Is your site not ranking well? Here are the SEO mistakes that are holding it back
It is not always “Google’s fault” or the volatility of the SERPs: sometimes our site’s performance on the search engine is damaged by technical problems or real SEO errors that do not allow it to reach its true potential and achieve the positions we desire. Therefore, we have tried to identify some of the most frequent and common SEO mistakes to avoid in a strategy, that is, those small and large carelessnesses, inconsistencies or mistakes, both on page and off page, that can jeopardize the performance of a project, as well as keyword rankings on search engines. So here are what these mistakes on sites are, which can make the difference between a winning strategy and a failure in the race for top positions on Google and, thus, the goal of higher organic traffic and returns.
Common errors in the SEO activity
Unpredictable events are the norm of the working routine in every sector, and SEO errors are a kind of variable to always keep into account while assessing our campaigns’ performance.
Goodbye SEO errors!
This does not just apply to SEO beginners or those who are just starting out in SEO, and it doesn’t just mean “avoiding pitfalls“: the success of organic optimization activities depends on so many details and nuances, and we all need to remember these in order to build a more robust and integrated strategy.
Some of the most frequent mistakes include inadequate keyword research phase, creating low-quality content, neglecting titles and meta descriptions, not optimizing technical factors such as site loading speed or responsiveness, building a poor backlink profile, not using analytical tools such as Google Analytics and Search Console, neglecting social signals, and not updating content regularly.
SEO mistakes to avoid: a beginner’s guide (and more)
For beginners and, in general, for anyone who wants to work on improving a site’s organic visibility, understanding these mistakes is crucial for several reasons: first, SEO is a field where success depends on the ability to adapt and learn from one’s experiences. Knowing common mistakes therefore allows beginners to avoid hindering the progress and effectiveness of their strategies.
It also serves from a “theoretical” point of view, to understand how each element-even the seemingly minor ones-can then contribute to the overall picture of site health on Google.
All this without forgetting two key elements: SEO is not only a search engine issue, but also and above all a user experience issue. Mistakes like ignoring the mobile experience or site loading speed can drive users away, reducing traffic and potentially conversions. What’s more, this field is constantly evolving: what worked yesterday may not be effective today, so “updating” is a relevant topic not only for content, but also for one’s skills, and is the only way to stay abreast of changes and adapt strategies accordingly.
10 organic SEO mistakes
Let’s start by analyzing what may be the most common and “trivial” mistakes we can make on the site, which can lead to a huge loss of user engagement and profits.
- Lack of quality content
Without bothering with the old maxim “content is king,” there is no doubt, however, that content has a significant specific weight in search engine success.Consequently, the first and serious reason why SEO strategy does not work is the absence of quality content on the site.
Publishing poor, duplicate content or content that lacks informational value or originality can damage a site’s ranking and reputation, but most importantly, it does not entice users to visit its pages.
As a general rule, it is necessary to ensure that brand content is useful and usable, of high value to the target audience. Making sure that the website publishes good content should be practically a must for both owners/managers and SEO specialists working on it, because it is basic to offer users pages that are worth seeing, reading, and consuming. Instead, presenting content that is unoriginal, with parts copied at the drop of a hat from competitor sites, articles full of grammatical errors and other bad SEO writing habits can convince the audience to abandon the website and never return.
- Lack of effective keyword research
Another mistake that can lead to the failure of an SEO strategy, namely the absence of properly executed keyword research: today we can no longer do it the “old-fashioned way” and search for keywords among those with the highest volume, but we must work consciously, performing a complex of evaluations that also take into account the analysis of organic competitors and the real needs of the site and especially its users.
Above all, we need to investigate and discover the search intent that moves people’s interest in a particular query, and try to optimize content to meet this need effectively.
- Not analyzing keywords
However, it is not enough to “gather” keywords, because we need to take an additional step: that is, we need to learn how to do keyword analysis, another strategic activity that can lead to success (or failure…).
A mistake in this area can lead to optimizing content for irrelevant or extremely competitive terms, reducing the chances of reaching the right audience; likewise, not knowing the keywords that the target audience uses to search online for our products or services can hinder visibility.
