SEO mistakes can be technical SEO issues or on-page SEO mishaps. Not only do these issues affect your customers’ experience with your website, it can also hurt your rankings. Yikes!
Here are a few common SEO mistakes that you may not be aware of, how to avoid them and when you might need an SEO agency to step in.
1. Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is a major SEO issue that involves inserting as many keywords as possible into a piece of content or a web page. You may think this will lead to higher rankings in SERPs but in truth it will hurt your SEO efforts.
Keyword stuffing weakens the user experience of your website by overloading your copy with an unnecessary amount of keywords. This leads to unreadable content and will cause web visitors to click off the page. More importantly, because Google favours high-quality, person-first content, there is a significant risk you will drop down the rankings.
How to avoid this:
- Conduct quality and in-depth keyword research to determine keyword difficulty and how often a keyword is searched for.
- Expand your body of text to allow a more natural distribution of keywords.
- Measure your keyword density to ensure your stay below the ideal of 2%.
- Give each page a primary keyword that’s low competition so you can rank quicker.
2. Duplicate content
According to Google, duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across your website that either totally matches other content or is extremely similar. Essentially, it’s having identical content on two or more different web pages. For search engines, this causes indexing problems. Google won’t penalise your website but you still pose the risk of losing traffic and a decrease in ranking.
How to avoid this: To avoid duplicate website content, it is advisable to create fresh new copy for each page or blog post. If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, you may want to outsource the work to an SEO agency. Your SEO expert will also employ a variety of techniques to stop search engines from indexing pages that have duplicated content in the meantime.
3. Ignoring mobile optimisation
Failing to implement mobile optimisation for your website will affect user experience but also your site’s SEO performance and competitive edge. Mobile optimisation is a critical factor influencing SEO rankings with search engines favouring mobile-friendly sites.
How to avoid this: The fix is quite simple: get your website optimised for mobile devices! This will improve your site’s load time, integrate a responsive design, be better optimised for local search and ultimately work wonders for your SEO. Plus, you’ll attract a wider target audience that prefers to do searches on their smartphones.
4. Using the wrong keywords
The keywords you use and the way in which you use them have a significant impact on your SEO performance. Unfortunately if you’re not an expert, there are quite a number of mistakes you can make when conducting keyword research. One of the most common is choosing incorrect or irrelevant keywords to target in your content marketing.
How to avoid this: In order to be completely rest assured that you are using the right keywords, it’s advisable to call up an SEO professional to conduct keyword research for you. But if you still want to do it yourself, there are a number of keyword research tools like Surfer SEO that can help you out.
5. Not optimising images
Image optimisation involves making sure that your images are accurately sized, compressed and labelled. Optimising images on your website can help you rank on Google Images. It will also improve your site’s accessibility and enhance the user experience. On the other hand, having uncompressed, large scale images can slow down your site which in turn can affect UX and rankings.
How to avoid this:
- Choose the right file name so Google knows what your image is about
- Select the correct image format and resize for the web
- Reduce the file size using a compression tool
6. AI only content
AI can be a helpful tool to spark content ideas and it is definitely playing a role in SEO. But only using AI to generate content is risky. This is because search engines prioritise human-generated, high-quality content that is accurate and helpful to readers. AI content can sometimes provide inaccurate and unreliable information that you don’t want to appear on your website.
How to avoid this: Have a clear and purposeful content plan with relevant topics and get experienced writers to craft blogs and other content pieces. SEO content writers will be able to create high-quality content that includes relevant keywords naturally. And this will bode well for your SEO rankings.
Get it right the first time
Don’t get caught lacking on your SEO! Avoid the mistakes that could set back your ability to rank higher on Google, rather leave it to our team of experts to do a great job the first time round.
Get in touch with us today.
