Top 20 Common SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Top 20 Common SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid
By purchasing through the links on this page, you are giving us the opportunity to earn a commission. Your support is greatly appreciated!

Simply practicing SEO to improve your website rankings is not enough, you have to do it right. And yet, keeping up to date with the latest search engine algorithm updates and following developments in SEO strategies can be challenging.

Luckily, with the right tools and info, you’ll be able to pinpoint common SEO mistakes that hinder your website growth.

But how exactly do you do that?

To help you get started on rooting out these SEO problems, we’ve put together a list of 20 most common SEO mistakes. Whether you’re running a niche online blog or a booming eCommerce store, finding and replacing these SEO mistakes with best practices will help you rank better on SERPs and further maximize your online presence.

Are you a Shopify store owner? Improve your store's SEO performance and speed with one app

Install TinyIMG now

List of 20 most common SEO mistakes

Here is a rundown of SEO mistakes that many website owners often overlook:

  1. Slow website loading speed
  2. Wrong target keywords
  3. Poorly answered search intent
  4. Default metadata
  5. No content structure
  6. Weak or duplicate content
  7. Unoriginal content
  8. Unoptimized images
  9. Keyword stuffing
  10. No internal linking strategies
  11. No Google Search Console account
  12. No analytics tools
  13. Poor backlink strategies
  14. Poor mobile-friendliness
  15. Poor UX and site structure
  16. No structured data
  17. Mistakes in robots.txt file
  18. No sitemaps or sitemaps with errors
  19. Redirect chains
  20. Poor E-A-T signals

If ignored, these bad SEO practices will cause harm to your website and drag down your entire SEO strategy together with it. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen by covering these mistakes, their examples and how to avoid them in more depth.

1. Ignoring site loading speed

  • Why is it important? Slow site load time leads to lower rankings and conversion rates.
  • Related mistakes/examples: not optimizing image size, not checking Core Web Vitals, having render blocking JavaScript or unused JavaScript and CSS.
  • How to avoid it: use GSC Page Experience report and Google PageSpeed Insights, choose the right image file type, resize and compress images, clean up code, implement lazy loading, fix broken links and redirect chains.

If the shopping, browsing or reading experience is seamless, people do it longer and enthusiastically.

Plus, Google favors faster sites. After the Google Page Experience Update rolled out mid-June of 2021, Google started putting more emphasis on three page loading experience metrics known as Core Web Vitals. The update shook up SERPs massively, showing that site speed should be at the forefront of any website owner's SEO effort.

Yet for some reason, website speed is often an afterthought for website owners. Don't make this SEO mistake. Practice website speed optimization by working on your visuals, removing redirect chains and cleaning up code.

Tip: Understand how good your website speed is in the eyes of Google. Google PageSpeed Insights helps you identify areas of improvement, such as image size optimization and removal of unused JavaScript or CSS.

TinyIMG will boost your Shopify store speed by automating image optimization, broken link and redirect chain tasks

Try TinyIMG now

2. Targeting the wrong keywords

  • Why is it important? Targeting the wrong keywords will make it hard to rank and bring in low-converting traffic.
  • Related mistakes/examples: optimizing for keywords that are too broad or too far away from your niche.
  • How to avoid it: do accurate keyword research, create a keyword map, define realistic ranking expectations based on your website DR and online presence.

Researching the right keywords for your niche is a must if you want to maximize your site’s content reach.

Don’t fall for the temptation to use broad, generic keywords with massive volume, like “women’s clothes” or “headphones”. Realistically, you have very little chance to rank for them and even if you manage to do so, the conversion rate of such traffic won’t be impressive. Focus on more specific queries that you can actually rank well for.

Tip: Even some low volume keywords are very competitive. When doing keyword research, choose a tool that has a Keyword Difficulty metric. If you’re just starting out and your website does not have much authority, prioritize low keyword difficulty queries and aim for higher ones later on.

