Most Common SEO Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

Most Common SEO Mistakes & How To Avoid Them. SEO mistakes can negatively impact your rankings and business as well. Hence, everyone who makes these SEO mistakes needs to understand and learn how to fix them. 

Hence, in this article, you’ll come across the 11 most common SEO mistakes that newbie bloggers and SEO experts make. 

We are not only highlighting the mistakes but will also teach you how to fix or avoid doing those mistakes.

So, without further ado, let’s begin.

1. Not doing proper research

This is one of the most common SEO mistakes that bloggers, webmasters, and SEO professionals make. Merely creating content without doing proper research and waiting for it to get ranked on Google will not take you anywhere.

You need to understand what people are searching on Google and what information they are hunting for. Hence, you need to do in-depth research.

You can start by doing competitors’ research and check their website’s top-performing content and web pages. You can also track their top ranking keywords and accordingly plan your content and SEO strategy.

For example;

If you want to create a post on “Christmas decorations” you can start with a Google search and check what results appear on SERP.

You can also use Google’s auto-suggest to find great keywords ideas that you can incorporate into your content strategy. You can also scroll down to the end to get some more keyword ideas.

Another great way to discover keyword ideas is using SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, or Ubbersuggest.

2. Copy content

Spinning content, rehashing content, changing words, plagiarism, are just a few words that define copy content for Google. After the Panda update in 2013, Google has become very strict against the quality of content.

It prefers unique and high-quality content over low and poor quality content. 

On the other hand, if you have used duplicated or copied content, then Google will place a small penalty on your site. This penalty may affect the overall ranking of your website.

Here is the other outcome of Google’s penalty:

• Losing website traffic.
• Adding no values to customers.
• Losing rankings.

That said: Content duplication can occur in various forms.

URL: Changing URLs website proper redirection setup can also cause content duplication. 

Scraped content: This will happen when you copy the exact content from another website and paste it on your website. This type of category includes blog, title, meta description, and heading tags.

Pro Tips: Whenever you create any form of textual content, focus on Core Web Vitals. 

3. Title and description

The next common SEO mistake happens at the title, description, and heading tag level. No matter how well you have created your content, if the title, description, and heading tags are not in line, then your content won’t rank on Google. 

Search engines crawl the title, meta description, and heading tags to better understand the context of your content. That means if you have not created a proper title, meta, and heading tag, your content might not rank on Google.

According to research done by Search Engine Journal, 4.96% of websites fail to add proper heading tags for their website and regret later.

Hence, use a heading tag properly in the right sequence of H1-H2-H3-H4-H5-H6.

Also, make sure to include your primary keywords in the title tag and primary + secondary keywords in meta tags.

4. Wrong link-building strategy

Google makes around 500-600 changes in its algorithm every year. No matter how many changes they make in their algorithms, link-building will always be their top ranking factor. 

Hence, building backlinks can be one of the most effective ways to boost up your search engine rankings. However, if done the wrong way, it can negatively affect the overall ranking, traffic, and health of your site. Also, read homes for sale in brampton.

So, what are the link building tactics you should avoid:

1. Spammy links

Adding spammy links in your article is a big no.

For example;

Your website is all about information technology, and recently you created a list of the best tech companies. You cannot link to websites that do not belong to your niche or sites with a high spam score.

This will affect the health of your site and rankings as well.

Always link to the websites that are relevant to your niche and have good authority.

2. Internal links

Internal links can surely help you in improving your site’s ranking in no time. However, internally linking out to the web pages that make little sense is a poor practice.

We have seen bloggers and SEO experts pump out their web pages with tons of internal links that make no sense. 

A good practice would be to add an internal link at every 100 words where it makes sense.

To get the maximum benefit from internal links, follow this:

• Make sure that all internal links are do-follow.
• Use keyword-rich anchor text in the internal link.
• You can use professional SEO services to get you quality internal links if it seems too confusing to do it yourself.

5. Avoiding link auditing

Now you know that you should avoid making low quality and spammy backlinks for your site. Apart from this, it is also important that you regularly audit your links.

During the initial days of our blogging career, we used to build links from any website just for the sake of making links. Later on, it negatively impacted our rankings. 

In fact, one of our keywords on hosting for which we were ranking on the first page was deranked and moved to the 10th page. This happened because we were making too many spammy links for this.

That’s when we realized the importance of link-auditing.

We immediately audited our link profile with SEMrush and disowned all the toxic links. 

Now, we are ranking for those keywords again.

6. Avoiding site auditing

The next common SEO mistake that bloggers and SEO professionals do is they avoid regularly auditing their site. Just like link auditing, it is also important for you to do monthly website audits.

Auditing will help you in diagnosing the errors on your site and also improve the overall health of your site. 

Apart from this, you also need to keep an eye on the Google search console and check for coverage issues for your site.

If there is any coverage issue, then fix it immediately.

7. No balance between long-tail and short-tail keyword

Bloggers, webmasters, and SEO professionals face many challenges while creating SEO strategies either for their clients or for their websites. One such challenge is maintaining the right balance between long-tail and short-tail keywords for content.

The type of keyword you plan or target will determine the amount of traffic your site will get.

For example;

You are running a business that offers professional SEO services. You plan to target keywords like SEO, best SEO services, cheap SEO packages and best enterprise SEO services.

But here’s the catch.

Keyword SEO services is a short-tail keyword and will have high competition and good search volume. On the other hand, keywords like best SEO services, cheap SEO packages, and best enterprise SEO services are long-tail keywords with low competition and decent search traffic.

The long-tail keywords will be highly conversational as compared to the short-tail keyword.

Hence, you need to diversify your keywords while crafting content and SEO strategy.

For example;

If you are creating content for an SEO strategy for a new website, then go with long-tail keywords. Once the website has gained some authority and credibility, then you can focus on targeting short-tail keywords.