By enhancing the visibility of individual pages or the entire website in the SERPs (search engine results page), SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practise of boosting organic or free traffic to a website. You must use SEO to elevate your rank in order to obtain top placement for your desired keywords.
Even though there are a tonne of internet resources available on how to enhance your SEO techniques or the best ways to apply SEO off-page and on-page strategies, the most common SEO blunders shouldn’t be disregarded. Here are some of the common SEO errors even experts make, along with suggestions for how to avoid them.
Starting today, let’s examine some of the most typical SEO errors, or possibly SEO issues, and how to resolve them.
Common SEO Errors
1. Slow site performance
When users want to access material on your page, a slow site speed may put them off. You will inevitably lose hard-earned SEO visitors due to a poor website speed. If the page loads slowly, all of your time and effort spent trying to increase traffic from SERPs is essentially in vain.
Viewing the following performance measures will allow you to gauge your page speed:
Page Load Time This measures how long it takes for your page to fully load and render after the browser delivers the request to the server. The following elements can be used to gauge page load time:
2.First Happy Painting
One of the metrics recorded in a Google Chrome Lighthouse report’s performance section is FCP. It counts the number of seconds that pass after a user navigates to your page until your browser renders the first piece of DOM (Document Object Model) content.
Here is an illustration of a time series from the FCP.
It’s time to interact
The Time to Interactive (TTI) metric measures the speed at which a website loads. TTI, then, is a measurement of how long it takes a page to become fully interactive. On the basis of information from the HTTP archive, the TTI score is compiled.
Here is a simplified translation of the original text:
Utilise Google PageSpeed Insights to assess how quickly your website loads and identify any potential bottlenecks. There could be a variety of causes for lengthy loading times, including:
Image Size and Format: To help reduce the bandwidth consumed by photographs, set the image size to 72dpi using photo editing software and image formats like JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP.
Redirects: While certain redirects cannot be avoided, correcting them will speed up serving. Complete a site audit to identify all internal URLs that are the source of the redirection and fix them.
JavaScript and CSS: To reduce size and speed up loading, compress JavaScript and CSS code by giving variables shorter names.
2. Bad Reviews on Google
One may anticipate both favourable and bad feedback when it comes to a product or service. The total amount of reviews, however, boosts your company’s social proof and is one of the ranking considerations for localised search. While having just good reviews makes your website appear more credible, they also give it a very dubious appearance. Several customers expressing discontent with your website at once may potentially discourage visitors.
Potential Repair
You can use unfavourable evaluations to strengthen your bonds with your clients, better understand your audience, and attract new clients. Your website will get more credibility if you post on social media about the types of problems encountered and the solutions implemented.
Additionally, you can encourage individuals to publish evaluations about your services on social media platforms and industry-specific review sites, and you can honestly respond to their inquiries to come across as sincere.
An error in the Google My Business Verification Code
It’s rather typical to experience problems with the verification PIN you receive for your Google My Business account.
Potential Repair
Make your “private” profile “public” and try again. After you update your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) information, the issue can occur. Make sure your contact information is consistent with your listing to prevent this.
Webmasters frequently commit the following SEO error by failing to target location-specific pages for their content.
4. Lack of Location-Specific Pages
The number of searches using “near me” and location-specific keywords has increased, particularly among mobile users, according to a Google Report. For instance, smartphone searches for “..near me” increased by 900 percent between 2013 and 2017. Additionally, 76% of consumers who use their mobile device to search for something nearby visit the relevant business in a day or less, and 28% of those searches end in a purchase.
Potential Repair
Your ranking in the local search results ought to be lot more approachable if people can recognise your business as having a local presence. Having properly optimised, location-specific, unique pages will help you enhance your rating in local SERPs and potentially rectify this SEO blunder. When you have a single site, clear location signals are inevitable.
Having duplicate content on your site is the next SEO error.
5.Duplicate content
Duplicate content is defined as material that is either the same as or comparable to another piece of content on your website. Even while duplicate material is not punished by Google, it is quite likely to have an impact on how websites rank. Because search engines rarely display identical versions of two pieces of material in the SERPs, they opt for the one that the readers find more pertinent.
Potential Repair
Given that content is king for websites, having original content that enables audiences to learn all there is to know about your goods or services will help you establish yourself as a reliable player in the industry. To correct this SEO error, make sure that no material on your website has already been published elsewhere before doing so. For instance, you can look for copies of your page on the internet using tools like Copyscape and get rid of the duplicate content.
The failure to promptly fix broken pictures is the following SEO error.
6.Missing alternative texts and shattered images
- Missing alternative texts and shattered images
Alt tags, also known as alternative tags, are HTML characteristics of photographs that aid in content description. Alt tags need to be fixed in terms of on-page SEO issues. There are times when the image component of your website renders poorly because the filename, file location, or extension was incorrect. In these situations, the image’s alt tag will indicate its contents and how it will be used on the page. Additionally, it strengthens the target keyword by facilitating crawlers’ understanding of the content on the page. Common mistakes include missing or broken alt tags.
Broken Picture
Fig. A damaged picture with an alt tag
Potential Repair
Alt tags are quite easy to use. Find the image component in your HTML code and give it an alt tag. Here is an illustration of one such image source:
img src=”image.jpg” image alt=”description” title=”image tooltip”>
If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily add them to your photographs.