Another common mistake is to target a massive range of keywords, even when they have no direct relevance to the website niche. Instead of bringing in more traffic, the pages created for these keywords will simply dilute your topical focus and confuse Google and the visitors about the purpose of your site.

Tip: Define topic clusters and create a keyword map for your website. For instance, if you’re an eCommerce store that sells scented candles, create a strategy around your product pages. Try to think of all information your buyers would need to raise interest in your product (f.e. , how to reduce stress, what is aromatherapy) and make an informed decision (f.e. types of scented candles, effects of scented candles, etc.). Branch them out into main and supporting content pieces and make sure all of them have internal links to relevant product pages.

3. Not answering search intent properly

  • Why is it important? If you fail to address intent appropriately, you will never gain good search engine rankings for that query.
  • Related mistakes/examples: ignoring SERP results, poor understanding of target audience’s problems.
  • How to avoid it: understand types of search intents and what type of content you need to answer them, research SERP competition of specific query.

Over the years, Google almost perfected the ability to understand user issues related to specific queries and the types of content best suited to answer them. To do that, it uses language processing models, BERT (and soon MUM).

This entire concept is called search intent and it’s best explained through an example.

If you search for “best running shoes”, most of your SERPs will consist of blog articles that review a certain number of running shoes. “Running shoes sale” will provide you with a bunch of product listing pages from sports shoes retailers selling at discounted prices, whereas “running shoes near me” will return a number of nearby sports stores with their addresses.

In short, there are four main types of search intent:

  • Transactional - product or service pages and listings. Example: wordpress jetpack plugin.
  • Navigational - specific website access or landing pages. Example: wordpress admin login.
  • Informational - blog posts. Example: how to start a blog with wordpress
  • Commercial - specific product or multiple product reviews. Example: best wordpress plugin.

For website owners, missing search intent is one of the more painful mistakes because essentially they end up wasting resources on content or pages that will never show up on high SERP positions.

Thankfully, you can get a fairly clear idea of the search intent for a specific query by simply Googling it and analyzing the listings that come up. Determine whether its blog posts, product pages, analyze how much video or image content is listed and land the perfect page every user will click on and stay on.

4. Using default metadata

  • Why is it important? Using default metadata can cause poor rankings and low click-through rates, meta titles and description might be too long.
  • Related mistakes/examples: duplicate metadata, meta titles and descriptions with no keywords, meta data that is too long.
  • How to avoid it: use tools to detect missing or duplicate metas, create unique meta titles (under 60 characters) and meta descriptions (under 145 characters) for every indexed page.

Under-optimized meta tags are among the most common SEO mistakes. They are short and you don’t see them on page, but never overlook their importance for your SEO strategy. Meta tags help search engines identify what your page is about, and then link that page to keywords that searchers use.

Also, metas are your one chance to convince potential customers that your page specifically is what they’re looking for. Default, duplicate or underoptimized metas are a massive mistake because you miss out on clicks from people who can’t understand what they will find on your page.

Another issue with default metas is the length. If your CMS or website builder generates meta titles automatically, it’s most often your H1, which can be significantly longer than the recommended 60 characters. If that happens, only a part of it will show up, which can confuse the readers about the purpose of your page.

Here are some common meta tag mistakes that you can easily fix:

  • Missing meta titles or description
  • No keywords
  • Too many characters
  • No action verbs
  • No selling points.

5. Forgetting about content structure

  • Why is it important? If you have poor on-page content structure, users can’t navigate the page easily, you miss out on ranking opportunities with specific passages
  • Related mistakes/examples: missing headings, mixed up heading order, no table of content
  • How to avoid it: establish on-page content hierarchy and assign appropriate headings

There are two most common SEO mistakes when it comes to on-page structure:

  • Missing H1. Your page title should serve as H1 heading that gives both readers and Google a good understanding of the content on that specific page. Forgetting to add an H1 tag can confuse search engines about the purpose of this page.