Even more serious is to misuse keywords in managing the editorial plan and, for example, create content for all keyword variants, hoping to gain more traffic: for years already, the tactic of creating multiple, specific pages to intercept possible variants of high-volume keywords no longer yields the desired results, because Google’s algorithm is capable of (almost) perfectly understanding semantic and linguistic variations of words.
Today it is more useful to create unique content by focusing on the “topic” of intent perceived by Google and, more importantly, by users landing on the page, providing as mentioned the right answers to people’s needs. Such a system also helps us avoid the risk of cannibalization of keywords and pages, which makes the site more difficult to use and navigate and also generates uncertainties to ranking.
- Not taking care of content optimization
Moving on to practice and onpage SEO mistakes, there are various obstacles that can undermine the visibility of the content we publish. For example, not optimizing page titles and meta descriptions can result in missed opportunities to attract users from search results; on the other hand, not optimizing elements such as headers, image alt attributes, and URL structure can limit the site’s ability to be understood and indexed properly by Google. Again: failing to create an effective internal link structure prevents search engines from understanding the hierarchy and value of web pages, while simultaneously risking rapid reader abandonment, which could instead be retained still on the site by proper organization of thematically in-depth links. Also, a piece of advice that always applies: keyword stuffing, i.e., the forced and unnatural insertion of keywords into the text, not only does not serve to strengthen rankings, but can annoy readers and may result in a “devaluation” of the site by Google.
Also part of content management is the organization of the editorial calendar and the regularity of publications and updates: a site that does not offer content in a systematized manner risks being abandoned by readers, who are instead looking for projects that can constantly provide engaging, interesting and enjoyable articles that provide added value to browsing. This does not mean publishing all the time, every day and without much thought, but precisely effectively setting up a strategic editorial plan, perhaps blending needs for “news” articles and other evergreens.
- Slow site
Turning to basic technical aspects, it should be well established (but is not in practice) that a site that is slow to load can frustrate users and negatively affect both ranking and conversion rate.
The loading speed of a site and its pages is an established ranking factor, and not structuring the design in a smooth and lightweight manner is definitely a mistake that can penalize ranking and returns in the long run. Loading too heavy images, using heavy code or certain back-end elements (even JavaScript) risks increasing the crawl budget and making it too complex for search engine spiders to crawl.
- Shortcomings on user experience
Another boulder that could heavily impact on a site’s SEO is represented by the poor care dedicated to the actual people’s usability: the user experience is a key value in order to gain good results because, as we reported on many occasions, it is a set of interventions with the purpose to make the site easier to navigate and use and that affect both the time spent on the pages and the chance to see the user again on our pages.
It is pretty clear that sites with a high bounce rate or low values of dwell time could have worse performance on their Google ranking as well, and for that an SEO campaign that is focused on enhancing these aspects is not going to offer them any benefit.
- Neglecting the mobile version of the site
In an era when browsing from mobile devices is predominant, not having a mobile-friendly website can seriously penalize search engine visibility.
Today’s minimum standard is to offer users a responsive design, and then avoid other disruptive factors such as interstitial ads, which, moreover, are viewed very negatively by Google because they make it complicated for people using smartphones to enjoy content.
- Problems with links and backlink profile
Links are the very essence of the Web, so we should not be afraid to receive and place them on our site, but we should always pay due attention to the strategy.
For example, internal links can help build navigational structure (for search engines and users) and can help retain readers on the site, as long as we manage them properly and avoid harmful forgetting, such as “broken links,” broken links that do not lead to other resources and undermine the structural organization of the site and its pages, or internal links with nofollow attribute.
Turning to some offpage SEO errors: the backlink profile of a site has a fundamental weight both for ranking and survival with respect to the evolving interpretations that the algorithm applies to links. The most immediate reference, of course, is to the hurricane that was unleashed after the Penguin update, which started a battle against link spam that has since continued (albeit with lesser intensity).
Acquiring backlinks from low-quality or irrelevant sites can be seen as a manipulative practice by Google and lead to penalties. We are talking about the tendency to launch into article marketing and link building campaigns without strategy and in a spam way, on low quality sites and proposing low quality content, which does not represent added value to the user and reader experience, while managing a balanced backlink profile with relevant references can bring ranking benefits.
