9 Most Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid In 2022

Intro

A well-executed SEO strategy can enhance search traffic, but simple mistakes can drop a site's rankings.

Google and Bing aim to give users with high-quality, accurate, and relevant results.

Any SEO campaign should start with a user-friendly, honest website. Some SEO mistakes are worse than others for search traffic.

The following are some frequent SEO mistakes to avoid:

1. Slow Site Speed

Slow site speed can stop visitors from accessing content on your page. Slow site speed will inevitably cost you valuable SEO traffic.

Investing time and effort to get traffic from SERPs is essentially pointless if the page takes too long to load.

Elements affecting site load time.

• First Contentful Paint

Google Chrome Lighthouse's performance section tracks FCP. It measures the time (in seconds) your browser takes to render the first piece of DOM content once a visitor visits your website.

• Time to Interactive

TTI measures page load speed. TTI measures when a page becomes fully interactive. TTI uses HTTP archive data.

• Time to First Byte (TTFB)

The interval of time between sending a request to a server and having the first byte of data delivered to the browser.

To fix your site load time, run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate its performance and learn more about how quickly your site loads and possible ways to increase your website speed.

2. Not using Google Search Console data

Numerous SEO tasks are performed with Google's free Search Console service. However, starting keyword research or page optimization without first reviewing the information in Search Console's performance report is a common SEO mistake.

Search Console provides data on traffic, popular pages, and how visitors are finding your website through Google search results, just like Google Analytics does.

But a typical error is starting your site's optimization too seriously and optimising for keyword density without first determining the phrases you're already performing well on!

You may find out which keywords are driving the most clicks, impressions, and the greatest click-through rates for your website/pages using Search Console (CTR).

Check to see whether making changes to your website's content, title tags, or keyword density will potentially result in you losing clicks or CTR for terms you may not have known were crucial before making the changes.

3. Insufficient multimedia content

The king is content. The majority of people are aware of this, yet a typical SEO misconception is that content just refers to text.

The search quality evaluator standards provided by Google provide additional guidance on optimal practices. In addition to being of the highest caliber, content should emphasise meeting the needs of those who frequent the sites.

It also explains how "page-quality" is not simply related to content but also to how well-executed the aim of a page is when high-quality content is linked to it. Website audit process helps you to examin your website and improve the page quality of your pages.

This suggests that there are other types of content that are just as valuable. Many organisations have discovered that users can gain from a variety of site features, including tables, menus, forms, videos, photographs, graphics, etc. in the modern world of web marketing.

When developing content, consider your audience's demands rather than just the text (which, of course, is still valuable for content and SEO keywords!).

4. Improper navigation & orphaned pages

Search engines will utilise your site's navigation and structure to better understand it.

They'll also use site hierarchy to determine which pages are most crucial and which aren't, which may occasionally have an impact on how they appear in search results.

Avoiding navigation on your website that is unclear, broken, or even missing is a common SEO mistake

Ensure that the navigation to your most important pages is simple or that they are listed in the navigation bar and your website passes the Google mobile friendly test.

Your website should have access to all of your pages, including the less significant ones. An "orphan page" is one that has no links pointing at it whatsoever.

It's just not possible to add a link to every page on many websites, especially major eCommerce sites. Most of the time, employing a sitemap to prevent orphaned pages or pages that are not indexed is totally acceptable.

5. Bad robots.txt settings

The majority of webmasters and marketers are aware of how effective the robots.txt file is for controlling search engine crawler bots.

But setting it up incorrectly and running the risk of indexing issues is one of the most typical SEO mistakes.

However, you shouldn't use robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing your website. In reality, Googlebot has recently used indexing directives in robots.txt files as suggestions.

The rationale for this is because Google can still access such pages through other links because they won't represent the preferred indexing status.

Use of "noindex" or "nofollow" HTML tags within the source code of each page is a preferable method.

However, if you just use robots.txt for indexing, you can find that your coverage and index status don't represent your preferences without adequate on-page robots directives. This isn't necessary a huge SEO mistake to avoid.

6. Not updating old content

With the Google freshness algorithm update from 2011, it was possible for specific themes with older or dated content to perform worse in SEO.

In an effort to maintain organic traffic, one of the worst SEO mistakes that many websites and online businesses do is to constantly produce new content.

However, as outdated articles, manuals, pages, and blog posts accumulate, they may start to disappear farther into the site's hierarchy or their content may become no longer useful.

The ideal strategy is to identify outdated articles or pages on your website that are declining in organic traffic and keyword rankings year over year (YOY) and determine whether they may use an edit or rewrite. Republishing with fresh content might also aid in improving your article's SEO.

7. Not submitting a sitemap

One thing is to have a sitemap, but another is to make sure that Google can find it and crawl it.

The best thing to do is to add your sitemap to Search Console. Google encourages businesses and webmasters to do this so that it's easier to find important pages, re-crawl them regularly, and so that Googlebot doesn't waste its time crawling duplicate or unimportant links.

Sitemaps are also important because they let search engines know which pages are important to your business and ask that they be indexed.

This is one of the most common SEO mistakes to avoid, since sites often find that pages they want to be indexed aren't being indexed, even though Google knows about them. This won't happen if you have a sitemap.

8. Avoiding 404 errors or broken links

Although many people are aware that 404 errors are harmful, few webmasters actually take the time to update any broken links on their website and/or redirect any 404s.

Even for low-ranking, low-value pages, this could seem like it is not worth the bother, but if you allow 404s just hang around, eventually you could be losing rankings. Additionally, an excessive number of 404s could waste time for search engine robots like Googlebot and reduce your crawl budget.

When search engines perceive your site as being of low quality, 404s might not only cause the original pages to lose the ranking authority connected with them but also result in decreased ranks for the entire domain.

9. Negative Link Building

Unnatural link building techniques can quickly result in a manual action penalty for your website.

Although it used to be, this error in SEO is no longer among the most frequent ones. In order to build a growing number of backlinks, SEO marketers discovered that they could buy links, create private blog networks, link between their own websites, and even post guest blogs on other websites.

In actuality, Google disapproves of any link building "scheme" and considers it to be unethical. Instead, websites are encouraged to provide high-quality, authoritative, and user-friendly material that will naturally attract links.

To check your website backlink profile, you can make use of a powerful backlink checker.

You need to avoid practises like:

• Paying other sites to connect to yours
• Creating site-specific content and requesting backlinks
• Link-buying
• Getting links from unrelated sites
• Linking separate blogs or webpages to your main site
• Overlinking a page (even for internal links on your domain)

Conclusion

Focus on high-quality content and user engagement for SEO. Some SEO faults are human errors, but a frequent site audit will assure your site's health.

Advanced Search Engine Optimization Course teaches SEO best practises and how to get your site to the top of SERPs. Digital Marketing Specialist Course teaches full-stack SEO.

This course covers SEO, social media, PPC, conversion optimization, digital analytics, content, mobile, and email