Tip: Don’t confuse Title tags and H1 tags. Title tags are also known as meta titles, it’s what shows up on the SERPs but not on the page itself. H1 tag is the title people see when they land on your page. Both should be present and optimized for focus keywords.

  • Incorrect heading placement. Your headings should indicate content hierarchy very evidently. The title is H1, every major section should have H2 tags and subsections should be H3 and H4 headings respectively. Failing to do so will confuse Google and won't allow generating a correct table of contents.

Tip: In 2021 February, Passage Indexing was introduced into Google algorithm, meaning specific passages from your content can rank for related queries. If you don’t have defined on-page structure, you largely miss out on these opportunities. Mark your headings right and include keywords in them to capture more SERPs with one page.

6. Publishing weak and duplicate content

  • Why is it important? Publishing duplicate content can cause cannibalization, you risk ranking penalties, weak content lowers your overall website authority.
  • Related mistakes/examples: targeting synonymous keywords with the same intent or the same keyword with different pages, no internal linking strategies.
  • How to avoid it: introduce canonical tags for similar pages accessible through different URLs, avoid creating pages around similar keywords.

Pushing content for the sake of having it is one of the worst things you can do for your website.

If you perfectly optimize content that provides no original solutions and little value for the users, you might rank for the target keyword a week or two. However, your page will disappear from search engine rankings in no time because Google will see that bounce rates are big and session durations short. What’s worse, such empty content will drag down your entire website authority together with the rankings for the good pages you have.

Another massive mistake is having multiple pages with very similar content with the hopes of capturing as many listings on the first page as possible. Such an approach usually causes keyword cannibalization, meaning multiple pages competing for the same keyword and neither one of them ranking well.

Tip: Even if you don’t publish duplicate content on purpose, such pages might exist on your website because of how your CMS is set up. A common example is Shopify, which creates duplicate product page links. Fix these problems easily by using canonical tags and telling Google which one is your preferred version.

7. Publishing unoriginal content

  • Why is it important? Plagiarism is harshly penalized by Google.
  • Related mistakes/examples: creating content with no additional value if compared to existing competition.
  • How to avoid it: don’t directly copy content or text from your competitors, write unique content with valuable solutions.

Some websites find well-ranking pages and bluntly copy their content with basic changes in syntax and word choice. Don’t ever do that.

Calling unoriginal content an SEO mistake is an understatement. Google knows who comes up with original solutions, and if you copy them, the penalties will never let your page rank well.

Regularly investing in good quality content (and maybe even checking your text with a plagiarism checker) may require quite a bit more time and effort, but it will ultimately give your website higher chances of ranking and build website authority. Plus, you’ll gain the trust of your target audience and in the long run, they will start coming to your website directly.

Tip: Struggling to come up with out-of-the-box solutions? Sometimes the secret to original content lies not necessarily in the solutions, but in their presentation. Beat your competition by creating tables, infographics, having more user-friendly pages, all of which make information more digestible to the readers.

8. Not optimizing images

  • Why is it important? Unoptimized images slow down your website, hinder user experience and cause poor search engine rankings, you lose opportunities to rank in image search.
  • Related mistakes/examples: ignoring visibility slow load times, ignoring Google PageSpeed Insights warnings.
  • How to avoid it: do regular site audits for broken images or images that are too big, write unique image titles and alt texts, set up automated optimization, choose appropriate file formats, implement lazy loading.

This is a big one, especially if you have an image-heavy site, such as an online store. Images that are too heavy for the web affect site loading and performance, and like we discussed before, a slow-loading page means you risk losing rankings and your potential client's attention.

This is often overlooked by site owners, especially because it can be frustrating to resize and compress each image manually.

You can easily address this by choosing the right file format for your image files (WebP, JPEG or PNG) depending on your needs and by saving for the web each time. Additionally, you should compress image size using online tools: 

Another common image SEO mistake is not writing optimized titles and alt tags. If you use keywords and make alt texts descriptive, you have chances to rank in image search, an often overlooked source of traffic.