Next, let’s examine yet another typical content-related SEO error: having out-of-date or unrelated information on the website.
7.Out-of-date Information and Content on the Site
Your website’s outdated material may reduce its authority. For a given query, there are many search results on the SERP, but not all of them are pertinent to the readers. Your website will be filtered out by the search engine if it determines that your content is no longer relevant or up to date. In a way, indexing and crawling sites that are no longer relevant will be a waste of your site’s crawl quota. Your website’s traffic may even suffer as a result because such pages may see a sharp increase in bounce rates.
Potential Repair
Make sure the material you upload contains relevant and high-quality information to address this SEO error. Always provide the most relevant, well-optimized material possible to search engines.
Not having a mobile-friendly website is the second most glaring SEO error.
8.Not Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Many users increasingly prefer using mobile devices over PCs because we are living in a mobile-first environment. As more than half of Google’s search results now come from mobile devices having mobile-friendly websites has many benefits. However if your page is not mobile-friendly, you will probably lose viewers. If you haven’t used this function your website is also not using the most cutting-edge design techniques.
According to a report by Perficient Digital between 2016 and 2018 more people visited websites via mobile devices than via desktop:
Potential Repair
You can rank higher on SERPs by having a site that is mobile-friendly. The most sophisticated form of design is unquestionably one that is mobile-optimized. The website will entirely reformat itself for various devices because it is mobile optimised. When you optimise your website for mobile, the speed and organisational structure of the site are also improved.
To determine whether your page is mobile-friendly or not, use the Mobile-Friendly Test tool. If you discover that your website is not mobile-friendly, make sure that your site loads quickly activate Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and reformat your pop-up advertisements for mobile.
Having contact forms that don’t convert is the following SEO error that we ignore.
9.Not Converting Contact Form
Formisimo claims that just 49% of the 1.5 million visitors who see a form complete it. Additionally, only 16 percent of those watchers finish it. There are a number of reasons why contact forms do not result in conversions, among them:
much too many form fields
Dropdown menus with either too few or too many options
Possible Repair
Make your contact form user-friendly and interesting to maximise its effectiveness. Provide fewer form fields to increase conversions as a remedy for this SEO error.
Limit the number of necessary fields on your contact form to five.
Think about the form alignment.
Use a distinctive, eye-catching CTA.
Run A/B tests on your form to compare different design elements, such as colour, position, size, required fields, etc.
Make sure your form is mobile-optimized and enable auto-fill with the Google autocomplete plugin.
Use CAPTCHA sparingly
Having faulty landing pages is the next most evident SEO error.
10.Damaged Links
Users get the wrong idea when they visit your site via a search engine and get a 404 error. Your crawl budget, or how many times Google bots will crawl your page in a particular period of time, will even be depleted by the broken links on your website. Multiple broken links can cause search engine crawlers to go on to other websites, leaving some of your crucial pages unindexed and uncrawled. It also has a detrimental effect on the domain authority of your page.
Potential Repair
The Google Search Console’s crawl stats function allows you to determine which pages on your site are returning 404 errors.
Site Explorer > yourdomain.com > Pages > Best by Links > Add an HTTP response filter for “404 not found”
11.Low ratio of text to HTML
As it relates more to technical SEO, this is yet another SEO error that won’t receive much attention. Although the content on your website appears to be text, the HTML code—which includes headings, links, JavaScript, graphics, and other elements—is what truly powers it. By comparing what the search engine finds on the same website, text to HTML calculates the ratio of text content to HTML code.
Woorank claims that a healthy text to HTML ratio is between 25 and 70 percent. Given that Google also utilises this measure to evaluate the relevance of a web page, a low text to HTML ratio points to serious issues with your website’s on-page technical SEO.
Low ratios may signify:
websites that load slowly because of too much code
Search engine bots are alerted by hidden text.
Use of Flash, inline style, and JavaScript excessively Potential Fix
An HTML-heavy website can severely effect loading speeds and user experience, hence a low text to HTML ratio is a crucial indicator to enhance page load times. To correct this SEO error, move inline scripts to separate files, eliminate extra code, and add pertinent on-page language where applicable. To keep the size of your webpage as small as possible, make sure to utilise plain text on the page.
Not verifying whether or not Google is indexing your site is one of the most common SEO mistakes.
12.Not Indexed Pages
Your webpages will be indexed when they are included to the list of Google searchable pages. Not crawled by Google’s bots content cannot be ranked. Your pages may not be indexed for the following legitimate reasons for example:
mistakes of 404
Where your pages contain meta tags with the following source code: META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> refuses to be indexed
You don’t have a current sitemap.
redundant information
inadequate standing or power
potential remedy
Google Search Console is the finest resource for fixing Google indexing problems. You may check whether a URL is indexed when you submit a URL inspection for a webpage.
You can practise how search engine bots crawl your website using the Deepcrawl tool a thorough website crawler. Get a thorough report of any URL by doing extensive research without having an impact on the performance of the website.
in the robots.txt file, allowing pages. When you’re finished give Google’s bots some time to re-crawl your pages.
Crawl your website using Screaming Frog with the user-agent configured to “Googlebot,” “Bingbot,” “Slurp,” “DuckDuckBot,” “Baiduspider,” or “YandexBot.” Make sure that any page that is not currently in the index may be indexed by looking at the “Indexability” field.
Make your XML sitemaps more effective by removing any unnecessary or broken sites from them.
