17 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid and Ways to Fix Them

Just the basic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices like incorporating keywords are not enough to make your website perform its best. You have to go beyond that and build an SEO strategy that takes into account each and every crucial factor. It’s true that a well-optimized website can help you build a better online presence. But people often overlook the term ‘well-optimized’ in this. Just having a website and publishing content on it won’t make your brand visible in search results. If this is what’s happening with your website, you might be making some biggest SEO mistakes that are impacting your site’s visibility and performance. 

No matter how hard you try, if you are overlooking things like the slow speed of your website, poor crawalability, non-indexed pages, etc, you won’t be able to succeed in SEO. These are some most common SEO mistakes that website owners tend to make 

1. Plagiarized or Poor Quality Content

As per Google’s latest algorithm updates, we can easily understand that it considers high-quality content a crucial factor in ranking websites. If you have published plagiarized (non-original) content or poor-quality content on your website, it’s highly likely that your website will not rank well on Google. Google prioritizes content that is genuinely helpful and relevant to the topic instead of content that is just created to manipulate search engines. So, if you are just copy-pasting content from some other website or rephrasing it using some tool, you won’t be able to make it to the top search results. 

How to Fix This?

Content plays a very important role in the overall SEO performance of your website. If you want to improve the quality of your website content, look for site auditing tools and look for issues present in your website. It will also tell you if there is any duplicate content on your website. A webpage’s content is considered duplicate if more than 85% of its content is identical to some other webpage. So, just make sure that this is not the case with your website. If this issue persists for some or all of your pages, rewrite those pages and update them as soon as possible.

2. Slow Site Speed

The loading speed of your website is one of the most crucial factors impacting the SEO and traffic of your website. A website with a slow loading speed can lose its traffic as users get frustrated when a webpage takes too much time to load. A fast loading speed results in a better user experience and positively affects the SEO of your site. You can use the following performance metrics to measure your site speed:

• FCP (First Contentful Paint): It refers to the time your browser takes to render the first piece of DOM (Document of Object Model) when a user visits your page.
• Time to Interactive: TTI is another metric used to measure page speed. It is the time taken by your webpage to become completely interactive. 
• TTFB (Time to First Byte): It is the time taken by the browser to receive the first byte of data after the request is sent to the server.

How to Fix This?

To check the speed performance of your web pages, you can use ‘Google PageSpeed Insights.’ If your website speed is slow, it may be due to the following factors that you will need to fix:

Size and Format of Images:

Wrong image size and format can cause a delay in loading a web page. Therefore, you have to make sure that all the images on your site are well-optimized. Try setting the image size to 72dpi and use formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, etc, as they will help reduce the bandwidth used by the images.

Javascript and CSS:

Compressing the CSS and Javascript codes can also help improve the loading speed of your site. Try doing this by reducing the size of the code by using shorter names for the variables.

Redirects:

Fixing redirects can also improve your site speed. You can conduct a website audit to identify internal links that are causing redirects and try fixing them.

3. Under-Optimized Meta Tags

If you are overlooking under-optimized meta tags, you are probably making one of the biggest SEO mistakes. Meta tags are HTML snippets that help search engines better understand the content of your web pages. Google uses them to connect your web pages to relevant search queries. If these tags are not well-optimized for the relevant keywords and do not fulfill users’ search intent, you are missing out on a big opportunity to improve your site’s performance. Some common types of under-optimized meta tags include:

• Too long or too short tags
• Duplicate tags
• Missing meta tags

How to Fix This?

Again, you can fix this using a site auditing tool. Go to site audit and open your report. Under the ‘issues’ tab, you can search for the term ‘tag’ and it will show you the number of pages containing duplicate tags, or missing tags. You can easily fix them by adding tags where they missing and replacing the duplicate tags with the original ones. 

4. Website Not Optimized for Mobiles

Mobile-friendliness of websites is another important aspect to consider in order to ensure the best SEO performance of your site. Google switched to mobile-first indexing a few years ago and now, Google considers the mobile version of a site to decide where it should rank. No matter how well your website looks on a desktop, if it’s not optimized for mobile devices, you cannot achieve a good search engine ranking. Therefore, it is extremely important to focus on the mobile-friendliness of your website. If you are ignoring this, you might be losing a vast amount of traffic.