Try image compression and optimization app TinyIMG for Shopify, automate optimization processes and ensure fast load times

Install TinyIMG now

9. Stuffing keywords

  • Why is it important? Google penalizes keyword stuffing.
  • Related mistakes/examples: poor quality content, not answering search intent.
  • How to avoid it: maintain natural keyword density, first write for the reader, then optimize for SEO.

There were times where you could fit as many keywords on a page as possible and consider that as a legitimate strategy for context creation and search engine visibility. Those times are gone, keyword stuffing nowadays is a big SEO mistake.

Avoid big focus and secondary keyword density as well as excess content that exists only to contain keywords. Google is able to understand the value of on-page content and your rankings will suffer if you practice keyword stuffing. It even takes meta data and backlink anchors into account when determining whether a page is guilty of keyword stuffing.

Place keywords in your content naturally, focus on providing value, unique solutions and explaining the context that the readers actually need.

Tip: Use on-page optimization tools like SurferSEO. They will analyze SERPs and give you a list of keywords and how many times you need to use them in order to establish contextual relevance without keyword stuffing.

10. Not having effective internal linking

  • Why is it important? Not having internal linking strategies wastes link juice, page rankings suffer, your site hierarchy becomes confusing.
  • Related mistakes/examples: no sitemap, no keyword maps, poor anchor texts.
  • How to avoid it: create silo structure, establish content hierarchy, outline preferable anchor texts.

There are two main types of internal links, navigational and contextual. Navigational ones are what you find in the website menu or footer, whereas contextual ones are what appears in the text.

Missing contextual internal links or those set up with no purpose is a bad SEO practice. Most often, internal linking issues include:

  • Orphan pages. Some website owners decide their pages can exist without any internal linking effort. In such cases, some content pieces can have no incoming internal links, so both Google and readers have a hard time finding them.
  • Spam internal links. If you see a word and link any content piece related to it, you are diluting your topical focus and wasting link juice that could otherwise be reserved for your focus pages.
  • Vague or empty anchor texts. Always link your content pieces using anchor texts that serve as target or partial matches of your focus keyword. You will help establish topical relevance around the article and improve its rankings.

Tip: Fix all your internal linking mistakes by creating a silo structure of your website and letting it guide your internal linking effort. That way, you will show your topical coverage very well and ensure your link distribution is based on page importance.

11. Not registering with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

  • Why is it important? You will miss out on warnings and prioritization opportunities.
  • Related mistakes/examples: not using analytics tools.
  • How to avoid it: set up accounts and watch tutorials on how to use information you find in an actionable way.

Registering your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools is a great idea because essentially you’re telling search engines about the existence of your new website and ensuring it gets crawled.

These tools can also guide a lot of your SEO effort. They provide Page Experience reports, indexing errors and warning, and if you act on it, you can quickly fix site health issues that could be dragging your entire website down.

12. Not using analytics tools

  • Why is it important? Not having analytics tools prevents you from correctly prioritizing your effort and measuring results.
  • Related mistakes/examples: not prioritizing your SEO efforts correctly.
  • How to avoid it: set up Google Analytics and SEO analytics tools with embedded analytics capabilities.

If you’re not basing your SEO and marketing effort on data, you’re not doing it right. While general audience understanding and creativity is essential to good SEO strategy, you have to know what’s happening with your website at the moment if you hope to make informed decisions.

These are some of the top marketing and SEO analytics tools every website would benefit from:

  • Google Analytics - endless possibilities for gathering and analysis for aggregated customer data. Does have a bit of a learning curve though.
  • Hotjar - heatmaps, recordings and other features allow you to get a good idea of how your audience interacts with your page.
  • Ahrefs - gives you a good understanding of your SEO performance for individual pages and website as a whole.
  • Heap Analytics - a young but superb tool for tracking individual user activity.
  • Why is it important? Not having quality backlinks hinders good ranking possibilities, Google penalizes visibly buying backlinks
  • Related mistakes/examples: Keyword stuffing, acquiring backlinks from unrelated or spam sites, target keyword spamming in anchor texts
  • How to avoid it: Outreach websites related to your niche, refuse to pay for links, create high quality content that would generate organic backlinks.

