The need to run a comprehensive and thorough SEO campaign is becoming essential for ranking. Today, if you are not optimizing your site, and keeping up with the current trends, then you are losing against your competitors who are. When we talk about SEO, it’s important for you simply think of it as the combination of the best practices recognized by search engines.

Mostly, people tend to ruin the raking of their sites by not following SEO best practices, and the sad thing is that they do this accidentally. So, this post shall highlight some of the SEO mistakes that people make from time to time.

If you realize that you’ve committed one of these mistakes, then you can fix them. If you haven’t, on the other hand, then you will know how you can avoid them.

1. Incorrect indexing of your web pages

Everyone wants Google to rank their pages higher. However, there is one problem with this—Google’s algorithm cannot rank what Google bots cannot see. You can use Google Search Console to check whether you have any issues with your indexing.

In most cases, you will realize that your indexing problem is internal—possibly a NONINDEX tag was added to the page, or the page has not been allowed in by your robots.txt file by the developer who was working on that page.

The most possible culprits of your web pages failing to be indexed are either a 404 error or a DNS error, and Google Search Console will give you more details about this in its Error section. One way to get your pages to get indexed without a problem is by manually removing the NONINDEX tag for the affected pages, allowing the pages in robots.txt, or letting Google bot to recrawl the pages in peace.

In case you find yourself in a scenario where the rest of your site is patiently crawlable with its index tags, but you get a small part of the result you anticipated from your Google search—there might be a possibility that you are experiencing a manual action. The best way to deal with this is to start a recovery process by performing a complete website audit.

A website audit tool, you will be able to get a full report about the SEO status of your website, and also get all the web pages that are indexed that are not indexed. Also, you will be able to see the pages that are not complying with Google’s best practices, as well as the pages that didn’t have the right robots or tagging instructions. SEO experts recommend that you check your site for crawling problems on a monthly basis.

2. Keyword cannibalization

This has been a common problem, especially because most online marketers tend to overcrowd similar topics, publishing very related materials that have almost exactly the same target keywords. Now, the result of this is many pages end up competing to rank for the same keyword/s. As a result, the ranking opportunities of all the web pages involved goes down.

You should never take this issue lightly—and you should make sure that you deal with the problems as soon as possible by using a keyword mapping tool. Use your keyword mapping tool to sort out your site, and ensure that all the content in your webpages targets different keywords.

Combine the pages that target similar topics, and then create one page that incorporates various different pages. This way, you will make sure that you are not competing with other people who are creating the same content, just like you.

3. Incorrect page structuring for its target topic

There is one deniable fact—you can still rank lower than your competitors, even when you have more backlinks than them. Well, this tends to be counterintuitive to many people, especially those new to dealing with SEO problems.

But, the sad truth is—this is not all about the backlinks to your page. Today, Google has been working hard to deal with the quid-pro-quo linking schemes, which means building a big backlink catalog won’t be enough for you.

For a while, ranking higher in Google has not been about observing the best practices, but also avoiding mistakes that can get you punished. What you should note is that it’s not all about the content that you create, it’s also making it acceptable. For instance, when creating an article about the best SUVs in 2020, and then you create an article of around 3,000 words, and you cannot rank for it, just look at what your competitors are ranking for.

Also, let’s say that you write an article about the best travel destinations in the world. It’s an amazing and informative piece of content, with several images, and the names of these destinations are found throughout the text. Then you realize that on each page on top 10 results for the best travel destinations in the world present their image in a gallery, and have very little text. This means Google considers that format to be the best for writing that kind of topic.

What you need to do is to edit your content to make it fit in that criteria, add more images to create a gallery, with clear and brief descriptions, and you will notice that your page will start to rank better. Now, that can be an entirely different conversation when we start discussing the keywords for which Google has search engine results page features. Here, we can see that Google is trying to answer the search queries correctly on the search engine results page.

In such cases, it’s using instruments like People also ask, featured snippets, knowledge panes, and others.

It’s crucial for your content to get into those sections, and this also depends on the structure of the content. Therefore, it’s important to check whether your selected keywords can get a SERP feature. You can easily do this using any rank tracking software, as well as searching the terming that you’d like to rank for.

Go to the search settings on Google, and then disable the private results feature, and then adjust your location—if important, and then search your keywords. Whenever you see a featured snippet or knowledge panel, it’s an indication that it’s on.

