21 SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid

Everyone wants to think positive about their digital marketing strategy. Yet even advanced SEO strategists can’t be perfect in all SEO tasks.

Finding SEO errors or performance destroyers can be the source of great joy, and a turnaround in your search engine optimization strategy. Rankings will rise, traffic will grow and revenue will climb. All good outcomes.

Assessing your SEO and marketing strategy is an important task. This is covered in a digital marketing SEO audit and obviously, not doing a review is big mistake number 1.

Every SEO pro makes mistakes. I’ve made them. The important thing is to learn, know what they are, have the determination and time to correct them, and be focused on your goal of being a market leader. It’s competitive, and a key weakness is not getting the expertise, funding, and putting in the effort in an intelligent strategic manner.

Begin with Knowledge

Look at it this way, SEO mistakes are the flip side of a thorough approach. With good research and good execution, they likely won’t happen.

For instance, not editing your content creates many errors and delivers a poor user experience. And poor linking confuses Google’s ranking index so it doesn’t get the signals it needs.

If SEO and digital marketing are going to be cornerstone assets for your business success, then it’s obvious that a deep thorough look at your marketing is going to help grow your confidence and effectiveness. Low confidence/certainty can degrade your business performance and stop you from committing to your marketing.

So let’s take a look at the big mistakes and even cover some of the minor issues that might be plaguing your SEO.

The Overview

Many mistakes in SEO result from not preparing well, not being competitive, and not wanting to gain market leadership bad enough. This lack of intensity is what allows poor preparation, missing pieces, errors and lagging performance to creep in.

Mistakes arise in poor research, not getting your strategy crystal clear in writing, and not investing enough to ensure you’re able to compete in the search engine battles.

A new survey by Ezoic (Adsense ad service company) polled a number of search engine optimization people and cited keywords, content and weak SEO as the common denominator in SEO errors. They felt that businesses weren’t doing enough keyword research to cull out alternative or longtail keyword possibilities.

These issues are sub issues however. The big picture is that you must have a professional attitude about SEO and appreciate its value. And when you want top rankings bad enough, you’ll do the foundational work in research, content development, analytics, and strategy to get to the top.

Then you’ll be on your way to success amidst tough competition. Others want those rankings too and they’ll persist.

Top 21 SEO Mistakes

not being professional, assertive and focused – it’s competitive out there, be the best
not conducting at very the least, an SEO audit for insight – knowledge is power and confidence
not having an SEO strategy – you need goals, tactics with the right KPIs and analytics reporting and know how you’re progressing
not hacking your content and keywords — small improvements are good and help the learning process
poor keyword selection – both head keywords and long tail phrases and related words need to be understood. You’ll need several keyword research tools and your own info if you have it to find the best keyword phrases.
content excellence – creating the best content experience for visitors possible and delivering added value in information, consumption experience, branding, and establishing your credibility and trust with visitors
content expertise – doing the research to become legitimately expert in the industry and topic — trust, authority, relevance is key.
internal linking – your pages still have some PageRank and keyword reputation to share between them so clever linking that magnifies these assets is important.
impatience – persistently work to build the strengths and assets to rank high on competitive keywords, stay stead y and don’t run into disappointment and negative emotions
poor SEO funding – ensure you’ve got funding to pay writers, designers, videographers, ppc advertising, sponsorships with key industry influencers and associations
poor content funding – sufficient graphic designer/programmer work to keep your visuals and interactive elements interesting and first class
not writing interesting material for the reader/customer – continuous editing is needed to get copy to its best, and this takes time and tireless effort
publishing too much weak or brief content – content has to be deep enough to contain elements that Google’s algorithm considers signals of quality
not blogging and creating more content – persistent blogging keeps you and your brand and company top of mind and Google appreciates fresh content
not creating and publishing news items – news and events grab attention and create relevance and build trust
not creating videos – YouTube is a powerful search engine and videos embedded in your content increases your content engagement
not creating whitepapers and business case studies – serious content helps your sales team with their lead generation and conversion challenges.
not upgrading your website for speed and core metrics requirements – The web is slow which is why Google is forcing publishers to optimize their server response and loads along with content that delivers a great user experience.
doing spam link building and guest blog posts – getting desperate and putting out posts on low quality sites doesn’t help your rankings and could ruin them
marketing your marketing – if it’s going to be effective, people have to find your content and experience it so push it on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and get placements on industry blogs so your content gets found
not hiring a legitimate SEO expert consultant – a spammer webmaster is not a search engine optimization consultant. The material above shows the need for serious, multitalented people who have a sophisticated knowledge of how to engineer content and keywords and how to get the web to appreciate your website and brand.
low quality analytics – high quality, sophisticated web traffic reports are expensive, but not having them means you don’t really know how you’re faring.

While not being top mistakes, there are a variety of other things you can do to really improve your rankings. I can’t let you know those secrets right now, however they are brought out in a digital marketing audit, one with very deep SEO insights. Theaudit is free if you become a client on contract.

Just for fun’s sake, let’s look at Semrush (SEO software) and their look at some micro-mistakes with SEO.

11 Common SEO Mistakes — Screenshot courtesy of SemRush SEO Software

The best way to deal with the worst SEO mistakes is don’t make them. A sincere, committed, strategic and assertive SEO strategy that is well funded, will create results where minor mistakes don’t matter.

Of course, this depends on your creative assets and people. Excellent content is the medium of rankings, and you’ll discover that it generates inbound links and social shares, boosts trust and credibility, and more.

What this post tells you that it isn’t just Google’s 200+ ranking factors you need to pay attention to. Those are just signals the algorithm references.

Great SEO requires a serious, clever and versatile search engine optimization consultant and content expert.
Take a closer look at search engine optimization services now.