in those specific areas.

For example, The Happy Baker may benefit from creating a page that is focused on keywords such as “buy doughnuts in New York” and “New York doughnut delivery.”

SEO is a powerful tool. When a business is able to rank highly for key search terms which are relevant to its offering, it will benefit from high volumes of traffic with at least a certain level of buying intent.

Use the advice we have outlined in this guide to avoid some of the biggest SEO mistakes businesses make when trying to gain more traffic.