More and more, we see businesses becoming obsessed with SEO and improving their websites’ rankings. While SEO has definitely become a buzzword in the last few years, it’s important that business owners truly know how to use SEO to their benefit and avoid common SEO mistakes.
By now, we’re pretty sure you’ve heard of SEO—but if you haven’t, no worries. We’ve got a quick recap for you: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has to do with how search engines (like Google) rank different websites. This ranking process affects the overall visibility a given website receives.
With SEO, you want to be purposeful about the content you post in order to genuinely improve your ranking, and it’s an ongoing process. Otherwise, you run into the error of making some of the most common SEO mistakes, which actually have an adverse effect on your rankings.
We’ve put together a short list of some of the most common mistakes that people make and the ways you can avoid them!
Here are some of the top SEO mistakes & tips to avoid them
Keyword Stuffing
Mistake: This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like—too many keywords in your content! With this mistake, it’s essentially like you’re trying to trick search engines into thinking that your content is relevant for certain keywords, even if this isn’t the case. For example, if you’re doing keyword overkill with your blog posts, Google will start to view you as spammy, and this will have an adverse effect on your SEO ranking.
Tip: The number one tip here is to only use a keyword phrase that is directly relevant to the content you’re posting. We’re not necessarily saying “less is more” all the time, but we do encourage you to be mindful of the fact that “more” doesn’t always mean better.
Duplicate and Unoriginal Content
Mistake: This is the biggest mistake people make when striving to increase their SEO ranking. Duplicate content is anything on your website that is already shared elsewhere, and this can take a few forms. It could mean copying and pasting text or videos from someone else’s site onto your own, using the same blog content on multiple pages, or purchasing Private Label Rights (PLR) content and adding it to your website.
Tip: Make sure your text and visual content is original! It’s OK to use other websites as sources of inspiration, but your content should have your own spin on it. You also want to make sure each page has its own unique content, so don’t post the same article or sections of articles multiple times. Avoid buying someone else’s content. Instead, try phrasing key ideas in your own words as if you are explaining them to someone who has no prior knowledge of the topic.
Low-Quality Link Building
Mistake: Link building is one of the most crucial parts of boosting your SEO ranking, but if you’re not careful with how you do it, then it can actually hurt you. The common mistake people make here is including too many links in certain posts or simply building in irrelevant links.
Tip: Build-in links to your blog posts when it truly makes sense to connect those blog posts. If you write generally about a topic in one post and later link it into another blog post that goes more in-depth on that same topic, those posts have a genuine connection.
Incorrect Use of Header Tags
Mistake: Header tags are one way that you can organically break up content on your website, but using too many of the same kind (H1, H2, H3) can be detrimental to your SEO ranking rather than helpful. Basically, too many Header tags are viewed as a waste of time by search engines, like Google, that don’t want to sift through what is the most important content.
Tip: Remember that the purpose of Header tags is to make your content more readable, more digestible—and to help the crawlers properly index it. Use them intentionally, and you’ll be good to go.
Slow Page Speeds
Mistake: Page speed is a huge deal because it directly impacts how long people stick around to view your content. If a page is taking forever to load, then your viewer is just going to grow impatient and click out of it. Search engines can track this information, and they’ll be less likely to show your content to users.
Tip: Because we live in this culture of immediacy, page speed is insanely important to your SEO ranking. You want to aim for the load time of each page to be under 2 seconds. To increase your page speed, you can do a few different things, like compressing images, optimizing your code, and avoiding too many plugins or features (because too many of these will slow you down).
No Metadata
Mistake: Metadata basically summarizes details about your content and provides information about your data through the use of meta tags. More likely than not, when you search for something on the web, you will see a snippet of info underneath the links that pop up, and this will include metadata like the author’s name and date of publication. Failing to include metadata on your own posts means missing a chance for search engines to categorize your content in the necessary places.
Tip: To make your website as discoverable as possible, you want to include metadata in your content posts. You’ll do this through meta tags, which contain bits of information about a page’s content, and these live in the back end of your post. So, you’ll include these snippets in your code.
It’s okay if you have made these SEO mistakes
If you’re feeling uneasy and even having thoughts of, “Oh no, I’ve totally made some of these mistakes,” don’t panic! The great news is that you can fix and avoid these common SEO mistakes by focusing on original content development.
Stay up to date on the latest market trends so you know what’s going on (especially when it comes to keywords), and be deliberate about the content you put out. What original perspective or take on a trending topic can you share with your audience base?
You may have to remind yourself that improving your SEO ranking won’t happen instantaneously. And it’s important to remember that it’s not something you focus on once and never think about again. To be truly successful, you’ll need to prioritize SEO improvement with a true strategy, and you should plan to regularly audit your website to make sure you’re doing whatever it takes to keep it in the best shape!