The best way to appear in a SERP feature is to use a structured data markup. However, you should always note that one of Google’s priority is to present users with quick answers that are relevant to their search.

Using structured data markup, as well as inserting bullet points, numbers, and lists can make search engines recognize that your page is offering quick and easy answers, and the page can be sued as a featured snippet source.

Also, adding structural elements like FAQs can be very helpful, and also getting into SERP features can boost your page views, traffic, and CTR.

4. Improper internal linking

Every SEO expert knows about creating functional navigation. Now, users should be able to return to your homepage, regardless of the page they are in, and also have a clear understanding of the current section of the site they are in, and go to any part of the website by following the links you have provided.

However, it’s important to note that good internal linking goes way beyond that. In reality, we have the important, core, as well as the money pages. Now, these are the pages that people believe will bring them “the real cash.”

Because of this, people normally concentrate on them when creating the structure of their website, rather than creating a large thematic group that can connect several pages together. However, that’s not the best way to or practices of internal linking. You need to spread several valuable links around.

Search for a way to create links, not for your important pages, but links from these pages to other smaller and supplementary pages. What you should do is create new links from your previously old content to the new content that you’ve recently created.

It’s important to hypothesize your content as groups of pages, which support each other. For instance, if your website has a core page that describes the features of your software, you can link that page to your supplementary page, which talks about how to use these features, guest posts, and how-to’s.

If your website doesn’t have supplementary pages, make sure that you create several for your core images. Once done, proceed to create a good pattern of internal links that will connect your site into a coherent website. When creating these links, it’s important to avoid over-optimizing your anchor texts.

To do that, you should not use anchor texts that have the keywords that you are targeting to rank for, and target for naturally ideal anchor texts. You should never use anchors like “click here for more information” or “read here.” One of the best ways to create a good internal linking is to have some kind of well-ordered visualization tool, which shows all your pages as a web of interconnections.

With that, you will start to see where you have the most essential links, as well as the pages that need some extra linking. It’s important to note that any web page can make you money, so long as it has strong internal linking, as well as high-quality content.

5. Low page speed, particularly on mobile

Page speed remains to be a top-ranking factor, and almost everybody takes that seriously with their SEO. However, it’s easy for someone to forget the basics, and allow their web page speed to drop, which can cost them some traffic. And, this isn’t about Google ranking their page lower.

Now, with each extra second that your page takes to load, there’s a number of visitors who bounce, and you will never see them again. Slower web pages tend to rank lower, have poor conversion rates, and also offer poor user experience—and this is worse for mobile.

Over 50% of all mobile users will leave a website is takes more than 3 seconds to load. Also, you should understand that mobile page speed is a major ranking factor, and it’s remained that way since July 2013. Today, Google encourages websites to implement the AMP format and also emphasizes on the fact that fast, clean user experience for mobile users remains to be a top priority.

In addition to being a major factor in the user experience and ranking factor, a slow page means that an entire site will take longer to crawl and index. This can lead to indexation problems, particularly when you let it go unchecked. It requires some bit of extra work to fix issues related to page speed. And, if you own a website, regards to its size, it can be a challenge to fix these issues without the right audit tool.

One of the best tools to use is PageSpeed Insights by Google, which can give you a general idea of the speed of your website is affecting its chances to rank. With this tool, you will realize that the default setting is a mobile experience. The main reason behind that is that mobile optimization remains to be Google’s top priority, and has been that way for several years now. PageSpeed Insights can give you a quantified score and several insights about how you can improve that score.

There are a lot of little mistakes that can make your page slow down. Things from having a lot of redirects to issues like not having enough CDN—most of which you can improve. However, one of the things that you can opt to do to improve the loading speed of your website is to optimize your images and code. You should just do away with all the excess formatting, comments, and unused codes, and then compress all the images on your website.

Using PageSpeed Insights will give you some of the best ideas to increase the actual speed of your website. However, you need to look for broader page audit tools or hire an SEO expert if you want your page to become better. The best thing about audit tools is that they analyze all the pages in your website at once, which means you will be able to get suggestions to improve your website with just one single click.

Bottom Line

Regardless of the number of resources, guidelines, and SEO classes that we have today, you will still realize that people are making simple mistakes, like forgetting to optimize their title tags. This is a good example of how we can easily make mistakes that will harm our rankings. Following this guide will significantly assist you