7 Subtle But Damaging SEO Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

What you’re doing wrong can sabotage the things you’re doing right

SEO is becoming more competitive, coupled with the coming of AI chatbots and the many changes they brought to how we search, you can’t afford any loose ends.

While there are so many things you can do to optimize your website for SEO, it is easy to overlook certain common mistakes.

These mistakes, when not avoided, may be sabotaging the things you’re getting right about SEO.

Let’s go through seven of such mistakes and how you can avoid them:

Not starting with SEO in mind

Some people don’t think about SEO until it’s too late. But SEO is something you bear in mind when you start out building your website.

You have to factor in technical and on-page SEO elements such as site structure, speed, and mobile friendliness. When done right, these things will make SEO easy for you, but not doing them can become a stumbling block later on.

And when you write content, don’t write and then add keywords wherever you think they fit, rather start out with a keyword. Research those keywords first and craft your content around them, making them unique and interesting.

Another mistake you shouldn’t make is to treat SEO like a one-time thing. It’s not. It’s continuous.

When you eventually rank for any keyword, be rest assured that your competitors will use every tool possible to try and knock you off.

A way to avoid this is by having an SEO strategy. This doesn’t have to be complicated. I find Ahref’s Orchard Strategy helpful in this regard.

Not optimizing your website speed

Page experience has remained one of Google’s ranking factors for a while now.

This metric measures the experience of users when they interact with a webpage. A poor page experience means a poor user experience and such a page will not rank according to Google’s guidelines.

Website speed is a core part of page experience. Half of users will leave a website if it doesn’t load in 3 seconds. It appears that we hate webpages that take time to load, and so does Google.

You can use Google PageSpeed Insight to check your website speed, and there are two quick fixes you can use to optimize your website if you find out it is tardy:

• Large images make websites slow; avoid them. If you have large images, you can resize them or install a plugin that can do that if you’re using WordPress.
• Too many plugins can slow a website down. Be minimal. Deactivate inactive ones, and you can also find those that perform more than one function. A general rule when it comes to plugins is that less is more.

Not optimizing for mobile

Google uses what it calls mobile-first indexing. It started it a few years ago and perfected it this year.

Mobile-first indexing means that Google prioritizes the mobile version of your website when determining how well you should rank.

So if your website has been brilliantly optimized for desktop but not for mobile, this will negatively affect your ranking.

You can test how mobile-friendly your website is by using Google’s mobile-friendly test.

There are three factors used for measuring mobile usability:

• Page speed: how quickly your site loads
• Ease of navigation: how easily it is for users to find what they want on a small screen.
• Ease of taking action: how easy it is for visitors to perform common actions like contacting you, searching for products, or making a purchase.

You can also visit your website on mobile and see if it passes for these three parameters. Then you know what to work on if it doesn’t.

Not writing kick-ass content

There is one way to look at this content thing: it is everything.

It is your content that tells Google if you’re providing the content people are looking for. Having short, low-quality content on your website will signal to Google that your site is not the best result to match a search query.

Google has made many changes to the factors that influence ranking over the years, but has never shifted its stance on quality content.

Moreover, while the entire goal of SEO is to drive traffic to your website, not giving visitors what will make them stay or want to come back will be you sabotaging your efforts.

Following only Keyword Difficulty as a key metric

Keyword Difficulty is a metric that measures how easy or difficult it is to rank for a keyword. But there’s something wrong with basing your entire content strategy around this.

That a keyword has a low difficulty does not mean you can easily rank for such a keyword. Other factors like who your competition is and how well they cover the keyword will determine if you can rank for the keyword or not.

If your competitor for a keyword is a serious threat — has a high domain authority and has covered the topic in depth, then ranking for such a keyword will not be a walk in the park.

You are more likely to rank for low-difficulty keywords that have weak domains ranking on the first page of Google than you are to rank for low-difficulty keywords that have strong domains, like Wikipedia, ranking on the first page of Google.

So you need to analyze the SERP for a keyword, in addition to the difficulty, to determine how easy it will be for you to rank for the keyword.

Breaking Google’s terms when building links

Links are a very important Google ranking factor. Most of us know this.

But link-building can be done wrongly, and this can have the opposite effect you want for your blog or website.

Here is what Google’s Webmaster Guidelines say amounts to breaking its terms on link-building:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes:

Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links

Exchanging goods or services for links

Sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing it and including a link

Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.

Buying links is against Google’s terms of use, so also is reciprocal backlinks.

Websites that offer other things in exchange for links will leave footprints that Google will eventually detect and have them penalized for it.

When reaching out to websites you want to guest-post on, do not offer payment or any other thing in exchange.

Skipping title tags and meta descriptions

A good SEO article does not start and end with adding writing about a keyword.

Optimizing titles and meta descriptions are also essential and you should never forget them.

Google factors these parameters when crawling a website. They are the things that tell Google’s bots what a webpage is about, so doing them right can improve your content performance.

Here are three things you need to do about titles and meta descriptions:

• Craft unique and brief title tags for each of your page
• Try and make your keyword to appear in your title and meta description
• Avoid title tags and meta descriptions that are too long

You should also pay attention to your images. Add tags to them.

Google bots can’t see your image, they rely on the alt tags to know what your image is about, and can factor it in when determining the way to index your pages.

Conclusion

Here is a rundown of the SEO mistakes you should avoid:

• Not starting with SEO in mind
• Not optimizing your website speed
• Not optimizing for mobile
• Not writing kick-ass content
• Following only Keyword Difficulty as a key metric
• Breaking Google’s terms when building links
• Shipping title tags and meta descriptions.

You don’t want to be caught off guard committing these mistakes and thereby offsetting all your efforts at winning the SEO.

Avoid the mistakes that are human errors and also run regular site audits to fish out systemic ones so you can take care of them.