SEO is similar to any other industry that you can master over time: if you become too comfortable with it, you may begin to believe that you are immune to making mistakes.
We’ve all seen how it goes. You’ve been in it for five, ten, or more years, and you’ve developed a sort of autopilot mode.
But wait a minute, someone may say. Isn’t it true that we can’t “set and forget” SEO?
True, but it’s strange how the more knowledgeable you become about something, the easier it is to forget the details.
And, when it comes to SEO, keep in mind that Google’s methods change all the time.
With this in mind, every SEO out there could benefit from some pointers on how to improve.
Here are ten of the worst SEO mistakes that even the most seasoned experts can make.
1. Displaying an Inadequate Internal Link Structure
As your website grows in size due to all of your fantastic content, you’re bound to run into some fairly basic internal linking errors.
This includes everything from mass duplicate content generation to 404-page errors.
Internal linking structures, in my opinion, are vastly underutilized by webmasters, despite serving as one of the most valuable functions in your UX and SEO strategy.
Internal links provide your website with five valuable benefits:
- Making it easy to navigate to conversion pages.
- Spreading authority to pages that are hidden deep within your website.
- Including additional reading or interactive content on your website for users to consume.
- Organizing webpages using keyword-optimized anchor text.
- Providing search engine crawlers with access to your most important web pages.
Resubmitting an XML sitemap to search engines is a great way to allow search engines to crawl unlinked webpages.
Similarly, it’s critical to use your robots.txt file and noindex tag wisely to avoid accidentally blocking important web pages on your site (or a client’s).
No webpage should be more than two clicks away from the homepage or a call-to-action landing page, as a general rule.
Reevaluate your website architecture using new keyword research to start organizing pages by topicality, in content and topic clusters.
2. Creating Content for the Purpose of Creating Content
Best practices dictate that you should create content regularly to increase your brand’s exposure and authority, as well as the rate at which your website is indexed.
However, as your website expands to hundreds of pages or more, it becomes more difficult to find unique keywords for each page while adhering to a consistent strategy.
We sometimes fall victim to the fallacy that we must create content simply to have more of it.
That is simply false, and it results in thin and useless content, resulting in a waste of resources.
Do not write content without first conducting strategic keyword research.
Ensure that the content is relevant to the target keyword and includes closely related keywords in H2 tags and body paragraphs.
This will provide search engines with the full context of your content and meet user intent on multiple levels.
It can take months for optimized content to reach page one results; once there, make sure it remains relevant and unique to its industry.
3. Lack of Investment in Link-Worthy Content
According to our understanding, the quantity and quality of unique referring domains to a webpage is one of Google’s three most important ranking factors.
For agencies, link building is a significant industry draw. Obtaining a large number of links through guest posting, manual outreach, and influencer marketing, on the other hand, can be costly and time-consuming.
The best way to naturally acquire links is to leverage outstanding content that people want to link to.
Rather than wasting time on manual research and writing hundreds of guest posts each year, why not invest in a piece of content that can obtain all of those links in a single day of writing?
As previously stated, set aside time to create long-form content that adds value to the industry.
You can experiment with various content types here, such as a resource page, infographic, interactive quiz, or evergreen guide.
Use some of your manual outreach strategy to promote content from your website rather than content from someone else’s.
4. Your content isn’t reaching your target audience.
To continue on this theme, you must have a strategy in place to get people to view your content.
Much of the industry and many businesses, in my opinion, do not put as much effort into content promotion as they do in content creation.
Sure, you use social media to distribute your content. But how widespread is it without paid advertising?
Posting your most recent article on your blog, social media channels, and e-newsletter only reaches a small portion of your current audience.
If you want to generate new leads for your business, you’ll need to invest more in marketing.
Among the strategies are the following:
- Paid social media marketing campaigns
- To target sharing, keyword-optimized hashtags were used.
- Influencer channels are used to promote content.
- Making connections.
- While it is a bit of a catch-22, you must promote content in order to obtain links to it.
- Only then will you be able to begin organically acquiring more links.
5. Concentrating on the Wrong Keywords
So you put time and effort into creating long-form content, but it isn’t driving a lot of traffic to your website.
Similarly, your visitors are not converting and are spending little time on your site.
Most likely, you’re optimizing for the wrong keywords.
While most of us recognize the significance of long-tail keywords for informational queries, we occasionally make the following errors:
Inability to categorize search volumes and competition based on geography.
Excessive reliance on low-conversion-rate phrases.
Investing an excessive amount of time and money in broad keywords (external links, internal link anchor text, etc.).
Ignoring click-through rates.
Incorporating awkward exact match phrases into the content.
Ignoring the significance of Google Ads.
Using target keywords to influence irrelevant content.
Choosing keywords that are unrelated to your intended audience.
Researching the search terms that appear in the top results for both national and local searches is critical.