How to Fix This?

When you optimize your website for mobile devices, its overall structure and page speed also improves. You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check whether your site is well-optimized for mobile devices or not. If it turns out that your site is not mobile-friendly, you will have to make the necessary changes to it. You cannot overlook mobile-friendliness today if you truly want your website to rank high. Choose a reliable web host, enable AMP, and redesign your pop-ups for mobiles. Once you are done with all of this, make sure to open your website on a mobile device to check if it works well now.

5. Overusing Keywords (Keyword Stuffing)

Keyword stuffing is a black-hat SEO technique and should be strictly avoided. It refers to the practice of using keywords unnaturally at places where they don’t seem suitable just to manipulate search engines. It makes your website content difficult to understand for users and they tend to leave your site without even scrolling through the entire page. Incorporating keywords into your content is important, but you have to do it naturally. Overusing keywords or using them at places where they don’t make sense, can hamper user experience and impact the SEO of your website. It can even result in a penalty by Google.

How to Fix This?

If your web pages look keyword-stuffed and you want to protect your site from Google’s penalty, try to improve your website content as soon as possible. Start by choosing the right and relevant keywords for every page and incorporate them at the prominent places of your wepages. Google recommends adding the primary keyword in the title, meta description, subheadings, and at the beginning of the content. Make sure that the keywords seem relevant to the content and are not overused. 

6. Outdated Content

Old information or wrong data in your website content can make it seem outdated and negatively impact the site’s authority. Plenty of websites create content around the same topic, but each of them is properly relevant to the readers. If search engines find your content to be outdated and irrelevant to the topic, your content will be outranked by your competitors who have updated information on their pages. It will increase the bounce rate for such web pages and will even impact the traffic to your website.

How to Fix This?

The best way to ensure that your web page’s content doesn’t seem outdated and irrelevant is to update your website content from time to time. A high-quality and relevant content is the key to making it to the top of search engine result pages. Make sure that all the information, data, statistics, etc, of your website content is up to date and is helpful for the target audience. 

7. Broken Images or Missing Alt Texts

If your web pages contain broken images or images with no alt texts, this is something you must try to fix in order to make sure that your website’s rankings do not get hampered. Alt tags (alternative tags) of images help search engines understand the context of images and display them for the most relevant search queries. Sometimes the image doesn’t render or load correctly due to incorrect filepath or improper filename. In such a case, alt texts can help users understand the context of the image. Ignoring webpages with broken images and missing alt tags is another common SEO mistake that many website owners make.

How to Fix this?

To fix this, simply start looking for pages with broken images. You can find them under the ‘issues’ tab of your site auditing report. Search ‘images’ in the search bar and it will display the number of broken images and the number of images with no alt tags. Try to fix all of them by optimizing image size, replacing the image, changing the image URL, or simply removing the image if it’s not that important. In case of missing alt tags, you can simply add alt tags to all images. Just make sure that the alt text is relevant and seems natural. 

8. Poor Crawlability

Your web pages are crawled and indexed by Google before they finally start showing up in search engine result pages. Pages that are not crawled by Google bots are not indexed and hence are not visible on search engine results. There can be multiple reasons behind poor site crawlability as listed below:

• Broken links, lack of internal links, and nofollow links on the webpage
• Pages blocked in a robots.txt file
• Redirecting loops, i.e. two pages redirecting to each other
• Unindexed pages
• Poor site structure
• 4xx (non-accessible pages) and 5xx errors (servers unable to perform a request)

How to Fix This?

Many website owners often tend to miss poor crawlability, but this can harm your website SEO badly. Crawlability issues can restrict search engine crawlers from accessing your web pages, which further prevents them from getting indexed. You can check your crawlability score in your site’s auditing report. Look for the potential reasons behind poor crawlability and get them fixed.

9. Not Targeting The Right Audience

Targeting the right audience is as important as targeting the right keywords. If your content isn’t targeted at the right audience, it will never get as much exposure as it can. Knowing your target audience and creating content based on their interest is one of the fundamental SEO practices that you must follow in order to improve your search engine rankings. You must clearly understand who your target audience is and what is it looking for. If you are not doing proper research to understand the search intent of users, you won’t be able to make the most out of your SEO efforts.

