In fact, businesses make several crucial errors that harm rather than benefit their search rankings while trying to keep up with SEO requirements. Therefore, we invited a group of Cyber Infrastructure Inc. Agency Council members to share the common SEO mistakes they encounter. Here are 5 mistakes to steer clear of.
Mistake 1 No SEO content strategy
Search engine optimization is often used by website owners only when they are experiencing traffic problems. The SEO team could find itself isolated from the rest of the team as a result. They may be creating content or building links on their own, leading to confusion about how the tasks will be implemented. The SEO team might not agree on budgets, which is important, especially if your budget is tight or you need inexpensive link-building.
No Initial Keyword Research
If you don't do keyword research carefully, it can lead to the following problems:
- Many pages aren't ranking very well.
- Cannibalization of keywords and pages that conflict.
- You may fall short of what your audience expects.
- Pages with high traffic but low conversion rates.
- High bounce rate landing pages are important.
- Unexpected or unwanted audience.
Tip: Track Your Ranking And Plan Keywords
You will need to do keyword research to optimize your content. Rank Tracker has a Keyword Research Module that makes it easy to do. Keyword Sandbox is a place where you can store all the keywords that you have researched and further cluster them.
For effective keyword planning, it is important to consider search intention. It would help if you distinguished between transactional and informational queries. Sort the keywords according to the search intent, and then choose formats that best answer the query of the user. This guide will help you to sort keywords according to search intent.
Content Decay
You are making a serious SEO error if you publish a post on your blog and then forget it. The term describes the gradual loss of organic traffic and rankings. This happens naturally when a website loses relevance. After all of the newsletters and social media, it falls into obscurity.
You will end up with many pages that do not rank well. This is also a sign to Google that your site may be outdated or uninteresting.
Tip: Make A Schedule Of Topics And Dates For Publication
It is important to review your content strategy periodically. Update them periodically.
Redesigning existing content:
- Verify that none of your links are pointing to 404 pages.
- Get new quotes from reputable sources.
- Discover new facts and studies about your subject.
Prioritize topics and tasks in your SEO content plan. Map top keywords in Rank Tracker to landing pages so that you can see the decline of traffic and rankings. This keyword map will help you identify underperforming topics and generate new ideas for content.
Thin Content
Another content-related SEO error is publishing a lot of thin or unsubstantial content. Online shops with hundreds of products are common. Google may consider these thin pages if they have sparse product descriptions. Panda is Google's Core Algorithm, and it addresses this issue.
Tip: Use Seo Writing Assistants To Improve Your Content.
You should first check your website to determine if any pages have thin content. You can easily check this with WebSite Auditor by filtering your site pages using the Word Count metric under the submodule Site Structure > Pages.
Add some text to the pages that are lacking in content. Rewrite the product description provided by a manufacturer, for example. You can find more information on optimizing e-commerce sites here. Combine several articles to create a good story for other pages.
The Bad Site Structure
Early mistakes in your planning can become major problems later. As an example:
- Domain names are difficult to recall or generic, and they're highly competitive.
- The site is not memorable because the categories are not unique or original.
- A poor link can lead to high bounce rates and fewer pageviews. Visitors may not find the valuable content that is buried in your pages.
The structure of a site can affect the user experience and other factors.
Tip: Use The Visual Sitemap To Optimize Your Website Structure
WebSite Auditor can be used to scan your website and determine its structure. In the Interactive Visualization section, you can find the sitemap. You can view the HTTP response and click depth for every page in the visual sitemap. The pages with the most clicks receive a very low number of page views.
Google Analytics allows you to monitor PageRank distribution and Pageviews. You may also find pages that are not linked. Orphaned pages can be problematic because they're hard to locate and may fall completely out of Google's index.
Visual Sitemaps are interactive. You can colorize and annotate them, add pages, or even rebuild your project after making all of the changes.
Missing SEO Guidelines
We write for both search engines and humans in the age of semantic search. Even though well-written text may be attractive to the reader, it may not perform as expected in searches without an SEO-friendly format.
