Tried your best and still can’t rank #1?
The biggest issue in this condition is that you don’t know where the issue actually is. So for your convenience, we’ve listed down the 9 most common SEO mistakes to avoid at any cost to rank #1 in SERP.
The big mistakes aren’t always the issue, small SEO mistakes are enough to bring your website down. From, big company websites to small ones, these SEO mistakes have been seen messing around with everyone.
Here, you’ll get an overview of these SEO mistakes. And of course, we’ll tell you how you can avoid or solve them.
So, let’s get started.
9 Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid
#1: Not Understanding Your Audience
SEO cannot be started without knowing the target audience. This clearly states that knowing and understanding your audience to the granular level is a must.
While lots of marketers believe that they understand their audience, but fail at completely understanding their behaviour in the market.
Also, users too want instant answers and results to their questions and demands. That is too quick and in real-time.
Many SEOs do rely on holistic data, but that’s not all one should do. There’s nothing bad with holistic data but to gain deep insights into seasonal and real-time trends, one’s method has to be holistic.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Go through the industry as a consumer and analyze what are the trends and what do the consumers like?
- Make use of both historical and real-time data to better analyze how consumer behaviour is changing.
- Use the info you gain about the behaviour and search intent of users to choose your keywords and strategy.
#2: Not Having A Fast & Mobile-Friendly Website
Content and Keywords are not all the SEO.
User experience and website quality play a major role in the SEO picture. And for these mobile-friendliness and page speed of the website are the most important factors.
Google and other search engines do favour mobile-friendly and fast websites in search rankings. Especially after the roll-out of the mobile-first indexing approach of Google.
And not to be surprised they are the major ranking factors of Google.
Websites that are making these SEO mistakes can be identified through
- Slow site speed
- Poor loading of images and videos
- Non-responsive design of the website
- Block files
- Interstitial ads
- Poor local information
How to avoid this mistake?
- Improve your website’s page speed. If you don’t know how? Learn here: Why Website Speed Is Important And How To Increase Page Speed
- Make sure that the website is mobile-friendly.
#3: Having Plagiarized or Non-Original Content On Website
Quality of content does matter a lot which we will talk about in the next point. But for now, let’s discuss one of the most common SEO mistakes that have been widely used over time.
Publishing non-original or plagiarized content on your website was supposed to work once a long time ago.
But now, Google has become quite strict in this case. Having someone else’s or plagiarized content on your website can lead to a heavy SEO penalty leaving you lost somewhere far behind SERPs.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Research and write original content
- If you allow guest posting, check the content for plagiarism before publishing on the site.
#4 Creating VERY Ordinary Content
Every user that is searching for something on the internet wish to get the right, comprehensive and concise answers to their queries.
But if you give them irrelevant, too thin/long or poorly written content, they will most probably exit from the site and would never come back. And that makes it an utmost priority to write content that offers value to the reader.
What makes a piece of content poorly written?
- If it’s irrelevant to the query
- If it’s too short or too long
- Not having appropriate value or insight to offer
- Use of wrong wordings and sentences
- Grammatical errors
- Bad/No proper structuring of the content
These mistakes make Google think that you have less to no expertise on the content and ain’t worthy to be ranked on the top.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Research properly about the topic before starting to write the content
- Use standard language (using a little native language is good for user experience but not too much)
- Check for grammatical mistakes before publishing the content
- Structure properly as it makes it easier for a user to read the content
#5 Using Wrong Keywords to Rank
Trying to rank for the wrong keywords is among the most common SEO mistakes out there.
But first, let’s see what are the wrong keywords that you need to avoid.
- Too generic keywords
- Irrelevant keywords
- Keywords with very low search volume
- Keywords with different search intent
Too generic keywords bring you an arena of competitors which ain’t a good thing at all. Especially if you’re a new website/business or a local business.
Whereas irrelevant, low search volume and different search intent keywords offer a low to no chance of ranking in the top 3 pages at all.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Do proper keyword research
- Use Long-tail keywords to be more specific (long-tail keywords will have low search volume but would have a good chance of ranking higher and bringing potential leads)
- Never use irrelevant keywords
- Do not use keywords that have VERY low search volume
- Make sure that the search intent of the keyword matches with the topic of the content
Writing amazing content using precise keywords doesn’t mark the end of the work.
