10 Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the fundamental concepts of website administration. Even beginner-level webmasters understand the significance of optimization and try to follow the latest trends in this field.

But no matter how important SEO may be, it still seems like a lot of website administrators don’t know how to do it properly. We get to see amateur optimization mistakes on a daily basis, ranging from broken links all the way to poorly designed content. In such circumstances, learning the basics of SEO becomes critical.

You need to know what to do in any given situation, but you also have to figure out the don’ts that have the power to ruin your content creation efforts very quickly. In this post, we are going to show you the benefits of SEO and present you 10 common mistakes to avoid here. Let’s take a look!

What Makes Website Optimization so Important

Although it became quite a buzzword in the marketing universe in the last decade, some people seem to have forgotten how important SEO actually was. It’s always good to remind yourself of the benefits of a quality optimization strategy, so here are just a few stats to prove it:

• Users conduct over six billion searches every day.
• More than 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine, while 75% of people never scroll past the first page of search results.
• Ranking highly for organic search results is crucial because up to 80% of users completely ignore paid advertisements.
• Search is the number one driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%.

The Worst SEO Blunders You Could Make

With everything you’ve seen so far, you should be ready to move on to the crucial part of our post. We prepare for you the list of 10 common SEO mistakes, so let’s check them out one by one:

 1. Focusing on One Keyword Only

We all know that keywords represent an epicenter of SEO, but it doesn’t mean you can stick to one keyword exclusively when writing posts. On the contrary, you need to create a full set of relevant terms and expressions and mix them throughout the text to make the most out of your content.

A study shows that around half of all search queries are four words or longer. It means you need to be open-minded, using enough synonyms and longtail keywords to maximize the discoverability of your articles.

 2. Creating Low-quality Content

This mistake is rather obvious, but we can never overestimate the importance of content quality. What does it mean to create low-quality posts? James Cornell, a fellow blog writer at Paper Writing Pro Service, gives us a few suggestions:

• Some essay writers say, that poor content is not analytical and it doesn’t provide readers with fresh and interesting information.
• It doesn’t come in small and concise paragraphs, but rather in large bulks of text. This makes reading slower and less dynamic.
• Underperforming content is generic. It fails to solve any real problem of your followers.
• Low-quality articles don’t have a clear call to action.

 3. Neglecting Dated Content

Your website is probably filled with outdated posts, with some of them being two, three, or even more years old. Content creators at EssayShark believe that the last thing you want to do is neglect these articles: “You should regularly revise old posts because it helps your website to stay up to date and preserve search engine ranking. Try to refresh evergreen content by adding new stats or removing outdated information, thus keeping all articles highly credible and relevant long-term.”

 4. Underestimating the Importance of Website Loading Speed

Do you enjoy waiting for a webpage to load? We bet you don’t! But guess what – your audience doesn’t love it either. You have to ensure that the website loads within three seconds max because it’s the only way to prevent a high bounce rate. We strongly recommend you utilize services such as Pingdom, a tool that quickly scans your website and identifies page load speed from any given location worldwide. It won’t only reveal load times, but also give you suggestions on how to make the website load faster.

 5. No Internal Backlinks and Outbound Links

Internal backlinks and outbound links are extremely important SEO parameters. The former has the purpose to promote other posts on your website and boost traffic, but you better be careful not to add irrelevant backlinks.

On the other hand, outbound links are necessary because you want to support claims using external content that directly correlates to your subject. Of course, you have to make sure to add links that lead to top-notch articles only.

 6. Not Using Local SEO

Local SEO is a powerful marketing tool, especially if you are running a small business with physical stores. According to the study, almost 90% of consumer-driven local business searches on a mobile device either call or visit the business within 24 hours. You should definitely seize the opportunity to promote local branches by setting up Google My Business account. Besides location-relevant content, the most important thing is to optimize company information by writing accurate names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact details.

 7. Forgetting to Optimize Images

Images make an integral part of almost every piece of content, but some authors don’t remember to optimize visual elements. Such a blunder decreases online discoverability, so you have to prevent this issue by optimizing each photo. First of all, a filename should contain topic-related keywords.

Secondly, you should write alt text just in case a user’s device fails to load the actual image. It’s a brief description with up to 125 characters. Use it to describe visual content, but if you are not sure how to do it in such a limited form, don’t hesitate to ask professional writers at best essays service.

 8. Forgetting to Optimize URLs

Search engines use URLs to identify content and give it a proper ranking. However, a link won’t mean a thing if you forget to optimize it because it will end up being long and filled with meaningless symbols. Our suggestion is to modify every URL, keeping it short, keyword-rich and informative. For instance, it should look like this: www.example.com/common-seo-mistakes.

 9. Not Adapting to Mobile Experience

More than half of website traffic comes from mobile devices, but the trend is still on the rise. That’s why it would be a huge mistake not to adapt your website so as to match the needs of smartphone users. You need to create a responsive design that suits the requirements of all device types, including laptops, tablets and mobile phones.

 10. Failing to Utilize Web Analytics

The last mistake on our list is also one of the most common. Namely, a lot of webmasters fail to utilize analytics and learn how their websites perform. They rely on instinct instead of data, which often leads to terrible business results.

There are all sorts of tools that can help you in this process, with the basic one being Google Analytics. You just need to set up an account to be able to monitor progress, following important indicators such as traffic sources, session duration, bounce rate, acquisitions and many others.

Conclusion

A reliable SEO strategy is critical to the success of your business. If you don’t optimize a website properly, rest assured you won’t be able to keep pace with competitors and drive enough leads and conversions.

The list of tasks to do here is long and mind-boggling, but you must also pay attention to the list of the most common SEO errors. Our post explained 10 very frequent optimization mistakes you have to avoid at all costs.

Eliminating these blunders will make your website stronger and more reliable, so don’t hesitate to use our suggestions. And of course, feel free to leave a comment if you want to ask a question or if you have other interesting ideas to share with our readers – we would be glad to see it!