On-page mistakes that are common in SEO content include:
- Meta titles that are not optimized
- Meta titles and descriptions that are empty
- H2-H5 headers with multiple H1 and no H2-H5 titles
- Lack of paragraphs can lead to poor readability
- Italics and bold fonts make it difficult to read.
- Images without ALT text.
Tip: Use Writing Assistants For Better Content
WebSite Auditor allows you to keep track of pages and keywords that need further optimization. In the Page Audit, you will first be able to see how each page is optimized.
The Content Editor, which is built into the tool, will then take care of your meta tags and suggest questions and topics, as well as show you the optimization score for each landing page. It will highlight your focus keywords and show you competitors as a reference.
In the Content Editor, you can also compile tasks for your copywriters. You can also use the Yoast SEO plug-in (if you have a WordPress site) to optimize your pages while on the move. So, publishing editors can become familiar with the proper format and will avoid the most common SEO errors.
Mistake 2 Outdated SEO Techniques
Some people say that black-hat SEO is no longer effective, but it still happens. Recently, we came across pages that promised to "watch [a film] online" but copied the official streaming website. Another time, the name of a fake website matched exactly what was asked, for example, "Watch Poirot online." The domains were only active for a short time.
From Google, we started a Twitter thread about old SEO techniques. Here are a few examples:
- Stuffed keyword meta tag
- Rel next/prev for pagination
- PageRank algorithm shaping
- Exact-match domain names
- Automatic comment posting
- The same color background with keywords (cloaking).
- The Doorway Pages
- Links to farms
The list could go on and on, but we'll stop at the SEO techniques below, as they can be costly.
Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a common SEO error that copywriters make. In the past, it was considered web spam to stuff keywords into meta tags or content in an unnatural way. Google abandoned the meta keyword tag because of this practice.
Search algorithms can now tell that some content is written by humans. They also know the user's search intention and use passage rankings to display the relevant part of the page. The ranking of a web page will not be boosted by excessive keyword repetition. The question then is, how can you use keywords in a way that shows the relevancy of a web page for a search query?
Tip: Use Content Editor to check on-page SEO
WebSite Auditor's Content Editor can be used to evaluate your site's optimization. This tool shows you where it is best to reduce the number of keywords to avoid keyword stuffing. You should be aware that this mistake can occur in many places, including meta tags, ALT text, anchor texts, and more. The TF-IDF is a feature that WebSite Auditor users tend to overlook. The tool shows the calculations of recommendations based on SERP analyses for the biggest competitors.
Trade Links
Links are controversial investments even after the Penguin algorithm was introduced. Google values backlinks, and they help to rank pages. It isn't always easy to get backlinks quickly. The question is, should you buy backlinks? Eight out of ten web admins admitted that they paid for link building in our poll.
Black-hat techniques like forum links or paid blog networks will waste resources. Take the case of sites that had to be manually penalized for selling links outbound or spamming user comments. Be prepared for anything if you're involved in an extensive paid link campaign.
Tip: Do Quality Link Building
Quality link building is better than buying links. Try broken link building, skyscraper techniques, or search for backlinks from competitors. Be aware that Google requires you to label sponsored content appropriately when buying backlinks. Check out our list of link-building tactics still effective in 2023. Use the SEO SpyGlass Backlink Checker to analyze backlink profiles and find high-quality domains to link.
Article Spinning
The purpose of article spinning, an SEO technique for guest blogging, is to produce a large number of posts quickly and improve rankings. It involves manually rewriting or using AI to rewrite the text and then publishing it across multiple domains.
Guest posts are fine when they add value to an existing audience. It will not be beneficial to you if you feed platforms that lack traffic and engagement. These platforms won't rank for long, and they will have no influence on others. The search algorithms can detect duplicates and plagiarism. This is an intriguing case study on how the Helpful Content Update demoted websites with AI-generated content.
Tip: Instead, Publish Guest Posts To Authoritative Domains
You should only collaborate with platforms of high quality if you want to do guest posting. Cyber Infrastructure Inc. can be used to evaluate the authority of a guest-posting site. It has default options to locate platforms that allow guest posting. Cyber Infrastructure Inc. also allows you to search by keyword, exact location/search engines.