How to Fix This?

Use data analytics techniques to understand the type of consumers who are most likely to be interested in your business. Look for users whose search queries match your website content. Incorporate the right keywords into your content strategy based on what your target audience is looking for and what their search intent is. 

10. Lack of an SEO Strategy

You should have a well-planned strategy in order to succeed in SEO. From the keywords that you want to target to the type of content you create, everything should be well-planned. If you are randomly creating content based on your assumptions about the target audience and their search queries, you won’t be able to succeed. Just writing content and publishing it on your website isn’t enough. In order to make sure that the content is visible to users and appears in search engine results for relevant search queries, you need to optimize it. 

How to Fix This?

Good SEO is only possible when you have a well-planned SEO strategy. This strategy should involve keyword research, creating high-quality content, link building, and other SEO tactics. You can start by identifying your target audience and preparing a list of relevant keywords that you want to target. Just make sure that these foundational steps are taken very seriously. The keywords should be relevant to your target audience and the content you create should be relevant to the target keywords. If you don’t have a good knowledge of SEO, you can consider partnering with MadHawks, the top SEO agency. 

11. Not Using Schema Markup

Schema markup is a form of special code (also known as structured data) that helps search engines understand the content of your web pages. Without schema makeup, search engines have to struggle to understand the context of your page, which may result in lower rankings. If you don’t use schema markup for your website, you might be missing out on a great ranking opportunity. 

How to Fix This?

There are different types of schemas that you can use in your web pages based on the type of your page’s content. For blogs or web pages through which you are answering the most common search queries, you can use FAQ schema to boost SEO. For ‘How-to’ content, you can use HowTo schema and so on. This will help search engines better understand your content and display it in SERPs for the most relevant search queries.

12. Not Having Quality Backlinks

Google itself confirmed that link building is an important ranking factor for websites. However, the biggest mistake that many website owners make is to prioritize the quantity of backlinks over their quality. Having quality backlinks from authoritative websites is more important. If most of your backlinks come from irrelevant and low-quality websites, search engines may consider it a spammy practice, which will directly impact your site’s authority. 

How To Fix This?

When building backlinks, your focus should be on the quality of links over the quantity. Try to look for websites that are relevant to your content. Also, make sure that websites are of good quality and don’t seem spammy. It may be challenging but by putting some time and effort into finding high-quality links, you can successfully get links from high-authority sites. It will help improve your site’s authority and build trust with search engines. 

Improve Your Website SEO with MadHawks

If you have been making some or most of these SEO mistakes, you need to fix them as soon as possible if you truly want to appear on search engine result pages. No matter how hard you try, these common SEO mistakes can cost you a lot of website traffic and many potential ranking opportunities. Therefore, it is quite important to ensure that you take care of each of these factors. MadHawks, being the top SEO agency, can help you achieve your SEO goals. Our SEO professionals have proper knowledge of best SEO practices and good experience in bringing websites to the top of search engine results. For any further queries, contact us today!

FAQs

1. Can SEO mistakes result in penalties from search engines?

Ans. Yes, SEO mistakes like keyword stuffing, link spamming, etc, can result in penalties from Google, which may badly impact a website’s rankings and traffic. 

2. Are there any common misconceptions about SEO mistakes?

Ans. Some most common misconceptions about SEO are:

• You should only focus on backlinks. However, that is not true. Internal linking is always equally important.
• Keywords should be incorporated multiple times even if they don’t seem natural. The right strategy is to incorporate relevant keywords only where they seem natural. Keyword stuffing should be strictly avoided.

3. How frequently should I audit my website for SEO mistakes?

Ans. It is advisable to conduct an SEO audit for your website at least once a quarter. For more dynamic industries, you can even consider monthly SEO audits. 

4. Are there specific SEO mistakes that are more damaging than others?

Ans. Yes, practices like keyword stuffing, link spamming, duplicate content, poor crawlability, and targeting the wrong audience, can lead to heavy losses in rankings and website traffic.

5. How do SEO mistakes impact website performance?

Ans. Common SEO mistakes like keyword stuffing, lack of quality backlinks, missing internal linking opportunities, publishing plagiarized content, etc, can badly impact a website’s performance causing drops in rankings and reducing website traffic.