The 10 Most Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the strategy used for enhancing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website. Every business irrespective of type of industry needs quality SEO service to reach to the next level. Both the demands of SEO and opportunities in SEO are growing at a tremendous rate. But the bad practice seo mistakes keep rank down.

The size of this online marketing industry is predicted to touch $1.6 billion by 2027. This has evolved over recent years to a significant revenue channel from being a siloed practice. 

From shifting marketing conditions to changes from search engines and customer priorities, marketers always have to stay on top of many changes. Following are some common SEO mistakes with suggestions to get rid of them.

SEO Mistakes 1: Not Knowing Your Audience

Recognizing the target audience is one of the key principles of SEO. Remember SEO can let you hear the voice of your customers. As a marketer you need to understand the behavior of the consumers at each level. 

Choosing the right keywords for a website might be the first step of your SEO planning and choose right keywords planning tools. Thus you need to measure the preference of search engines and users on your keywords/keyphrases. Most marketers commit mistakes here. 

While you are going to define your products and services, it’s important to know what kinds of queries your potential customers generally will use to refer to them.

Tips:

• Understand the market where your customers take part – what are the macro trends?
• Use both real-time and historical data to identify how behavior is changing.
• Map what you find about consumer intent to your keyword selections and strategy.
• Use Google keyword planning tools and vendor tools at your disposal.

SEO Mistakes 2: Not Having an SEO Plan & Roadmap

You might have noticed that many internet marketers face hurdles to either build or execute on strategy from small and medium-sized businesses to big enterprises. This is very common SEO Mistake.

Last year around 36% of small businesses had an SEO strategy. Developing an SEO strategy and roadmap seems critical for success. However, some strategies fail as creating a sustainable and effective plan on various stakeholders – content, website, PR, IT, and engineering.

Make sure the strategy is developed by the persons who have deep understanding on the importance of SEO as well as SEO best practices.

Without having a proper roadmap, you cannot let your business up. . Look at where your website and results are today and where you want it to be. Set goals and start according to workflows.

Tips:

As part of your plan:

• Evaluate and understand your competition – positions, keywords, content, and performance.
• Divide actions in tasks and think of goals and key stakeholders.
• Agree on roles for content, site updates, digital alignment, and SEO evangelism.
• Adopt technologies – tools and platforms that will help with workflow and your strategy.

SEO Mistakes 3: Creating the Wrong Type of Content

The most critical SEO mistake in the SEO process is preparing irrelevant content that your audience is not interested in. The primary issue is that you are looking to rank a specific keyword but you miss the context through which you can tap the potential audience. 

Search engines always provide their users the most relevant content based on their search queries. This is why you need to design your content in such a way that users would spend more time on it. Without making customer-centric content, expecting rank improvement is your ignorance.

This mistake is often a consequence of:

• Attempting to match a variety of topics within one piece of content.
• Practicing low-quality work just for keyword stuffing.
• Optimizing many keywords in a single article.

Therefore you should produce content that is related to the questions and requirements of your prospective audience, including using the right search terms. After that search engines find your content matching the keyword tried to optimize in it.

Marketers possibly make two big blunders with content:

• Not preparing content for the right audience.
• Not generating content that is in accordance with expertise, authoritative, and is trustworthy.

Thus it’s imperative to produce content that Google loves. This is very common SEO Mistake.

Tips:

• Make sure your content and SEO strategies are perfectly aligned.
• Prepare content keeping in mind that answers the questions people are searching for.
• Create different types of content to cater to various requirements and SERP layouts such as text, video and visuals.
• Adhere to the best practices of Google on search quality and E-A-T.

SEO Mistakes 4: Publishing Duplicate Content

Here the focus is on the quality of content. Many marketers have been relying on duplicate content. And they should make sure that such practices always get a penalty from search engines. Copying and plagiarizing content is considered as spammy practice and should be disregarded. Simply thin and duplicate content won’t help. 

Some also use software to modify or spin a content. They must think that Google always gives credit to original and meaningful content. It is just the way to make a website upgrade and push high to search results.

Tips:

• Put strong headlines that match the topic of your content. Avoid misleading readers.
• Ensure your content provides answers and has actionable information.
• Prepare stories that people relate to and engage with. Always quote reputable sources.
• Include images and videos to boost the experience of readers. Be creative.

SEO Mistakes 5: Skipping Title Tags & Meta Descriptions and Forgetting to Provide Context with Schema

When you are optimizing your content, you need to insert target keywords in your content. Title tags and meta descriptions are important objects of SEO that cannot be overlooked. This would result in losing the value of your content. 

Major optimizing factors are acknowledged by search engines while crawling a website. Thus if it is carried out correctly, they can enhance the performance of your website. 

Some marketers often forget to implement schema to mark up the content and convey Google many things about their websites. Developing content is really important. But without this, Google finds difficulties to understand the context of your content. That means your site’s visibility is lower in organic search results and is keeping less relevancy in certain queries made through voice search. This is very common SEO Mistake.