Filter them based on quality criteria, such as domain traffic, authority, and social media. Each website can be reviewed in the internal web browser and added to your link prospect database.
Fake Reviews
Paid reviews suffered the same fate. Google has introduced a series of updates to its product review system (four in the last two years) based on fake reviews. Google uses automated measures for spam detection to eliminate reviews which are likely spam. The mistaken deletion of genuine reviews on Google Maps or Business Profiles was particularly painful for users.
Tip: Ask Your Customers To Rate Your Services Or Products
Google has tightened its requirements on reviews. Reviewers are required to post their own content and provide evidence of how well they understand the subject. This means that thin texts (less than 500 words) are not acceptable for web articles. Only images and videos will be accepted.
In the meantime, your customers or users can provide the most valuable reviews. You can leave your customers a note asking them to review or rate your service on the relevant platform. It is important to let them know how they can be of assistance to you, even if your clients are devoted to your brand.
Mistake 3 Wrong Or Unclear Seo Goals
You need to be able to determine the success of your SEO campaigns to prove its effectiveness. Traffic and conversions are two indicators of good results. In the short term, however, there are many milestones you should plan for When your SEO efforts start to bear fruit and why major gains or failures occur. Prioritizing tasks is crucial.
Avoiding Competitors
Without any research on the competition, optimization would just be a blind leap into the unknown. SEO requires constant effort due to the ever-changing competition in SERPs. You first find out who the major players are; then, you optimize your website to compete with them. If you don't pay attention to your competition, you will be pushed out of SERPs very quickly.
By examining the SEO strategies of your competitors, it is possible to learn how they are doing things. This alone makes competitive research a good idea.
Tip: Monitor Your Competition In SEO
The four SEO PowerSuite tools are all suitable for competitor research. Still, Rank Tracker, which has a dedicated Competitor Research Module, is the most sophisticated. With Rank Tracker, you can do the following:
- Search for your competitors by topic or domain.
- Find out the ranking keywords of each competitor.
- Find the keywords that have the highest traffic potential by exploring the gap between them.
- Compare your SEO performance with that of competitors.
Add your competitors and compare their ranking with yours. Track how your competitors rank, see their richest features, and the history of SERPs. You can then take action based on what your competitors are doing right and what you're not.
Search Engines: Focus On Just One
Google may be a virtual monopolist on the market for search engines, but things can vary depending on where you are. China, Turkey, and Russia all have their own search engines that occupy a large part of the market. Focusing on just one search engine can cause SEOs to miss out on the fact that their website is not ranked or deindexed completely in other search engines.
Tip : Make Sure You Check Your Website's Indexation In All Relevant Search Engines
Rank Tracker allows you to check your rankings for any local search engine. Add your own custom search engine to the Project Preferences. Define the location and update rankings.
WebSite Auditor also allows you to scan your site using a customized search engine. You will receive all of the relevant information on how search engines view your site. If you find that Bing is not indexing any of your pages, use the Bing Webmaster Tool to check for the problem.
Googlebot Mobile is an independent crawler. This makes it vital to track mobile rankings and performance in addition to the desktop for certain businesses.
Local Search Is Ignored
The above SEO error is also a common mistake. Some businesses that are new to SEO do not use local media. Local SEO can boost your ranking much faster and provide more benefits.
Tip: Optimize For Local Searches By Localizing The Search Engine That You Use To Check Your Rankings
Think globally and act locally
- List your business in the local listings
- Create a Google Business Profile
- You can start a conversation with the local press.
- Local businesses can add schema markings.
- Search engine rankings can be tracked.
Clicks Are The Sole Seo KPI
Analyses that are based solely on clicks will eventually fail. The success of SEO is determined by organic traffic and revenue. However, if these metrics drop, it's important to identify the problem.
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You Can Get Regular Updates About Your Seo KPIs
It is a good idea to create a list with primary and secondary metrics so that they can be regularly compared. The SEO content team, for example, will be interested in these SEO metrics.
- Keywords and landing pages with the highest traffic.
- Clicks and impressions from organic sources
- Rankings and visibility online.
- Conversions to organic products
You will want to know the SEO metrics that are related to your website's general health. These include the number of indexed pages and technical issues. Our guide on tracking SEO results has more information about these metrics.