Backlinks have been a substantial ranking factor for a while now. With AI tools for content generation improving and websites becoming more populated with content, the importance of dofollow backlinks is bound to grow even more.

Refrain from having paid backlinks though. While this may seem relatively trivial, it certainly isn’t to Google. Beginning with its Penguin Algorithm update in 2012, Google has cracked down hard on poor-quality backlinks through all confirmed updates over the last decade.

Instead of buying backlinks, follow best backlinking practices:

  • Get in touch with websites related to your niche that could benefit from having a link to your content or product
  • Offer to write guest posts in exchange for a backlink
  • Do regular lost backlink reclamation and spam link disavow
  • Optimize your outreach effort (do backlink gap calculations, use target or partial match anchor texts to link to your pages)
  • Find and reach out to websites that have nofollow links to your website and ask to make them dofollow
  • Have content good enough that websites link to it organically

Tip: Be careful with the timings and anchor texts of your backlinks. If you receive a lot of backlinks over a short period of time, all of which have your target keyword as the anchor text, Google can flag that down as buying backlinks and penalize your website.

14. Not having a mobile-friendly website

  • Why is it important? Google indexing is mobile-first, not having a mobile responsive website can cause ranking and conversion rate drops.
  • Related mistakes/examples: not optimizing images, poor navigation, not having responsive design.
  • How to avoid it: define dimensions, limit dropdowns and other navigational features.

Being mobile-friendly is very important because it’s one of Google’s top deciding factors in terms of how high you rank. In 2018, they announced mobile-first indexing which meant higher rankings for sites that had mobile-friendly versions. Not to mention that a lot of users visit websites on their mobile phones, especially for online transactions.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly by using Google’s free test. It’s also a good idea to check your site on your phone - personally go through each page, click every button, and take note of loading time.

Tip: Struggling with mobile page load times? Set up AMP pages designed for user-first mobile experience.

15. Ignoring UX and site structure best practices

  • Why is it important? Poor UX increases bounce rates, people spend less time on your website, which affects rankings and site authority.
  • Related mistakes/examples: no internal linking structure, poor mobile responsiveness, disregarding Core Web Vitals.
  • How to avoid it: simplify navigation, design mobile first, ensure fast load times.

Google is smart enough to factor human behaviour into account when it determines SERP rankings. Factors such as session duration, bounce rate, and pages visited all impact rankings for website pages.

That’s why disregarding UX and website structure is a big SEO mistake. Not only can inconvenient navigation, confusing desktop or mobile layouts and slow site load speed cause frustration for users, them leaving will directly impact your performance in SERP results.

Keep these UX and site structure aspects in mind to design an SEO-friendly website:

  • Use clean and short URLs. Healthy site structure and best URL practices are inseparable. Make sure users can understand the page content from looking at the URL. Also, avoid date markers, symbols and other elements that might need to be changed or are unnecessary.
  • Have intuitive navigation. While the 3-click rule is a somewhat outdated concept, the idea that users should be able to get where they want easily and quickly matters more than ever. Make sure your navigational links align with site hierarchy, make user journey simple and intuitive, use breadcrumbs to simplify backtracking.
  • Limit popups and CTAs. While we all want to capture leads and monetize as much traffic as possible, excessive use of intrusive on-page elements can have the opposite effect and make users leave the website.
  • Optimize on-page structure. Use heading tags and hyperlinks to help people jump to specific sections, make scrolling efficient by maximizing the potential of on-page space.
  • Avoid layout shifts. Now that Core Web Vitals are a ranking factor, fixing any Cumulative Layout Shift issues should be even more of a priority. Add width and height dimensions to your on-page elements to help blowers allocate space for them in advance.

