Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid for Better Rankings
Warning! Is your website SEO Friendly?
SEO is a powerful tool. A well-crafted and executed SEO strategy can improve a website’s health and traffic, but in reverse, a poorly optimized SEO strategy with common mistakes can plummet your site’s ranking.
The demand for SEO is growing day by day. It is always challenging to stay on top of search engine platforms. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of improving the website’s organic traffic by enhancing the visibility of websites or web pages on SERPs (search engine result pages). As Search engines develop and change in the consumer’s behavior, SEO practices also constantly evolve.
Whether you are optimizing your site for the first time, revising it for better performance, or diagnosing why your site is not getting search traffic. With the proper SEO strategies and execution, you can achieve the result, but when done incorrectly or there is scope for some common search engine optimization mistakes, recovery can be difficult and even more time-consuming.
Do not let these blunders derail your website’s success, check out these errors and correct them immediately. Let’s begin:
Not having an appropriate roadmap
Knowing your target audience is one of the most basic principles of SEO. And drafting the SEO roadmap as per the consumer behavior, SERP, and market conditions. Although, what is the point of understanding your audience but taking little or random action to maximize opportunities from the knowledge? Many plans fail to build a sustainable and efficient On-page and Off-page optimization strategy, including content, engineering, product or services, and PR. Building an SEO plan is crucial for success. If you don’t have a roadmap for success, you need to build one now!
Check where your site and results are now and where you want it to be. Set goals and agree on workflows.
Possible Fixes
- Check out what your customers are buying and what they are following – what are the macro trends?
- Evaluate your competition – keywords, ranking, performance, and content.
- Divide actions into tasks and establish goals and essential stakeholders.
- Determine who will be in charge of content, site upgrades, digital alignment, and SEO evangelism.
- Look out for technologies – tools, and platforms that will aid with workflow and strategy.
Site Response Time
Loading, loading, loading………….
Slow site speed can hinder your audience when they try to access the content of your website. When a site takes time to access, it will cost your hard-earned SEO traffic. Investing time and effort to get traffic from SERPs is pointless if the page takes too long to load. Site speed can be measured through page load time. This is the amount of time that passes between when you send the request to the server and when your will page fully loads and renders. This can be assessed using the following factors:
– First Contentful Paint (FCP)
– Time To Interactive (TTI)
– Time To First Byte (TTFB)
Possible Fixes
By running your page through Google PageSpeed Insights, you can assess the performance of your page to understand more about the site’s speed. Various factors can be responsible for delaying the load time, including:
- Image format and size: Use image editing tools to set the image size to 72 dpi and image formats such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP to help reduce the bandwidth consumed by images.
- Redirects: Prepare a site audit for all the URLs causing the redirects and fix them. Some redirections can’t be avoided, but fixing them can fix your site’s speed.
- CSS and Javascript: Compress JavaScript and CSS code by utilizing shorter variable names to minimize size and, as a result, boost loading time.
Content Crafting
Content is the key to the doors of your audiences’ attention. It is a very common mistake that you want a particular keyword to rank, and you avoid the target topic content—crafting content just for the sake of stuffing keywords or optimizing multiple keywords in one article. The search engine works for the users, and if it doesn’t find your content user-friendly, it will not rank. The site’s content is healthy and quality content for SEO when it genuinely corresponds to the target customers’ needs by using appropriate search terms.
Even if your site’s content targets your audience, then too many search engines are blocking your rank; WHY? The answer is NON-ORIGINAL content. Plagiarised or copied content is highly discouraged and even penalized by search engines. This practice can easily push your website’s ranking down.
Possible fixes
- Ensure your content is as per your SEO strategies and vice-versa.
- Include various types of content such as video, images, visuals, and text which target different needs. Impress with your creativity.
- Ensure your content holds the attention of the reader and has actionable information.
- Make Sure the content explains what you are offering and is completely unique means plagiarized free.
Failing to add context with schema and skipping the meta tags
Skipping the meta descriptions, title tags, H1-H2 tags, image alt texts, and other SEO elements means you are losing considerable content potential for your website. Another blunder is when marketers forget to use schemas and tell search engines what their site is about. Creating good content is excellent; however, without all this, it will be difficult to read and understand your site’s content.
Possible Fixes
- Adhere to Google’s best practices for developing good titles and snippets.
- Make your title tags unique for all pages, and avoid long tags.
- Create distinct title tags for each page that are brief yet descriptive – not ambiguous.
- Make sure your keyword is relevant to the intent and that it is placed correctly.
Not using tools or using the wrong technology
Suppose you have optimized your website according to SEO guidelines, but now what? How are you going to track your progress? The answer is ‘Google Analytics.’ Many other tools and technology also help check how your optimization is performing on search engines.
Tip: Google has so many other tools like Google search console, Google keyword planner, and Google Analytics that you can set up to plan and track your website’s performance.
SEO has immensely developed over the years. Proper setup of tools and the use of the right technology can help you avoid many mistakes.
Possible Fixes
- Choose the technology or platform which best matches your organizational needs.
- These tools can help you achieve the goal and route your SEO roadmap efficiently.
- Set up the tools your website requires to track down the website’s performance and implement it for the better.
Not investing in desktop and mobile-friendly use
Not having a mobile-friendly website is not a mistake; it is like a sin against your website. In this mobile-first world, users check their mobile more than desktops. If your website is not mobile-friendly, you will likely lose half of your targeted users.
Possible fixes
- Check if your website is mobile-friendly or not through a mobile-friendly test tool, or you can also use Google tools.
- Optimize the website to make it more visible, responsive and avoid people bouncing.
- Improve your site’s speed along with providing a better experience.
Summarizing it, SEO is a crucial part of any content marketing strategy. The primary focus is providing user-friendly access to websites and top-quality content. To achieve this, two marketers make many plans and try to be on board. Although, seo marketing experts can also make some typical mistakes. It is always best to be in touch with the latest updates and challenges of SEO to avoid making common mistakes.
Don’t let that happen to you, be updated and make your website error-free!