Inquire with your customers about the terms they use to describe different aspects of your industry. From here, you can segment your keyword list to make it more relevant to your customers.
Use keyword tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Semrush’s keyword generator to generate relevant keyword ideas.
Keep in mind that you should optimize for both informational and commercial search queries.
Read Reasons To Hide IP For SEO Specialists.
6. Ignorance of Paid Media
Currently, SEO is concerned with acquiring and nurturing leads, whereas paid media is concerned with acquiring and converting leads.
But what if we broke down those silos to create a unified message that targeted the buyer at every stage of the journey?
Do you have any idea what your client’s advertising message is or what keywords they use as an SEO provider? Are you using the same keywords as the paid media department to promote the same product/service pages?
PPC keyword research and landing page performance offer SEO consultants a wealth of information that they can apply to their campaigns.
Aside from that, Facebook and Twitter’s advertising platforms offer robust audience analysis tools that SEO consultants can use to better understand their clients’ customers.
By focusing on a unified message and sharing in each other’s research, SEO consultants can discover keywords that convert the highest and drive the most clicks in search results.
7. Ignoring Local Concerns
The Pigeon update by Google completely transformed the field of local SEO.
Because of local directory reviews, customizing a Google My Business page, and the local three-pack, local SEO is highly targeted and high converting.
Consider the following data:
- On the same day, 76 percent of mobile device searches result in an in-store visit.
- Half of all local mobile searches are for local business information.
- 97 percent of people read online reviews before making a purchase.
- Personal recommendations are trusted by 79 percent of people more than reviews.
- It’s critical to categorize your keyword research into two types: local and national intent.
- If you provide local services, include city names next to target keywords and in the content body.
While many of us are focused on national business expansion, the importance of local SEO should not be underestimated.
8. Failure to Regularly Audit Your Own Website
One of the most common mistakes we all make is failing to continue to optimize our site and fix errors that arise over time.
Following a site migration or the installation of new tools or plugins, a site audit is especially important.
Here are some examples of common technical errors that occur over time:
- Duplicate content exists.
- Expired hyperlinks
- Slow site performance due to oversized images or ineffective JavaScript implementation.
- Meta tags that have not been optimized.
- Duplicate content can occur due to a number of factors, including pagination and session IDs.
When moving content around your site, broken links are unavoidable, so make sure to include 301 redirects to a relevant webpage for any content you remove.
Remember to resolve 302 redirects because they are only temporary.
It is critical to audit your website for mobile search. It is not sufficient to have a responsive web design or AMP.
Make sure to minify your CSS and JS on your mobile design, as well as shrink images, to provide a fast and responsive design.
Finally, an important aspect of the audit that is frequently overlooked is reevaluating your onsite content strategy. Most industries are dynamic, which means that innovations emerge and certain services become obsolete over time.
Redesign your website to reflect any new product offerings.
Create content around that topic to demonstrate its importance to both search engines and users.
Refresh your keyword research and audience research regularly to discover new opportunities to scale and remain relevant.
9. Ignoring Google Analytics on a regular basis
The following point is about Google Analytics. It’s not the same as auditing your website, because an audit reveals technical errors on the back end that you must fix on your own.
Google Analytics is more focused on the audience, and examining the data presented in the program is critical for determining where your website requires attention.
Have bounce rates on this or that page been increasing? Investigate it to find out why.
Is it true that traffic from one channel has been steadily decreasing over time? Check your resources to see what you can do to fix it.
Even if you’re intimidated by data and numbers, Google Analytics presents information in simple ways that even a novice can understand.
The point is that installing a Google Analytics tracking code and then completely ignoring it is the wrong approach.
I know it takes time and effort to go in and check things out regularly, but you’ll learn so much about how the public interacts with your site that you won’t be able to ignore the issues you discover.
10. Neglecting Technical SEO
Finally, don’t forget about the technical SEO aspects.
Many website owners may not want to tackle this area due to the often mind-numbing nature of fixing these issues, but I can assure you that if you’re ignoring technical SEO, you’re doing it wrong.
Do you have any pages that cannot be crawled? Are there any broken internal images or links? A thousand short-term redirects?
What about orphaned pages, pages with no internal linking, or external links that are broken?
All of these issues harm your site’s crawl ability and raise your crawl budget.
So, what is the bottom line? These issues will keep you from being discovered by the people who matter the most to you.
Use tools like Semrush or Screaming Frog to identify and resolve these issues before they become too severe and cause you a headache. To stay on top of these technical issues, perhaps audit them once a month.
It may not be the most glamorous aspect of SEO, but resolving technical issues is critical to the success of a website, so get to work.
Last Thoughts
Everyone makes mistakes in their craft, and one of the best ways to correct them is to consult best practices.
My best piece of advice is to keep your mind agile and to take a step back now and then to assess whether you are doing everything possible to scale your or a client’s business.
Learn more from SEO and read How Can I Increase Traffic to Specific Landing Pages?
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