16. Not implementing structured data

  • Why is it important? Without structured data, you have no chance to capture rich snippets.
  • Related mistakes/examples: violating Google structured data guidelines, implementing incorrect structured data.
  • How to avoid it: implement relevant structured data markup.

Rich SERP results, such as product ratings, recipe results, video galleries and others are your ticket to maximizing SERP visibility.

Not implementing structured data is a mistake because that’s the only way to capture them.

There is also something to be said about the traffic quality related to structured data, especially for product pages. Since the people browsing have already seen the information such as product price and rating and liked it enough to click on your listing, you can expect higher conversion rates.

There three supported formats of structured data:

  • JSON-LD (most recommended)
  • Microdata
  • RDFa

Use them, comply with Google structured data guidelines and enjoy an increase in traffic, more space on the SERPs and more informed visitors.

17. Making mistakes in robots.txt file

  • Why is it important? Mistakes in robots.txt files can cause drastic indexing issues or loss of all website traffic.
  • Related mistakes/examples: using one robots.txt for different subdomains, listing secure directories, blocking relevant pages.
  • How to avoid it: find alternative ways to make changes on your site, leave editing of robots.txt to professionals.

Robots.txt is a file that dictates which pages on your website can and can’t be accessed by crawlers.

The file is built on specific rules and if you make edits to the site without knowing them, you can have some fairly drastic issues, including the loss of all website traffic.

If your goal is to prevent pages from showing up on the SERPs, use noindex tags instead. If you care about the crawl capacity of your website and want to optimize it, we highly suggest refraining from making changes to a robots.txt file without the help of professionals.

18. Not creating sitemaps or having sitemaps with errors

  • Why is it important? Not having a sitemap will prevent orphan pages from being indexed, your site structure might be unclear.
  • Related mistakes/examples: no internal linking strategy.
  • How to avoid it: create and submit an XML sitemap.

A sitemap is essentially a list of the most important pages of your website. It ensures your pages are seen and crawled by search engine bots, help them understand your site structure and discover orphan pages.

Sitemaps are a complete must for websites without an effective internal linking strategy and in general a good SEO practice.

A sitemap with errors can do more harm than good though. When you’re creating your XML sitemap, avoid these mistakes:

  • Listing pages that are marked as noindex
  • Forgetting to list important pages
  • Creating the sitemap manually
  • Forgetting to submit your sitemap to Google.

Tip: Is your website heavy on visuals? Create and submit image and video sitemaps to maximize their reach.

19. Not fixing redirect chains or broken links

  • Why is it important? Broken links and redirect chains are bad for site speed, user experience, and overall site health.
  • Related mistakes/examples: poor internal linking strategy, no analytics tools.
  • How to avoid it: find all broken links or internal links to pages that are redirected and remove or replace them with live links.

If you made a mistake in the URL when inserting a link or forgot to remove links to pages you deleted, chances are your website is suffering from broken links.

Ignoring them is a massive SEO mistake. If crawlers find them, your website value will decrease and you will waste crawl budget. Users that land on a 404 page will straight up leave, whereas redirect chains will increase their page load time, which can lead to a similar outcome.

Find and replace all broken or redirected links with live ones, it’s one of the easiest fixes to an SEO mistake that could be causing a great deal of harm to your site health.

Tip: Remember to find and remove not only internal broken links, but also outbound ones. You can do so using Screaming Frog.

If you’re running a Shopify store, use TinyIMG app to find all broken links. You can also set up automated redirects to a chosen page and prevent this SEO mistake in the future!

Find broken links

20. Ignoring E-A-T signals

  • Why is it important? Companies that have low authority in their niche struggle to rank.
  • Related mistakes/examples: not having About us or Author pages, not posting quality content, not auditing or updating content.
  • How to avoid it: make your expertise and authority explicit with informative Author and About Us pages, have good online presence, reviews and reputation.

E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. While it’s a somewhat vague concept, it has an impact on rankings and is used as a base for Google Quality Rating Guidelines, so disregarding it is a big SEO mistake.

