9 Deadliest SEO Mistakes That You Must Avoid At Any Cost

SEO is a growing field in Digital Marketing.

As a useful marketing tactic, businesses are investing in SEO on a larger scale than before. 

According to a 2020 report of “The Business Research Company”

“Businesses spent about $47.5 billion on SEO and related products and services in 2020, even during the COVID-19 outbreak.”

You see that even during such a period of the financial crisis, SEO has earned its place in the digital market while growing to become a significant revenue generation strategy.

And at a CAGR of 10% starting in 2021 to 2023, the Business Research Company reports that while recovering from this pandemic outbreak is still slow, the SEO market is expected to grow.

And according to another research by giiresearch, it is estimated that

“Global Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Software Market to Reach $1.6 Billion by 2027”

Taking these reports into consideration and understanding the unique nature of SEO in digital growth, it is unavoidable that you would use search engine optimization techniques to rank on SERPs and would not achieve both traffic and visibility.

Also, you would not commit SEO errors due to negligence or even not knowing of the biggest SEO mistakes that you could make.

But don’t worry!

In this blog, I would uncover some of the most common SEO pitfalls that let you understand these mistakes which are unavoidable and can be improved.

Let’s get started. 

Read More: Search Engine Optimization

Common SEO Mistakes That You Must Avoid

Not Knowing Who You’re Talking To

Your Customers are the ones who are directed to your website and as the Search Engines are user-oriented, they require your website materials such as content, products, and services to be relevant to the customer’s query.

So, that it can ranked on SERP.

If you have put SEO efforts on your website still if it has not been rewarded with ranking on SERP, the reason could be, you have not considered your target audience persona and didn’t build your content to be audience-centric.

This is why first of all, Google could not find relevant content, even though your presentation is good and brings your ranking down, and secondly, your customers will never get to know that you exist.

And that is why your target audience should be your major concern and must be profiled (in Buyer Persona) as they are the ones who your business is attempting to attract when you are performing SEO in the digital arena. 

Often left out, the “Know Your Audience” element of SEO would keep your website under-ranked on SERPs.

Knowing your audience is the basic nature of your targeted user’s living, profession, and decision-making authority. 

And, when you understand their common pain points through buyer persona, you can attempt a customized approach this data provides.

So, when you are not attempting to ‘know your customers, you are not only losing feedback and reviews but some great testimonials that can advertise your brand and help customers make buying decisions.

If you still don’t get how important the feedback and reviews are, check out this report by Brightlocal,

“More consumers are reading online reviews than ever before. In 2021, 77% ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ read them when browsing for local businesses (up from 60% in 2020).”

Your business can experience high traffic through customer experience and the reviews that are left on your business’ GMB profile and other platforms you are available on.

These are a big part of customer experience as shown in the bar graph below showing customer experience to be 45.9% more important than product and pricing at 33.6% and 20.5% respectively.

These statistics mainly aim at the importance of your brand awareness on the digital platform that can be achieved by a better customer experience.

To achieve a better experience the priority of any industry or business is to know who its Target Customers are, and only then can you create proper content, products, and services for the satisfaction of your users’ needs. 

Otherwise, your web page may never rank on SERPs and your business remain invisible to online traffic.

Using Traditional SEO Techniques

Since 2014, Google has created many new guidelines and added new metrics and it crawls, indexes, and ranks your website on the basis of those guidelines. 

So, using traditional SEO techniques instead of revising them for modern ones are the SEO mistakes that could cost you your website ranking.

Because the changing of algorithms does not fit with the old traditional ways of optimizing your website and search engines find your content outdated and irrelevant.

Some other techniques are the exact match of the domain or URL name, keyword stuffing, and anchor texting, random guest blogging.

Problem is that the traditional SEO is not specific.

For example, URL names may become duplicated due to platforms that they are directed from, causing plagiarism of content, and search engines crawling these web pages may find them confusing or distribute your web page authority.

In a similar way, traditional SEOs have become quite specific in their indexing and ranking criteria making it so that they are not followed anymore.

According to Tidings, Since 2017 the traditional SEO and local SEO have decreased their productivity and the target engagement is up.

And Google’s algorithm is changing rapidly and evolving to fulfill your targeted users’ needs such as, 

• A. Mobile/ smartphones have increased search queries than desktops giving way to SEO of mobile-friendly websites. 

• B. The ‘voice search’ tool has increased the sales of voice assistance and the use of its application on most industry websites such as Chatbots.