Another thing content marketers also forget is adding image tags. The alt tags of the visuals are very important in the content, as they are another sign of how you are targeting articles. The bots of search engines cannot find the pictures; however, they can get all the alt tags and include the information in the way the web pages are indexed by them.

Tips:

• Place appropriate title tags for each page that is short but informative.
• Make sure you match your keyword to intent and be careful where you put it.
• Do not use title tags which are too lengthy and make them unique across all your pages.
• Follow the best practices of Google on creating good titles and snippets.

SEO Mistakes 6: Missing Quality Links

To take full advantage of SEO, content marketers must check the quality of outbound links added in it. If the included links are superior in quality, you can overlook their numbers. However, you need to make sure the links are relevant to the content and are of trustworthy websites. This is very common SEO Mistake.

It’s very important to link back to websites which have linked to you as it would help bring back traffic in the coming days. One more counterproductive practice when it comes to links is implementing unproductive anchor text. Remember anchor text signifies to search bots and the readers about the link and how it can be useful to users.

Again avoid using “click here” as an anchor text and be sure you have a lot of anchor texts, as using the same text repeatedly can be seen as spammy.

Tips:

• Generate backlinks on your own but do not try to buy. .
• Check broken links and fix them immediately.
• Prepare content based on E-A-T – quality content automatically gets links.
• Implement technologies and tools to help monitor and build.

SEO Mistakes 7: Overlooking Internal Links

Internal links are also very helpful in SEO. Many marketers you will find make mistakes in internal links. It is vital to think on your top-performing pages and think of putting links to them in the content. 

In this way, you can make them visible and create further traction. If the internal links do not match the topic, they are not only worthless but also invite penalty from Google. 

 As with keyword stuffing, you have to watch out and not overdo internal linking. When the content and links seem unnatural, your target customers would not value them.

Tips:

• Group topically-related web pages with internal links.
• Audit internal links for problems – broken links, slow pages, important vs unimportant pages.
• Keep the internal links count to a specific number.
• Avoid linking to irrelevant pages.

SEO Mistakes 8: Not Investing in a Fast & Mobile-Friendly Experience

SEO is not limited to content and keywords only. It’s also about the quality of your website, especially its performance on mobile phones that are the top most choice of users. Search engines can identify when your site is not mobile-friendly, as Google looks at mobile-first indexing. This is very common SEO Mistake.

Failing to provide a smooth mobile experience to the audience would end up in poor rating on search engines. 

Website loading time is the key as search engines give more emphasis on it. You can notice slow websites are often found in lower positions on the SERPs. 

Organizations that make mobile SEO mistakes typically fall around:

• Slow website speed.
• Block files.
• Taking time to load videos and images.
• Interstitials ads.
• Poor local information.
• Non-responsive web design.

Tips:

• Improve the load time of your website to avoid bounce rate.
• Must have responsive design to let users browse your mobile site seamlessly.
• Optimize and ensure local and mobile strategies align.
• Produce mobile content to give users a top-class mobile experience.

SEO Mistakes 9: Not Getting How SEO Works Across Digital Channels

Today SEO has become an integral part of digital marketing and it maximizes our potential. So you need to be very cautious about the workings of SEO and its effectiveness when integrating other marketing channels. 

SEO always requires assistance from multiple major marketing channels and has a positive effect on them all. Developing a symbiotic relationship and agreeing on various perspectives across channels such as email, social media, among others.

Tips:

• Be sure your SEO strategies watch all inputs and outputs from all digital channels.
• Evaluate your overall SEO improvement and show how it helps other channels.
• Keep in touch with digital counterparts, both internally and externally.
• Ensure all your digital team members are bought into your SEO plan and roadmap.

SEO Mistakes 10: Not Using Analytics & Implementing Wrong Tools & Technology

The only way to know whether your SEO and content efforts work is to check their development. Some marketers discredit the numbers, but this is a serious mistake.

Setting up and reviewing your analytics continuously is important for your optimization results. Google offers plenty of tools including Google Analytics and Google Search Console that can help you measure and get an overview of site performance. 

In addition, there are many other tools and platforms that can facilitate you to track all your SEO mistakes. 

Solutions range from:

• Keyword research.
• Link management, reporting, and measurement.
• SEO management and workflow.
• Automation.
• Competitive analysis.

Tips:

• Use a tool or platform that best serves you and your organizational requirements.
• Tools often help with certain parts of your SEO strategy.
• Platforms cover a lot of things.
• Tools and platforms help you enhance efficiency and execute SEO strategy.

Conclusion

SEO is an intrinsic part of your content marketing strategy. In fact many top marketers make a few common SEO mistakes. You need to be well acquainted with the challenges that have already been experienced by some marketers with the right marketing efforts to avoid them. 

All these 10 common SEO mistakes have now become easier to recognize before you commit them. Best of luck!