Mistake 4 No Regular Site Audits
A site audit is the first step in any new SEO project. Even though some issues seem insignificant, their combined effect will negatively affect the SEO of your website. No matter how vigilant you are, there will always be on-site problems. Here are some examples of SEO mistakes that could catch you off guard.
Indexing Issues
You may have indexed unwanted pages, or you might wait for too long to index a URL. What can go wrong? One common SEO error is to disallow a page that has robots.txt while still listing the URL in the Sitemap. One mistake is to not have any XML Sitemap.
You are taken to a list of affected URLs by clicking on the issue. You should also know the reason for listing each page in a particular section.
There are several reasons for errors:
- Google has found pages that are very similar, but it is unable to identify which page was the original.
- It means Google found a second version of a webpage with the canonical URL. The error could be due to AMP pages or UTM parameters.
- The error is caused by the 'noindex" tag. This tag could have been accidentally added to your page (a box in WordPress's admin panel discourages search engines from crawling the site).
- Google Page With Redirect: This means Google found a web page that had a redirect, but it did not index the page to avoid duplication issues. Or there was an error with the redirect.
- The error is a soft 404. It occurs when Google finds a URL that looks broken. This can happen when a page returns an incorrect 200 HTTP response instead of 404.
Website Auditor Is A Great Tool To Use For Generating Sitemaps And Robots.Txt
WebSite Auditor has a Sitemap generator and a robots.txt Editor that allows you to review all pages and follow instructions. Then, go to Site Audit and review the indexing issues. Select the Generator you require from Website Tools. You can either download the edited files to your computer or upload them via FTP.
You can also submit an updated or new URL to Google via the URL Inspector Tool and ask Google to index the page. You can check if the URL was successfully indexed in the same area. The tool only allows you to check 50 URLs a day. You will have to do this one URL at a time, making it difficult to resolve multiple issues.
Google also offers a free Indexing API that allows you to notify Google directly about URL changes. This API allows you to combine 100 URLs in a single HTTP Request. It is an SEO mistake to try and use this API with other types of content, as it only works for broadcast events and job listings. Other types of content can be crawled, indexed, and then removed from the Indexing API. Google recommends the use of sitemaps if you wish to include the whole website.
Redirects to The Wrong Website
Redesigning or restructuring your website can result in unnecessary redirects. These redirects are detrimental to SEO as they consume the crawl budget for your website. The misuse of 301 redirects and 302 (both permanent and temporary) is a common mistake. There could be redirected loops or long chains, as well as mixed content, too many redirects, and more. Although redirects don't directly affect SEO rankings, they can have an impact on the crawlability and speed of a site.
Check Your Site Regularly For Warnings About Redirection
Check the Site Audit Report and all Warnings. You can find errors relating to mixed content (HTTP/HTTPS redirection), subdomains with www versions and non www versions, as well as canonicals. Consult this guide on common redirection errors for more information.
Content Duplicating
You know, each page must have a unique meta description and title. Sometimes duplicates can be created accidentally due to incorrect CMS configurations or by human error.
Tag generation is a typical WordPress website example. A separate page listing the articles that are marked with each tag is created for every topical tag. It may lead to having many pages which look similar and have thin content. WordPress editors must be warned to limit tags.
It is possible that duplicates appear when banned pages are still indexed. It can happen when the search engine cannot determine which page to prioritize because of incorrectly implemented canonical tags.
Use Site Audit To Check For Duplicates On Your Website
WebSite Auditor's Site Audit module has a section called On-page SEO that allows you to detect and correct duplicate meta descriptions and titles. Duplicate issues are not always penalized. Duplicates waste crawl budget. Read our article on duplication mistakes to learn more about how you can prevent them.
The Pages Are Not Mobile Friendly
Mobile-friendliness should be a priority. Google's mobile-first indexing is a result of the fact that so many people are searching on their mobile devices. The smartphone agent is now active, and the mobile-friendliness of your website directly affects its ranking.
Verify Your Mobile-Friendly Pages And Fix Any Issues
You will find the errors in the report Mobile Usability of the Console if the page does not work on mobile devices. They usually mention that the text is too small for you to read or clickable elements are too close.