Both of these innovations provided a better user experience on search engines, making websites optimized for easy access and navigation by searchers online.

Chatbots are leading the digital market and financial services have adopted chatbots 2 out of three times which has provided us with $8 billion in savings within the global market.

The Chatbots, as a voice search application, has taken over 300,000 chatbots on Facebook Messenger, according to VentureBeat

And according to the BusinessInsider,

80% of enterprises  would look to use chatbots

With this statistic and the heavy use of software on websites today, it is very important for you to remain updated with new SEO techniques because if these new guidelines are not applied you may get penalized or lose your rank altogether.

No Sitemaps Or Planned Data Structure

The sitemap and data structure is provided by websites to make it easy for Google bots to crawl them.

The picture below is a screenshot of a successfully crawled site map of a website named backlinko.

So your website requires a pathway and language (such as XML and HTML) that could provide a clear navigation system to crawlers’ web pages after web pages.

Here, people make the biggest SEO mistake of not linking their web pages together or using language that is not optimized for the content within a website.

Making it difficult for the search engine bots to crawl, index, and rank your web pages, and when they are unable to perform their function your web page’s relevance and authority on SERPs are not visible due to the low ranking it received.

So, planning your content on the website is a must that creates an easy pathway for your target users as well as the search engines to explore shown in the flowchart below.

Another common SEO mistake here is redirecting or canonicalizing URLs “too many” web pages creating a loop of redirection causing 

i. Your web page authority to become distributed

ii. Your customers experience slow page speed 

iii. Your page ranking declines due to distributed authority

This is why creating SEO plans and roadmaps regarding how to proceed with your website should be done beforehand and must be distributed in terms of days instead of months.

Note: You can use redirects such as 301, target keywords, and optimized headlines to build your page authority.

Focusing On Single SEO Techniques

SEO techniques are the most dynamic techniques that include On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO.

So, when you focus all your resources on a single SEO technique of the three available, you  are ignoring the others making your website’s Google indexing remain non-concluded and providing no ranking path.

This is a very common SEO mistake that requires extra attention or else, your website and its contents won’t get the visibility and traffic you expected.

The three functional directions – On-Page, Off-Page, and technical SEO- that your website should have worked, bring out the best results for your website to gain Expertise, Authority, and Trust (EAT guidelines), which is an essential metric for Google.

Shown in the pie chart below is the function of each SEO individually,

Each SEO Technique needs equal attention when working for indexing and ranking online. And that is one of the most common SEO pitfalls, that your website has focused all your resources and manpower on only one, single SEO Technique.

Let’s say, You are focused on building your website’s authority on SERPs by creating backlinks, image optimization, or even by doing guest posting. That is keeping SEO Techniques in check.

But you ignore the technical side of optimization that makes your site safe, navigable, and easy to explore.

Also, the On-Page optimization make your content engaging for existing users by building not only a long-term relationship but also, attracting more traffic.

That is why focusing only on one technique costs you your organic traffic as well as your ranking because Google has declared your website to be of ‘No Authority’ or that may have ‘Technical Issues’ which makes your website irrelevant for users and is not ranked.

NOTE: If your business is area-specific (city or region), you should know that Google handles it a bit differently with local SEO and so, you rank only on a local level.

Read More: Tweaks For Page Title & Meta Description That’ll Boost Your SEO Traffic & CTR

Intent Not Clear

The intent is the knowledge of your user’s query who was directed to your website to attain a solution or just an answer.

This solution could be your website’s resources, content, or sales (the last one is a bit tricky and requires a system to achieve).

But if all these elements do not follow what your target customers want. Then, what’s the point?

Your users and their search intent are the top priority!!

As your optimized website gets more traffic only when you provide a better user experience. 

According to PwC reports,

86% of buyers are  willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

Without search intent, your content would not be relevant to your reader’s queries and search engines would find it irrelevant to the searcher’s query making your online visibility decline and your web page’s ranking fall.

Your searchers are using different terms and tacts to find their solutions and if you haven’t applied these elements – long-tailed keywords, listicle formats, voice search, video content, – your website lacks the most important SEO technique User Intent.

The thing is you made one of the biggest SEO mistakes, of keeping unclear intent regarding searcher’s queries which causes declining traffic and falling rank.

