7 SEO Mistakes That Are Killing Your Rankings

Search engine optimisation has changed dramatically over the last decade or so. What worked before, such as keyword stuffing, mass backlinks, thin content and manipulative tactics, can now damage your visibility, reduce traffic and even trigger penalties by the Google search engine. 

Many websites struggle to rank, not because they lack potential, but because they continue to make avoidable SEO mistakes. If your rankings are dropping, stagnant or inconsistent, chances are one or more common SEO errors are holding your site back. In this article, we’ll be breaking down the most damaging SEO mistakes that can quietly destroy your rankings and explain how to fix them. 

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of enhancing a website so it appears higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) on platforms such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!. The higher a site ranks, the greater the chance that users will click through and visit it. Put simply, SEO helps drive free organic traffic to your website from search engines.

7 SEO mistakes that are killing your rankings

Now that you understand more about what SEO is, here are a few mistakes to avoid when it comes to implementing those tactics.

1. Ignoring search intent

One of the biggest SEO mistakes is targeting keywords without understanding why the users have searched for them in the first place. For instance, someone searching for “best laptops for students” wants a piece of comparison content. Someone searching for “buy MacBook Air” is ready to make the purchase, and someone searching for “how to clean a laptop keyboard” wants an informational guide. If your content doesn’t match the intent behind the query, then the search engines won’t rank that content highly. To fix that, before creating the content, analyse the current top-ranking results. Are they blog posts, product pages, videos or tools? Match the format and purpose users expect.  

2. Keyword stuffing

While this might have got you some good results in the past, it’s definitely a frowned-upon tactic to use now. Repeating the same word unnaturally throughout a page used to be common practice. Today, however, it signals low-quality content and warns search engines that the content could be spam. 

For example, “best SEO agency for SEO services offering SEO strategies with SEO experts” actually hurts credibility, readability and overall user trust. To avoid this, use keywords naturally. Include variations, related terms and semantic phrases throughout instead of forcing exact matches.

3. Thin content

Pages with little value, shallow explanations or copies of ideas will struggle to rank in this day and age. Search engines prioritise content that demonstrates depth, usefulness and originality. Thin content usually includes things like: 300-word articles with no real insights, auto-generated generic pages, duplicate service pages across cities and product pages with only manufacturer descriptions. If you want to fix this issue, then create comprehensive content that answers real questions better than your competitors.

4. Slow website speed

According to Pingom, 2 seconds is the limit a user will wait for your website to load completely. Anything over this time is bad news for your bounce rate. A slow-loading website will increase bounce rate, reduce user satisfaction and limit the amount of purchases someone can make online. 

It also looks questionable to users who are used to using competitor websites that perform better than yours. As such, they’ll give your competitors their custom over you. This is something you want to fix. 

Some of the most common causes for a slow-loading website include: large uncompressed images, too many scripts, poor hosting, no caching and bloated themes or plugins. But what about fixing the problem? Optimise images, use caching, upgrade hosting and remove any unnecessary code to help speed up your website.

5. Poor mobile experience

93% of internet users access the internet using a mobile phone. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that making sure the mobile experience for internet users is second to none. With mobile-first indexing, search engines will primarily evaluate your mobile site. If the website is difficult to navigate on mobile devices, then your rankings may suffer as a result. Some of the most common issues with mobile websites include:

• Tiny text
• Buttons too close together
• Broken layouts
• Intrusive popups
• Slow mobile speed

If you want to fix issues with your mobile website and therefore improve the overall mobile user experience, then you should use responsive design and regularly test usability on multiple mobile devices, for good measure. 

6. Missing title tags & meta descriptions

Title tags will help a search engine to understand the page’s topic. Your meta description influences click-through rates, which is why it’s important that you’re writing one and getting a few keywords in there, too, if possible. Common mistakes that people make with title tags and meta descriptions include: duplicating titles, missing titles, using generic titles, having overly long titles and writing misleading descriptions. If you want to do it properly, then you should write unique compelling metadata for every important website page, and don’t forget the blog post content, either. 

7. Poor internal linking

Internal links will help search engines to discover pages and understand the website structure as a whole. They also pass authority throughout your website. Without internal links, important pages will remain buried, crawling becomes inefficient, and users will struggle to navigate the website successfully or smoothly, for that matter. If you want to fix this problem, then link relevant pages together as naturally as possible by using descriptive anchor text. 

Kumo is a digital marketing agency with more than 20 years of industry experience. Our team includes SEO specialists, PPC experts, skilled content writers and talented web designers, all working together to help your business stand out from the competition. If you’d like to learn more about our marketing services, get in touch with our friendly and knowledgeable team today – we’re always happy to help.