Common mistakes that are hurting your business's SEO rank

In order to review the most commonly made SEO mistakes on new business websites, it is important to understand all factors that influence the positioning of our pages.

It would be nice if Google just emailed you with the problems you need to fix, but they are not that kind, so you need to check everything yourself or using external tools.

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Duplicated content

A duplicate content penalty occurs when many pages have the same content, which Google does not like. Duplicate content can arise for a variety of reasons that we do not always take into account.

It is used, for example, if a website has more than one url, such as www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com (without www). A preferred domain must be selected in Google Webmaster Tools in this case.

Another possible reason is tag abuse. Tags are intended to group content by topic; the danger arises when multiple tags are applied to one piece of content, creating multiple pages with the same content.

Responsive design

If you create a mobile site in addition to your main website, you’ll have an additional url, like m.yoursite.com. Unfortunately, this can also lead to duplicate content.

As an alternative, you could create different content for your web version, but this will take additional time and effort.

Thus, the recommendation is to create a single site with a responsive design that adapts to any device. Having a site with these characteristics will also allow you to improve the user experience and make your website available when and where your visitors need it. Responsive sites are very well received by Google for a reason.

Not using keywords

Keyword research is not only a must-do SEO practice, but is also an effective way to understand our audience. We cannot simply write about topics that interest us, we need to make content about topics that people are interested in.

There are tools that can help you with a keyword study. They will give you an accurate idea of what your audience is searching for on the Internet and help you identify topics for your content.

It doesn’t mean you should repeat the keyword thousands of times throughout the article, as just a few times is enough. Also, it doesn’t mean you can’t use synonyms (you should).

Abusing your keywords

Here is the other side of the coin. People who decide to use a very successful keyword in all their content make a big mistake. This only confuses search engines, since they cannot determine which page is relevant for what keyword, and end up defining that none is. This is referred to as keyword cannibalisation.

It is recommended to fix this by focusing every article on a single keyword. You can, of course, include keywords from previous articles in order to create internal links.

It is imperative to identify the broken links within our website and edit them so that they link to the correct pages, you can find some tools online to help with this.

In addition to improving the user experience (we’ve all been frustrated by an error page), this will also increase the number of page views and the amount of time spent on your site.

Linking to your site from other pages is good for SEO, but those pages must be high quality. If you are linked to pages with a dubious reputation (or if you have none) the effect will be the opposite and will negatively affect your ranking.

That is why we recommend you make a good link-building strategy and stay away from fraudulent tactics like buying links. A few examples of link building that you can implement are guest blogging (write on another blog as a guest), participating in forums, and linking on social media sites.

Content that provides little value

A common mistake is to leave out or reduce valuable content on your website. You might wonder why is it a mistake if sometimes less is more and navigation can be more comfortable?

It’s true, but for Google it’s different, and here what we want is the search engine to love us in order to place us on the first page.

Google has a robot that basically finds valuable content on the web, so if a user searches for something related to your business in London and the search engine detects that your site does not offer enough content, it will direct the user to another page and put you at the bottom of search results. Don’t avoid content that provides value on your page.

With this information, I hope that you will be able to make an accurate evaluation of your SEO practices. If it isn’t, don’t worry! Many people across the globe make these mistakes, but now you know how to avoid and fix them.

With this method, you will be one step ahead of your competitors, and much closer to the desired first place in search engine results.