The idea behind it is to help Google and readers see why information coming from you is reliable and trustworthy. No matter how much you know about the subject, if Google can’t see it, you will struggle to grow your website.

To avoid E-A-T related mistakes, make sure you:

  • Link to established and credible external sources.
  • Have an extensive About Us page that explains your experience and accomplishments.
  • Write quality content, conduct case studies.
  • Limit user-generated content.

Tip: If your website is in any way related to healthcare, legal or financial advice, E-A-T plays a massive role. Ensure the expertise of your content authors and institution is impeccable and explained on the website.

Tools and tips to catch SEO mistakes in time

Struggling to pinpoint which SEO mistakes you should fix first?

Here is a list of well-known SEO tools that can help you easily address the SEO mistakes outlined above and regularly provide suggestions for improvement:

  • Google Analytics. User behavior tracking tool with invaluable reports on website traffic, conversions, bounce rates, session duration and much more. It helps identify sources of traffic loss, your top performing topics and has many other applications that can help guide your SEO effort.
  • Google Search Console. Built around the idea of website health tracking, GSC will help you identify errors and areas for website improvement to improve your SEO performance.
  • Ahrefs is a great SEO toolset with multi-use Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, and Content Explorer. It can help break down SEO performance of individual pages, discover keyword opportunities, do competitor research and much more.
  • Screaming Frog. An often overlooked tool, Screaming Frog is an extremely powerful tool that allows to identify SEO issues in real time. It has a free version you can experiment with because maximizing its potential has a steap learning curve.
  • Platform-specific tools. Depending on your CMS, website builder or eCommerce platform, you might have unique SEO tool solutions. For instance, TinyIMG app is an SEO and image optimizer for Shopify stores with helpful features such as SEO and page speed audit, metadata optimization, broken link detection and redirects.

And here are a few general best practices to follow if you want to avoid SEO mistakes in the future:

  • Keep up with Google algorithm updates and latest SEO strategies. The way search engines evaluate websites change, you must stay informed and adapt to those changes.
  • Always have user in mind. Even if you’re having a hard time staying on top of all SEO practices, if you create your website and write content with users in mind, you’ll be one step ahead many competitors.
  • Define your mistakes and strategies based on your industry. For instance, one of the biggest mistakes for small local business is not optimizing for Google My Business listings, blogs will suffer greatly from keyword stuffing and unoriginal content, whereas eCommerce websites must always ensure proper product page indexation with parameters.

Final advice on avoiding SEO mistakes

SEO is a massive undertaking, so it’s vital to avoid SEO errors and let best practices guide your effort.

SEO mistakes are common even among seasoned SEO professionals, it’s all about catching and eliminating them. Follow this list, suggested best practices and additional resources to make sure the main aspects of your website are receiving only top-notch SEO effort.

Frequently asked questions

Most common SEO mistakes of 2023 include not optimizing meta data, missed intent, optimizing for incorrect keywords and disregarding broken links,

Duplicate and weak content is a common SEO mistake for websites that don’t have the resources to provide original solutions. Keyword stuffing is a very common mistake among content creators that want to maximize content visibility.

Mistakes in robots.txt, poor website structure and failing to follow best URL practices are among most common technical SEO mistakes. 

There is a best practice alternative for every SEO mistake. Identify your areas for improvement with SEO analytics tools, start with those that are an easy fix, such as broken link removal, and move to the more advanced or time consuming ones.

As a developer, you can do justice to website SEO by ensuring minimal JavaScript and CSS. Excessive code massively slows down websites and keeps them from successfully ranking in the SERPs.

About the author
Vita Klimaite
Vita believes that every great product must be supported by an even better marketing strategy. Armed with SEO and Content Marketing experience, Vita is dedicated to helping website and eCommerce store owners unlock the power of search engines and scale their businesses. A big fan of remote work, she is always on the road, so you can also hear some exciting travel stories from her.