In this sense, it is crucial to optimize the link building campaign, carrying it out in a conscious and shrewd way, trying not to implement extreme and risky strategies, which could result in penalties from Google, possibly also evaluating the usefulness of resorting to the disavow links tool.
- Ignoring social media
Not having a social media presence or not integrating social elements on the site can limit the dissemination of content and the creation of natural backlinks, with a view to the concept of taking care of all “social signals” concerning our brand, to amplify its visibility and attract new visitors.
- Not monitoring returns
The tenth SEO mistake is not monitoring the effects of the work, not monitoring the progress of the site’s ranking carefully and consistently, not having an idea of the market and competition and not knowing what keywords the site is ranking for and generating the largest share of organic traffic, never having performed an SEO Audit to detect any problems present, not having installed and linked Google Analytics and Search Console properties.
In short, the tenth mistake is being online without a strategy… and without using SEOZoom, which instead is the ideal tool to accompany any kind of online activity and make it perform better!
Other mistakes that compromise SEO campaigns
If these are some of the classic mistakes that SEO beginners make – but from which even those who have been in the field longer are not exempt – then there are other factors that can compromise the outcome of an optimization activity and lead to drops in traffic.
- Breaking Google’s rules and copying competitors’ bad practices
It may seem trivial, but if we desire Google-driven traffic, we must (should?) also accept the “conditions” imposed by the search engine; therefore, voluntarily “breaking the rules” and violating Google’s guidelines is definitely a mistake in the beginning.
This was also said some time ago by John Mueller in a tweet exchange with user Vivek Patel (who calls himself Local Search Analyst & Content Marketer): when asked “should I copy the strategies of competing sites that build directory links and get good ranking results?”, Google’s Search Advocate dryly replied that he never thinks of breaking the rules and guidelines, agreeing that the search engine “penalizes websites that try to cheat its algorithms.”
John Mueller added that the sites under discussion might have good rankings “in spite of” the ill-advised strategies, not “because of” them, but that in any case the suggestion he feels to offer is not to copy their bad practices, when you know how to put in place better and more lawful interventions. The discussion continued with interventions by other users, who more or less appreciated Mueller’s words and provided other interesting thoughts on the subject, among which we choose a simile that seems appropriate to tell a bit about what is happening in SEO.
Using the bad practices Mueller refers to is equivalent to the risk one takes by exceeding the speed limit when driving: you certainly take less time to reach your goal, but (forcing the issue a bit) you also increase the chances of an accident. Speaking of SEO and search engines, we know that there are so many businesses that rank (also or mainly) through link buying or other aggressive techniques, and Google sometimes seems to be a distracted traffic warden, letting through even cars speeding at 150 km/h. However, there is always the possibility that the vigilante will straighten his gaze and point it at these sites, as happened in the past with some of the most relevant Google algorithm updates or penalties.
@JohnMu I have found a couple of competitor law firms that are still in the process of building directory links and ranking well. Should we give it a try? Although I believe Google penalizes websites that try to trick its algorithms
— Vivek Patel (@vivekrpatel) 14 February 2019
- Not minding Google’s algorithm updates
We cannot control the frequency and effects of Google and its algorithm updates, which generate changes that can also significantly affect sites’ search results, but we can, however, stay informed about their release and try to proactively adapt our site.
Broad core updates, in particular, are periodic “fine-tuning” of the quality of results, whereby the search engine shakes up queries a bit in light of new (and always mysterious) reconsiderations about the famous 200 ranking factors.
This means that, even at the stage of setting up your SEO strategy, you need to be flexible and ready to adjust your game in light of any new developments from Big G, which remains the ultimate reference point for this activity.
- Do not provide a sitemap
The sitemap is a strategic element of the site and is also useful for search engine indexing purposes, because it directly communicates to the bots of Google, Bing, etc. what is the right path that connects the various pages of the site and sets their priority levels, preventing the most important elements from being penalized or, on the contrary, the spiders from wasting time with content that has little relevance to us.
- Underestimating the robots.txt file
Handle with caution: this is the message that should “appear” to those who approach the creation of the robots file for the first time without any particular experience, or who decide to entrust the management of this document to the “proverbial cousin.” This small file takes on a vital role for organic visibility, because it has the power to direct search engines as to which parts of the site they can access and which they cannot, and all it takes is a simple “slash” to wreak havoc.