Recently, there was a discussion on our Facebook group about the possibility that Search Console could be sending out notifications stating certain pages were not mobile-friendly. In the meantime, everything appears to be fine in this part of the Mobile-Friendly Test. It seems that this bug has existed for several years.
You can use WebSite Auditor in this case to check for warnings. Recheck the mobile-friendliness of the page and confirm the fix on the console. Some users suggested deleting and republishing the post if the error appeared again.
404 Pages
It is common for broken pages to appear. Ignoring them would be a grave SEO error. These pages are not good because they waste traffic and crawl budget. Search bots may stop visiting a site if they bump on too many broken links.
When:
- It is possible that the user has mistyped a URL.
- Links that are broken or have been truncated point to a specific page on other web pages and emails.
- The content has been moved or even deleted.
Tip: Make A 404 Error Page That Is Useful And Regularly Check Your Website For Broken Links
You need to create a custom page 404 that looks good and helps users locate the information they are looking for:
- Inform visitors that certain content is not available.
- It should be the same as the rest of the site.
- You can suggest that the user reports the broken link and explore other categories.
Poor UX/UI
When adding new features, web developers and designers rarely consider SEO. Page experience and website speed are more important than ever today. A poor user experience can negatively affect SEO. Take a look at how Core Web Vitals improved after Google's 2021 Page Experience Update, and see what conclusions were reached (spoiler: page performance correlates to organic impressions).
Tip - Plan A Redesign Keeping Seo In Mind. Do Ux/Ui Tests
It is difficult to identify usability problems, but mistakes that result in a poor user experience can be costly for SEO. Ideal user experience work should include A/B tests, analytics for paths of users, or Heatmaps.
Take a look also at our redesign of the website and how to avoid any mistakes.
Multiple Videos In One Page
It is a common mistake to place multiple videos on one page. Google can't tell which video is the most important in this case. All videos could be excluded from the Google search index.
Google recently added a Report on Video Pages Indexing to Search Console. This makes it much easier for SEO mistakes like this to be identified.
Tip - Optimize Videos For Organic Searches
You can increase your chances of appearing in Google video search results by optimizing your videos. Consider taking these steps to increase your video's visibility:
- Make a separate page for each video you want to feature on your site.
- You can add a script or a description to your video in order to make it more informative.
- Structured data can be added to video content in order to increase its discoverability.
- Find video keywords using the YouTube Keyword Tool in Rank Tracker.
In conclusion, it's important to conduct regular site audits in order to avoid such a large number of technical issues. Website Auditors can help identify and correct all of these problems.
The tool can also scan your site automatically after you have set up an appointment in the scheduler. The tool will provide you with both a general report and a detailed one, highlighting all technical problems and giving suggestions on how to resolve them.
Mistake 5 Not Using Seo Tools Right
There are now two extremes. Some website owners use tools to the point of obsession, and others don't. Too many plugins can slow down a site's performance. In some instances, the often-used Google Analytics may sound like an alien to marketing novices. You will need to persuade them to use the tool (or other alternatives).
SEO PowerSuite is a powerful tool that offers countless free features, including keyword research, SERP analysis and site audits.
The Professional and Enterprise editions also allow you to make sure that any SEO mistakes will not escape your notice. SEO PowerSuite includes a task manager for each tool. You can schedule regular alerts and checks to be run at any convenient time. These results can either be sent via email or saved on your computer. You can also save the results to cloud storage and then share them via URL.
SEO PowerSuite's automatic SEO tasks can be helpful:
- Sudden ranking drops.
- Traffic decline
- There are too many technical problems
- Too many links can be lost or gained at the same time.
- Search trends for keywords are changing.
- There are many other SEO-related activities.
Some SEOs may also make the mistake of ignoring new updates or features. Join the Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn user groups to stay up-to-date with SEO PowerSuite.
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Conclusion
This list is a compilation of SEO errors that are common. We hope it was helpful and you didn't find anything you have done in the past. We hope that it will help you to organize and avoid making costly mistakes in the future. Your SEO will be successful.
