Common SEO Misses (Avoid These)

Read time: 4 minutes

Before we start, here's some other newsletters we're loving at the moment:

AI Tool Report - Learn AI in 5 Minutes a Day. We'll teach you how to save time and earn more with AI. Join 170,000+ free daily readers for AI tools, tips, and news.

The Boonly - Brighten your inbox with inspirational insights that make self-growth enjoyable, not stressful.

The Average Joe - The "IKEA instructions for investing" to help you become a better investor. Market trends & insights that are simple, concise, and impactful.

Everyone makes the same mistakes.

Spend too much on Amazon, forget to wear trousers on a Zoom call - we all do it!

You mean well, but you rush around last minute, and next thing you know you’re frantically turning the video off.

Websites and SEO are no different.

I’ve audited hundreds of websites, and the vast majority make the same common errors.

There’s always new ways to break things, of course; but most of the time, I find the same mistakes repeated again and again.

That’s good news!

Because if most sites have the same problem, then we should generally be able to use the same solutions.

Here’s my list of common SEO mistakes - and how to fix them!

Junk, just hanging around

Old product pages. Promotional offers from years ago. Defunct blogs and ancient landing pages. If you’ve got old webpages hanging around the edges of your site, then you’ve got a problem.

All of those old pages, if they’re still indexed, are still being “counted” by Google. And if they’re out-of-date, don’t work well, and generally perform poorly, well, Google notices that also. Your site might be getting pulled down by the weight of all those ancient pages, without you even noticing.

Solving this one’s easy, fortunately. Clean it up!

Cull ruthlessly. Non-index those old pages, along with anything that’s out-of-date or doesn’t fit. There’s no need to save that old sales page!

It’s not a difficult fix, but it does require a little bit of technical know-how. If you’re unsure where to begin, reach out - we can get you started.

Old info

Still running a blogpost talking about the “upcoming 2020 election”? Not good. Chances are, you’ll catch the most obvious problems with your outdated data when you solve the junk pages above. But it’s worth checking your other pages too, just to make sure.

Updating old info can also give you a chance to update the publish date, something we discussed last week. Turn one mistake into two wins!

A bit threadbare

You might hear someone talking about evergreen content. It’s true, a well-written and authoritative piece of content can remain useful and continue to draw traffic for years. But unfortunately, a lot of content gets old after a while.

That “Top 10 Movie Fashion Styles of 2022” article is already short on Barbiecore - and that previous sentence will look crazy to anyone in a few years.

So don’t forget to spruce up old content. Turn your “Top Ten Ways to X” into “Top 15;” add steps to the “Ultimate Guide to Whatever.”

Better yet, reach out to experts and add new quotes from current industry leads. Boom! Increased value for the article, increased relevance, and even a sneaky backlink opportunity for the refreshed article.

Structure, you have none

Yoda reversed his sentence structure to make a point, and it defined his character.

On the other hand, your 5,000-word blog post with no table of concepts and only 3 H2’s in the entire article has no point

Define your article structure. Use clear tags and meta descriptions to inform SERP snippets, and use a Table of Contents (ToC) and jumplinks to make internal navigation clear

Beyond that, follow the basics of blog writing: use short paragraphs, vary sentence length, emphasise readability, use headings to guide the reader in a logical way

Structure also applies to the website itself. Do you have landing pages for products and offers? How does your website flow? Is there a logical progression for any site visitors

That leads us nicely to one more common mistake -

Poor user experience

It’s amazing how many places have good offers, but terrible UX/UI. Forms that don’t work, dead links, poor layout - all of these things can KILL potential traffic

Admittedly, fixing your site’s UX might take a bit more work than updating info on a blog post. But it can play a huge role in boosting traffic and increasing conversions

Why? Because your tendency as a site owner is to think like, well, a site owner

Instead..

Think like a visitor

What do your visitors need?

What problems do they have?

What are they looking for?

The answer (hopefully) is “your product” - but you can’t just build a site around your product and present it as such. Build a site around the answers to those questions, with your product as the key.

Do that, and UX/UI will be easier to build, site structure will be clearer, and all of these common SEO mistakes will that much easier to avoid.

If you’re not sure about how deep your content is or how many broken links are hanging about, give me a shout. We can jump on an SEO Video Audit and figure out where to start fixing mistakes.

Ready to get involved?

→ Grab an Actionable SEO Video Audit: The lowest cost-point way to get our expert insight and actionable tips on how to get more organic traffic to your website.

→ The SEO Ready Quiz: not sure if you’re ready for an SEO campaign? find out now, in under 3 minutes, for free.

→ Book a 15-min discovery call: Decided you’re ready to commit to an SEO campaign? Then let’s talk.