Title tags and Meta descriptions are the next crucial element of SEO that can not be overlooked.
These elements are regarded by search engines while ranking websites in search results. And more than that they play an important role in CTR. Compelling title tag and meta descrop[tion makes the user click on your result.
The next element that shouldn’t be missed is Schema markups.
They are structured data that makes it easy for crawlers and Google to understand the context of the content.
And if search engines aren’t able to understand what your page is about clearly, they won’t be able to rank your site for relevant queries and voice searches.
Another technical detail that content marketers sometimes forget is including image tags.
An additional technical detail to make use of is alt tags. Alt tags are the text that is added to make crawlers understand what the image is about.
Google bots can crawl through the page and understand all the text parts but they cannot read an image. That’s why it’s crucial to add alt tags to all your images.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Write unique and compelling title tags and meta descriptions for each page.
- Make sure that you add keywords and match search intent in metadata.
- Use schema to make Google better understand what your pages are about.
- Use alt tags in all your images.
- Follow Google’s guidelines to create good titles.
#7 Practicing Keyword Stuffing
The idea of keyword stuffing was to target one or more keywords in content and manipulate the rankings by adding them many times in a piece of content.
The tactic used to work long ago. But now Google has released many Algorithm updates that make sure search results don’t get manipulated by keyword stuffing.
And on a plus point, Google penalises the websites that perform keyword stuffing in the hope to rank high.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Do not force the keywords in your content or metadata, keep them natural.
- Keep the density under 3-5% naturally (It’s completely fine to keep it lower than 3% but not higher than that).
- Target users primarily then search engines.
#8 Bad Use of External and Internal Links
Quality external links do matter a lot.
Do not add external links just for the sake of it. You have to ensure that the websites you’re linking to must be authoritative and have a high DA.
Now, internal links are quite important too.
They help you in different ways. For instance, it helps you keep the user on your website for a longer period.
But again, you just can’t add any of it. The link must be relevant to the page that you are adding it to. Especially the anchor text of the link plays a major role. It also helps Google to identify and understand the content on the other side of the link better.
Also, just like keywords, stuffing them up in the content isn’t the solution. Rather it will create a bad image of the page in front of Google.
How to avoid this mistake?
- Use quality external links to authority websites.
- Use relevant internal links with accurate anchor text.
- Do not stuff them up in the content. It makes the page looks spammy.
#9: Not Using Analytics & Employing the Inappropriate Tools
Well, consider you have done all the work, you have spent months to build your SEO but how would you know if that works out or not? Or what precisely works amazingly and what went to waste?
This is why keeping an eye on your analytics is so important.
Google offers some amazing tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. With help of these, you can constantly keep an eye on the performance of your website from Google’s end.
You can check which pages are ranking high, which ones did not perform, if there are any technical issues, bounce rate, dwell time, demographics of the visitors and much more.
Moreover, SEO has evolved massively through the last years and technologies too. Today, there are several tools and technologies that you can use to avoid all these and other SEO mistakes.
Tools/Services range from:
- SEO management
- Keyword Research
- Link management
- Link reporting and measurement
- Competitive Analysis
- Automation
- And much more
How to avoid this mistake?
- Search for the tools that fit all your business requirements
- Calculate the budget and buy premium plans of the most required services (if you can, there are also free alternatives in the market)
- Use the tools and thrive in the search results
The Bottom Line
I know SEO is a long process with many things to work on. And no one can’t remember or fix all of the SEO mistakes in one go. But you can’t overlook it too.
So, the best advice is to start from the basics and then go to the complex and higher techniques.
If you would have your basics right, you wouldn’t have to worry about every new algorithm update. So, fix these common SEO mistakes one by one and move to the next step of the process.
If you are still confused about where to start from. Go for an SEO Audit of your website. Here’s how to do it: Complete Checklist For SEO Audit In 12 Steps For 2022.
I hope you would have got all the answers you were searching for, if not then the comment box is wide open for you. Or you can mail us your query at [email protected]. We will be more than happy to help you.
Also, Thank You For Reading Along. It means a lot to us.