For example, between this command
User-agent: *
Disallow:
and this one
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
there is all the difference in the world. In the top case, we give free access to all crawlers on all pages and resources on the site. In the bottom case, on the other hand, that simple slanted bar communicates exactly the opposite instruction, i.e. instruction tells all search engines (indicated by “User-agent: *”) not to access or index any part of the site (indicated by “Disallow: /”).
If used improperly or “unintentionally,” therefore, this error causes a virtual blackout for the site and its pages, which, once visible and perhaps even well ranked in search results, disappear as if swallowed by a black hole, which obviously drags with it organic traffic, visibility and opportunities to reach new customers or readers.
But it doesn’t end there. Even if the error is corrected quickly, search engines may take some time to rescan and re-index the site, during which time the ranking may be compromised. This interval of time, in which the site is as if it did not exist, can be fatal to the reputation and authority of the online brand. For e-commerce sites or those that rely on lead generation, the situation can become even more critical: without traffic, sales and revenue can take a hit from which it is not easy to recover.
- Deleting resources without appropriate redirects
Sites are also constantly evolving, and we often find ourselves repurposing obsolete, useless or otherwise “throw-away” resources: however, it is a mistake to delete content without perfectly executing the necessary redirects. Deleting a page, a tag, a category or even just an image always has an impact on the site and on search engine navigation: if Google’s crawlers no longer find the element that referred to that link and, at the same time, there is no redirect to another resource (which communicates that you are faced with a simple change of address) the classic 404 error is generated, which can in the long run bring usability and ranking problems.
- Errors with the multilingual version
Still staying in the realm of more advanced errors, there is often a general difficulty with multilingual settings.
Put more simply, there are many issues that one encounters when deciding to set up a multilingual site: the most trivial one is mechanically translating content without any attention to text quality, but there are also the drawbacks with hreflang values, conflicts within the source code of pages, incorrect links in the hreflang, and so on.
These are all factors that do damage to the site and SEO strategy, and should prompt a consideration: if you do not optimize your multilingual site, better to leave only the original language version and focus on improving these results.
- Apply outdated SEO strategies
SEO is an ongoing process, not a “set and forget” activity: another mistake that can jeopardize online success is therefore activating campaigns based on outdated or even obsolete tactics, absolutely not in line with the latest trends recommended by the international community or officialized by Google’s guidelines.
Surprising as it may seem, there are still many pseudo-specialists who advise clients on strategies based on reciprocal links, content infused with keyword stuffing, link building campaigns using only manipulative anchor text and exact match, or who do not intervene on the technical details to improve the URL structure or set up the robots file in the best possible way.
Although it sometimes seems that Google may “turn a blind eye” to certain elements and rank openly spammy sites high, using these tactics together almost means boycotting the project at the outset.
- Waiting for results too soon
Patience is also a key skill for those trying to get the most out of their campaigns: SEO is a medium- to long-term activity that needs the right planning and results gathering time, and in order to start seeing concrete and lasting effects to the efforts and interventions put in place, a waiting time of at least 3 months must be budgeted, although some encouraging signs may appear even earlier.
Only by entering into this perspective can one avoid falling into the temptation of deeming a campaign to have failed after only a few weeks or continually changing technical aspects to the site without understanding whether the previous changes can actually be successful.
Site errors and SEO, the study from the U.S.
Obviously, the topic of SEO errors has been the focus of various investigations and discussions over time, and in particular, a study by Zazzle Media, published on Search Engine Watch, allows us to delve more deeply into such difficulties and also to have some pointers for recovery.
SEO: Without Horrible Mistakes!
For this work, the U.K.-based content marketing agency conducted thousands of audits for sites of various industries and sizes and found some distinctive problems that are repeated over and over again: for example, some CMS platforms have their downfalls and repeatedly cause the same technical problems, but most of the time the critical issues are caused by sites managed by multiple people, knowledge gaps or simply the time factor.
This field analysis reveals the nine most common errors on sites and, more importantly, the strategies to be implemented to correct them.
- Broken internal link
One of the simplest problems, but which can also be easily overlooked if you do not perform a specific check, is the one about broken internal links, broken connections that can interrupt the user’s path and prevent crawlers from linking content. This error can negatively affect the authority of the page and disrupt the equity flow of the link.
