Top 10 SEO Mistakes

SEO mistakes affect your chances of high ranking in search engines. There are many SEO mistakes that website owners make related to their content and SEO tools. That’s why many beginners tend to fail. Because it is important to have strong SEO to appear in search results and attract visitors, in this article, we will discuss the top 10 SEO mistakes that users make, both complex and simple. 

1. Lack of Keyword Research

The first of the problems in the Top 10 SEO Mistakes is Lack of Keyword Research. Many website owners build random content and expect search traffic. They won’t get any clicks if nobody is searching about topics they publish. This is why your content must match their needs. To find these exact topics, you need to do keyword research. Keyword research is understanding the language target customers or visitors use while searching for specific products, content, and services. 

This is the only way of learning what visitors are typing into search engines like Google. Then you can build content around these keywords and topics. To avoid this SEO mistake, you have to make sure that a page you are going to publish targets a keyword with search traffic potential. So before publishing the page, keyword research must be done to match the content with found keywords.

2. Not Having Enough Backlinks

So if you find out that your pages are ranked low, the key reason must be that you don’t have enough links. You need tons of backlinks to provide your visitors with many quick choices. To avoid this SEO mistake, contact people interested in your content and ask them to link you. A website should have 40 to 50 backlinks to be competitive for SEO. Backlinks are still very important for SEO as Google’s original PageRank algorithm. Backlinks have significant impacts on organic search performance. It will be very effective to build at least 25 backlinks daily.

3. Extremely Slow Site

Page speed is an important factor in Google rankings. Google announced that page loading time is extremely effective for the page’s appearance in search results. It is not good only for visitors; it is good for website owners too. When a site is slow, you must allocate more resources and consume more bandwidth. This is why you need to fix this mistake by speeding up your site. Yes, it is a technical process, but basic knowledge will be enough. Otherwise, this kind of user experience will destroy your SEO. You can do the following when you are using WordPress: 

· Use TinyJPG and TinyPNG to reduce image size.

· Compress JavaScript and CSS files.

· Remove unused scripts.

· Delete and deactivate unused plugins.

· Validate HTML and CSS.

4. Not Using Analytics

Many website owners make big mistakes by not setting up analytic tools for their websites. It is suggested to set up Google Analytics because you need to determine whether your SEO strategies are moving in the right direction or not because Google Analytics collects data from your websites to build reports that provide insights into your business. With this tool, you can completely understand your customers, their needs, and what they are looking for. So you can analyze these data and build your SEO strategies, content, and products accordingly. Otherwise, you won’t be able to know how your SEO is moving or what needs to be improved. This is why there is a big possibility that you may have SEO failure because you can’t increase organic traffic and search rankings without analytic tools. 

First, you need to add your site to Google Search Console. It will help you focus on keywords and other important things to increase traffic. So check your Google Analytics weekly or regularly. This is how you can find out which content is driving traffic. Analyze content and improve your SEO to produce better results. 

5. Meta Descriptions and Title Mistakes

Meta Descriptions and Title issues are very important among the Top 10 SEO Mistakes. The meta title is an HTML element that specifies the title of a webpage. On the other hand, the meta description tag is a tag that provides a summary of your content and page. These two are displayed on SERPs for a given result. But there is an optimal format for writing these titles and descriptions. If you make a mistake, your SEO strategy will fail because titles and descriptions must match the page’s original content so that search engines can find it. Also, there are some specific details about how to write these titles.

This is an example of an optimal format for meta title: Primary Keyword | Secondary Keyword | Brand Name. It must consist of 50-60 characters. In addition to SERPs, the meta title is shown on social media and web browsers. On the other hand, meta description ranges between 50 and 160 characters. But this doesn’t affect SEO directly; it affects rankings and CTR. There are some problems such as:

· Using alphanumeric values

· Missing targeted keywords because of long words

· Duplicate description

To fix it, try:

· Use targeted keywords and add clear CTAs.

· Never optimize title tags with keywords.

· Make unique meta descriptions for all pages.

6. Bad Reviews

The website owners can expect both positive and negative reviews on Google. Bad reviews are one of the reasons for SEO failing. However, having too many positive reviews makes it suspicious. Meanwhile, several dissatisfactions from customers can drive away traffic. To fix negative reviews, you can build relationships with your customers. It will help you to understand the audience and gain new ones. If you post the issues and measures, you can also gain credibility for your website. 

7. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content issues are one of the Top 10 SEO Mistakes to watch out for. Because content is always the most important factor for search engines. Duplicate content is defined as identical or similar to other content on your web pages. It is possible that it can affect your webpage ranking. Search engines show the same version of two content in search results, choosing the most relevant ones for website visitors. So this one is considered a top SEO mistake. This is why it is important to have unique content that will give exact information to visitors. You can use tools like CopyScape to figure out whether it is published somewhere else or not.

8. Missing Alt Texts and Broken Images

Alternative tags are HTML attributes of images that help describe images. The image component on your website does not render well because of the incorrect file path, improper file name, or wrong extension. Broken images and alt tags are considered common mistakes. Alt tag for an image describes its content on the page. In order to fix this SEO mistake, find an image component in HTML code and add a tag.

9. Lack of Optimization for Mobile Devices

In this mobile-first world, users search on mobile devices more than on computers. Mobile-friendly websites make up more than half of the results on Google. Lack of optimization for mobile devices is one of the top SEO failures. As a website owner, you will lose visitors and customers if you don’t optimize your page for mobile devices. If you haven’t built this feature, your site is missing an inseparable design and function. The mobile-ready site will help you to get ranked higher on SERPs because the site reformats itself for different devices. Also, it will improve the speed and design structure. You can enable Accelerated Mobile Pages.

10. Keyword Stuffing

Using too many keywords is one of the most noticed mistakes among the Top 10 SEO Mistakes. It is a common mistake made by people who are new to SEO. Keyword stuffing is an important SEO mistake that can destroy your search engine optimization. This method helps to have a high ranking in search engines with the help of repetition on a webpage. These are the types of this method that can affect your SEO:

· Adding keywords that are not related to the content

· Writing the same keywords multiple times

· Using unrelated keywords

Website owners must add valuable content for their visitors to prevent SEO from failing. They must avoid using unrelated keywords to achieve a high ranking in search engine results because it can destroy their SEO and decrease the value of their websites. It is necessary to use keywords that are related to the original content. 1-1.5% keyword density is very good for search engines to recognize webpages and content. Adding them to meta descriptions, headings, page titles, and important parts of the text is effective.

Conclusion

This article discussed the top 10 SEO mistakes that hurt your SEO and business. To have active and strong SEO for your website, you must fix these mistakes and check them regularly with Google Analytics. You must add the right keywords, speed up your site, use Google Analytics, and avoid duplicate content for better performance. Otherwise, SEO failures will hurt your website and its content. 

Frequently Asked Questions