Common SEO mistakes should be avoided at all costs.

Some people are making these mistakes without even knowing it. Some aren’t even practicing SEO and still making these mistakes.

These common SEO mistakes below can harm your ranking on Google and other search engines.

And it’s so easy to make these mistakes.

You have to be vigilant, and you have to recognize mistakes before they happen. The purpose of this blog is to teach you how to do just that.

1 – Site Speed Issues are Common SEO Mistakes

This is probably one of the biggest common SEO mistakes – site speed!

Your website needs to load quickly. It needs to be fast. There is no room for slow-loading websites anymore. So it’s either going to be quick and visited or slow and a ghost town.

When I started running websites, site speed was slow because everyone was using dial-up internet to access websites.

Many of you don’t know the horrors dial-up internet brought us, old-school webmasters.

Nonetheless, your website needs to be fast. So optimize it as much as you can. Make sure images are small and optimized. Add your site to Cloudflare if you need to improve its performance. If you’re using a shared hosting service and your site is slow, it might be time to update to a VPS or even ditch the hosting service for a better one.

Your website has to load fast, or it will fail at SEO.

2 – Broken Images and Links are Common SEO Mistakes

If it’s broken, it’s not working.

Broken images and links are common SEO mistakes that go unnoticed for years.

Sometimes stuff happens. You change directories or CDNs. A website closes down or changes its link structure. Stuff happens. Things break. And they often go unnoticed.

But the issue here is that these common SEO mistakes usually have negative impacts when we don’t notice them.

You must audit your website routinely and look for broken links and images. It’s a good idea to add your site to Google Search Console or your favorite SEO service that can check for broken links and images. Try to get these things fixed as soon as you can. Not doing so only hurts your website even more.

A broken website is like a broken house. No one wants it.

3 – Not Updating Your Older Content

If you are a blogger or your website has many content pages, you need to remember that one day that content may need to be updated.

Keep track of the content you create that will likely become outdated.

You’ll know what you need to update when that time rolls around.

The best way to update outdated content is to remove what has changed and add what new updates have occurred. You could also put a strike-through of the old content and highlight the new content as long as it’s not hard on the eyes. Finally, name the title with the year showing it has been updated, such as using something like “(Updated for 2023)” or something like that.

While it’s best to create new content as often as possible, you must keep older content as updated as possible.

4 – Not Adding Content Consistently

Whether you have a blog or a website, you should always have a strategy for adding new content to the platform.

A blog is best for this. Even if you already have a website, you should add a blog to keep the content flowing.

But it needs to be the best content you can make.

It also needs to be consistently created so that search engine robots, algorithms, and PEOPLE know when to revisit your website to see the new content.

Adding new content consistently will help you get more eyes on your website or blog.

5 – Ignoring Mobile

One of the worst common SEO mistakes you can make is ignoring mobile users.

I like to say this story: You could create a blog about desktop computers and why they’re the best, and 90% of your visitors will be on mobile devices.

It’s a mobile age, my friend. Everyone is using their smartphone. You. Me. Everyone. And some of us are only using a smartphone. Not me, but I know many people who do. My girlfriend is one of them. She never had a computer until I moved in.

You should ensure that your website is optimized for mobile users first. I even saw that Wikipedia is changing its core look to better optimize for mobile users and their devices.

Sometimes a responsive design isn’t enough. You might have to put more into optimizing for mobile users.

6 – Common SEO Mistakes include Bad Anchor Text

Using bad anchor text is one of those common SEO mistakes that most people don’t even realize is a genuine mistake.

Anchor text is the text you turn into a hyperlink on your website. The mistake that is made often is what words you choose to turn into the look. Also, people use “click here” or “this page” as their anchor text.

That’s the wrong way of doing things.

Google wants you to define what the link is going to be about. So take a look at the links in this article. I’ve created links out of words that explain what you’ll see next.

Good anchor text will help you earn the trust of search engines and visitors.

Avoid these six common SEO mistakes for the best results. The mistakes listed above are so easy to make but also harm your SEO. I have even made these mistakes before. And when I took action to fix them, I noticed that things were doing better on the SEO front. If you enjoyed this article and want to see more, please follow me on Twitter.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers who follow this blog. Shawn also offers various services for extra help in content creation and blogging.