To find out if there are internal links on the site that do not work, just do a scan using an analysis tool, which returns all cases of error.
- Length of meta titles
If Google has dedicated a video guide to the optimization of preview snippets, means that titles and meta descriptions are really important! In general, the most frequent errors for these fields concern the management of the length of the content (also because the analyses cannot push to investigate the actual offered quality), and in the worst cases they can negatively determine the fate of a business.
When too short, the meta titles can be a spy of a lack of targeting, while on the contrary when they are too long they can be cut in SERP and therefore be ineffective: in both situations, the risk is not to get the click of the user and then have a low CTR.
- Redirecting internal links
Redirection of internal links can cause problems to the site architecture, as users and search engines take a little extra time to find contents.
With the modification of the contents or the exhaustion of products it is usually used a permanent redirect (301) or a temporary one (302: here our guide to HTTP status codes useful to know): the 302 indicates to a search engine to maintain the old page, since it is a temporary measure, The 301 indicates that the page has been moved permanently and will be replaced in the new position.
Redirection loops occur when our browser tells the search engine to redirect to a page, which in turn tells our browsers to redirect to another page and so on until you reach your final destination. Redirection loops should be avoided at all costs, as they increase scanning time and can send mixed signals to research robots.
The problem does not lie in the redirect per se, if completed correctly, but in the links that point to the redirection of the URL: for example, the URL “one” redirects to a new URL “two”, but the URL “three” still points toward URL “one”. In this case, as well, a scan allows us to find out all the critical cases, on which we can intervene via CMS by modifying the href destination so that it points to the new correct URL.
- Outdated sitemaps
XML sitemaps do not need to be static and it is instead recommended to use a dynamic sitemap.xml, to be sure that the CMS automatically updates this file directory whenever we add a content or media resource.
It is however good to pay attention to the use of dynamic sitemaps, because you risk adding unwanted Urls.
- Orphan URLs
Orphan pages, also known as “mobile pages“, are indexed and published Urls that cannot be found by following internal links from users or search engines (and therefore potentially never be scanned). A typical scenario of an orphan page could be a seasonal sale: once the page was needed, but after the season change has become obsolete.
Basically, experts say, the presence of a few orphaned pages is not harmful, but if they increase they can inflate the site, causing a poor distribution of link equity, cannibalization of keywords and a poor experience of internal link paths for both the search bot and the user.
- Site speed
By now we should be aware of the crucial role of speed on the performance of the site, which with the Google Speed Update has officially become a ranking factor. The site’s speed is closely related to the good user experience and slow websites have high bounce rates due to prolonged content loading (and potentially worse returns).
- Hierarchy and architecture of the site
The hierarchical structure of the website, also known as information architecture, is essentially the way in which site navigation is presented to a search engine or user.
The fundamental problem affecting most websites is the distribution of the ranking of pages, according to the study, because the main pages of websites or the most profitable pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page.
Without an effective hierarchy, the crawl budget can be wasted and pages in the depths of the site could have mediocre positioning, since Google is not sure of the importance of the page and the links equity could be distributed in a lighter way.
- Internal Linking Management
Internal links are an important feature of a site because they allow users to navigate within the pages and, from an SEO point of view, allow search engine crawlers to understand the connections between contents.
An effective internal linking strategy could have a great impact on rankings, but often – especially on complicated sites – we notice quite messy situations. For instance, anchor texts that does not contain a keyword, the inconsistencies of linking Urls per volume (for the purpose of Pagerank distribution) and links that do not always point to the canonical version of a URL: all this can create mixed signals for crawlers and eventually confuse them at the time of content indexing.
- Low quality content
One of the pillars of the SEO is to offer quality, unique and useful content for users: a work that requires time and consistency and that, when not performed correctly, creates what we call thin content. These pages are of poor quality, which do not allow to understand the business services and offers of products and are also explicitly contrary to the guidelines of Google, which may result – in the worst case – in a penalty scenario.
The length of the text is a first parameter to understand if the contents are thin, but we know that in reality the number of words is only a quantitative indicator and is linked to other factors. However, by focusing in the first place on the shorter pages can be a way to improve the quality of the texts provided.