Read More: A Complete Guide To Search Intent SEO

No Updates Are Available

No updates in your website can point your website to be one that has become inoperable for Google bots as well as making it irrelevant for your target users who need current content that follows new guidelines or evolved metrics announced by Google.

The updates such as switching from HTTP to HTTPS, regular blogs update, checking your technical elements (broken links, corrupted links, or duplicate links), and mobile optimization of web pages.

Now, understand that if any of these updates are not followed within your website, it would

i. Face downfall in ranking

ii. Avoided by Users as they are unsecured (decline of traffic)

Iii. Won’t operate on certain new platforms 

Such updates are dynamically provided by Google (the top search engine in the market) and are announced if any new guideline, rule, or algorithm update happens similar to the tweet given below of a 2020 core update.

You won’t believe how many marketers may let these slip by, only to understand when their traffic decline or their ranking.

So, instead of making the biggest SEO mistakes of not updating your website’s blogs. Work on URLs, Metadata, Headlines, robot.txt pages, site structure, and other such elements.

Using Text As The Only Content Formats

When it comes to engaging your customers, the content is every marketer’s weapon but is also one of the deadliest SEO errors that your website has.

You must ask why it is the deadliest?

Well, the thing is the content for your targeted customers does not only contains text or even images. 

Not at all!!

There are many content marketing techniques other than textual Content; such as Videos, Images, Podcasts, and e-Books that can be used for optimizing your websites and marketing your business digitally (many more content varieties are shown in the illustration below).

Now, with these essential engaging resources used today, you should know how important it is to present to users each available option.

You must have seen videos or pictures ranking on the first SERPs, and researches show that,

“In 2020, 96% of consumers watched videos of a brand to understand the know-how of a product or service and in 2021, this online video consumption increased to 100minutes/day.”

So, if you are not providing your users with all this engaging material, you are letting them go to their competitors who provide them with such a vast variety of content and your business loses potential customers.

That is why, not using a variety of content for your targeted users is the most common SEO mistake, and I would say the biggest one yet. 

Branding Is Absent

Brands are the favorite part of search engines ranked by Google immediately. Google likes its authority and loyal followers. 

That is why, Google is not only about ranking today but also, about building a trustworthy brand that promotes Google’s EAT guidelines of Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness concept and brings in genuine traffic.

Including an SSL certificate by switching from HTTP to HTTPS, may provide a secure website but to create a brand you have to do much more.

You have to build your brand from scratch!!

With SEO becoming more brand-centric every day, there is no other way but to follow every way to optimize your website and flaunt your business story online, and on media platforms for creating your potential customers’ association with your brand.

Or you would just be waiting for ranking.

Branding your website can also include branded keywords, and implementing local SEO.

Your priority is to rank on SERPs but to gain authority from the crawlers, you also, need to have genuine traffic and engagement. 

And only, then would they find your content relevant to the searcher’s query and your journey to an evergreen market is smooth.

No Regular Site Audits & Improvements

Website audits are about taking care of your website on a routine basis.

It is a need-to-know part of your technical optimization process and should be done twice a month so that it can provide you with details of which elements of the process need improvement.

And you won’t believe how much this SEO element is ignored!!

Well, being honest, most people ignore this part due to its technical nature but you must understand that for your business regular site audits are as important as air for humans.

Look at the image of an audit given below with the message “Your Page Could Be Better”, now when you further click on “Number of Recommended Improvements” you would get the suggestions for improving your website.

Site audits are the part of technical SEO that helps your website catch the errors and faults within your website that are causing your rank to decline and also, suggests ways to improve them so that your overall ranking is not affected. 

Take, if one of the web pages of your website is loading slowly, the site audit can immediately alarm you of the error and suggest the source of the problem and solution.

Improving your website SEO by the data and analysis provided by certain tools can help your site to improve, rank on SERPs, and gaining of organic traffic and you can stop making the common SEO mistake of not keeping an eye on your website. 

Read More: 11 Best Web Crawler Tools For SEO Professionals

Conclusion

Your website is like a child, and so you must keep up with its growth and development which could be through its looks (technical SEO), it interactions (On-page SEO), and the authority it gained in life (Off-page SEO). 

Maintaining these optimization techniques without losing track of updates and site audits helps you improve your website. Mistakes are a big part of life but in SEO, you have a better chance to swipe them and earn some revenue from them.

Evaluate your website’s working, analyze the data provided to you by diagnostics and site audits; and lastly, use proper tools to improve them for a better search engine and user experience 

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.