There are few tens of SEO mistakes that put the businesses in trouble and every one business of the four takes hit on their SEO and they get into big trouble. Every now and then all businesses suffer SEO hits for the one reason of common mistakes that happen knowingly or unknowingly by the various kinds of professionals who are part of the SEO implementation or related to the SEO implementations. SEO mistakes can be categorized as follows: SEO mistakes can happen from any of the following professional who play a key role in the SEO success and many times the problems lie with the marketing professionals and technical teams, apart from them the business owners to play a role by taking a wrong step or advising the wrong strategies, here I will be discussing all kinds of SEO problems that happen with each of these professionals,

1. Mistakes that SEO professional make

2. 

Wrong keywords targeting Keywords play a crucial role in SEO, a business using the wrong keywords or not able to build an equivalent content is a complete failure. If a URL/landing page cannot achieve the highest CTR for any keyword on the search results it can be considered to be as wrong targeting. Wrong content strategy Content is the one that sells the product and when there is no appropriate content strategy for the business it’s not just an SEO failure, but the whole marketing would fail for the business. A business cannot succeed with wrong selling strategies. For E.G for a business/website or blog getting subscribers is the main objective and if the content cannot drive it, it’s a wrong strategy. Content duplication Many SEO professionals don’t know the way to deal with the duplicate content, the bad side of it is they cannot realize or figure out when the duplication is happening on the system and this is the biggest loss and this one problem doesn’t let the SEO to progress. Cannibalization Cannibalization is one of the biggest problems when the competition is very high on the search results, cannibalization splits the CTR between two results of the same website and if the average of the two is lesser than that of your competitor you will losing rankings for both of your landing pages despite having a unique content, great content, and having everything else in place. Many SEO professionals don’t understand cannibalization or they misinterpret the way it works and do wrong implementations around it. E.G When both the webpages have the same title and descriptions and if they both are ranking for the same keyword then its a cannibalization. When it’s not cannibalization? When your article 1 is optimized for keywords lets say “Common SEO mistakes” and has the title and description optimized for it, whereas another article which is optimized for “best SEO practices”, and one of the section is about the common SEO mistakes, whereas title and description is optimized for “best SEO practices”, in this case, its not a cannibalization, as the other article “best SEO practices” may not have any kind of CTR over the first article and hence there is a clear difference. Wrong schema implementation Many SEO professional does a blunder here and this would never let them grow organically. Search engines suggest to server right information about the webpage or product to the users and any misleading information to the user on search results through schema may impact the CTR and may impact the user experience on the webpage and this would drop the rankings of the keywords. Make sure it’s always the same as what you show the user on the search results page and on the web page of your website. Building Template content Building template content for websites was a very old practice, during the era when search engines were light on this implementation. In recent times search engines have tweaked their algorithms in order to improve the user experience, to serve the best and customized information rather than a template and hence moving away from this is something which SEO professionals have to do right away, but unfortunately many rely on this and are still implementing the template content. Building only backlinks This is another misconception that many SEO professionals have, they believe backlinks help SEO or organic performance of the website, it does helps only when you have lots and lots of content on your website. Not having content and just backlinks used to drive the traffic for the selected set of keywords or webpages up to 2013 and it’s no more the same now. Your backlinks cannot help your website until you have lots of content or frequently publishing the content on your website.

More importance should be given to developing content and optimizing it.

Blind implementation A blind implementation in SEO is referred to as an implementation which you do just by reading some random content put on some random websites. It’s crucial to understand your websites, its current status, the business goals and more to implement something on the SEO front. A wrong implementation is dangerous and hence avoid blindly implementing something that’s not fair for your business. Disallowing webpages through Robots.txt Many do mistakes here while defining the robots.txt commands, sometimes a mistake, sometimes a poor validation, sometimes not knowing how to be work on it, etc. You may have to review this common SEO mistake every now and then as this would affect your search rankings significantly.

Disallow:/ * Instructs search engines to stop crawling your complete website

Blocking the web pages for search engines Blocking of web pages for search engines is not an intentional activity by SEO professionals, this is a tech-related problem, especially in the staging sites when they had to block the site for search engines and work, as they would push the same on to the live site. Whenever your team pushes some changes on the live site make sure that you review all of these once. HTML and XML sitemap mess ups If you are the only struggling to understand the differences between XML and HTML sitemap you may probably end up messing up the things here, some of the common mistakes are professionals either implement HTML sitemap or only XML sitemap. Few other SEO professionals don’t under the priorities, frequency of content update and the date the content was last updated on the website/webpage and they just mention some random details, which is not the right way of implementing it. The XML sitemaps are of various kinds such as image sitemap, video sitemap, News content sitemap, mobile sitemap and more, implementing the right sitemap following those specific set of guidelines is crucial and anything wrong around this may not help your SEO results progress. Mess up with the tracking pixels Tracking pixels doesn’t affect your SEO, but then they can mislead you and any implementation planned based on the wrong data may create a problem or would become a barrier for your SEO success. Wrong HTTP status code implementation SEO professionals have to understand what it means when the HTTP header status is 301, 302, 500, 200, 410, 404 etc They have to understand when they are used and the kind of impact they create Anything wrong around this creates disturbances on the system and the effects of the same may be small or big and you have to figure it out based on the kind of mistake was done.

Reviewing your valid webpages status code once in a while would keep your SEO safe.

Mess Up with default Titles & Descriptions Do you think the same kind of title and description work for all kinds of products catering to different categories? Why may or may not and correcting them accordingly in terms of sentence formation, grammar, based on category or industry, their meaning, etc is crucial. An error here directly impacts your CTR. These are not the only SEO mistakes you should be avoided, as there are so many other mistakes that happen with various other teams which are directly involved at various levels in building the final product. Many items are just listed, which you can consider as a checklist and validate against the list to make sure everything is in place.

2. Mistakes that technical guys make

1. Making dynamic web pages crawlable and indexable
2. Blocking websites for search engines through no-index, robots, etc
3. Implementing canonical tags wrongly
4. Content duplication
5. Poor server-side scripting/coding
6. Not implementing the load balancers
7. Mistakes with the configuration files
8. Multiple versions of the website (HTTP, Https, non-www, with www and more)
9. Hosting websites on poor performance serves
10. Uncleaned databases
11. Heavy querying
12. Wrong status codes
13. Infinite redirection loops or multiple redirections
14. Too many redirections on the system
15. Unoptimized servers
16. No CDN setup

3.Mistakes that UI/UX guys make

1. Wrong prioritizing the content elements
2. Restrictions on the content presentation
3. Improper presentation of amazing content
4. Not understanding the business

4. Mistakes that front end guys make

1. Too many external CSS and JS files
2. Non-crawlable content
3. No provision for Image alts
4. Making outgoing links as crawlable
5. Heavy scripting/Poor code practices
6. Read more as non-crawlable
7. Too many API calls
8. Heavy/Unwanted Sprites Images
9. Not using sprites
10. Images scaling in HTML
11. Non-mobile compatible

5. Mistakes that content teams make

1. Namesake writing, just to make some random piece of content
2. Not addressing the pain points
3. Out of topic
4. Poor content structuring
5. Poor understanding of target audiences
6. Not knowing the objectives of the content

6. Mistakes that business owners make

1. Hiring the wrong profile to build the SEO strategies
2. Poor understanding about the technology, content and other support need for SEO implementation
3. Not able to gauge the SEO skills and make them owners of the SEO projects
4. Not providing the appropriate details about the business and its goals
5. No coordination in activities around the marketing

Manjunath Chowdary

Digital Marketing Consultant