As a content marketer, there’s nothing more frustrating than pouring days or weeks of hard work into creating content, only to see it fail to rank in search engines. Unfortunately, common SEO mistakes can often be the culprit behind lackluster search engine performance.

Even seemingly small mistakes can have a significant impact on your digital marketing strategy, rendering your content marketing efforts useless.

In this article, we’ll be discussing some of the most common SEO mistakes that content marketers make, and how to avoid them.

By taking the time to understand and address these mistakes, you can keep your digital marketing strategy on track and ensure that your content reaches the audience it’s intended for.

Let’s get started –

Common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2023

01. Using un-optimized or wrong keyword

Over 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages each month

Semrush

One of the best ways to get your readers to your website is to produce quality articles by covering the relevant keywords. But using un-optimized or wrong keywords can hinder the ability of search engines to understand the content on a website.

If the wrong keywords are used, search engines may not be able to accurately categorize the content, which can result in lower rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). Similarly, if keywords are not optimized properly, it can also negatively impact search engine rankings.

For example, if a website sells shoes but uses keywords about hats, search engines might not realize that the website is about shoes and might not rank it highly for shoe-related search requests.

On the other hand, if the website uses shoe-related keywords but doesn’t optimize them properly (by using them too often or not putting them in important places like the title tag), search engines may not rank the website highly for those keywords.

Learn some common SEO mistakes that you should take care of 👉 Read now

How to fix?

It’s important to do research, choose keywords that are useful and get a lot of traffic, and optimize them correctly so that search engines can correctly classify and rank the content on a website.

02. Content is not mobile-responsive

Content that doesn’t work well on mobile devices is a common SEO mistake that can hurt the user experience on mobile devices.

That’s why!

85% of adults think that a company’s mobile website should be as good or better than their desktop website

Think with Google

With the popularity of smartphones and computers growing, more and more people are using mobile devices to connect to the internet. Because of this, search engines like Google are giving mobile-friendly websites more weight in their search results.

If a website’s content isn’t flexible to mobile devices, it might not show up right on mobile devices, which can make the user experience bad. However, you can test whether your site is at least mobile-friendly or not by using Google’s mobile-friendly test.

For instance, the writing might be too small to read, the pictures might not be the right size, and the website might be hard to use. This can result in high bounce rates, low engagement, and lower rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs)

How to fix?

It is highly essential that websites are optimized and made mobile-friendly. Not just for mobile, Google will rank your competitor’s content higher than you if you do not focus on speed optimization of your website too.

03. Writing very ordinary content

It is obvious that people that are searching online are all looking for informative and quality content that matches their queries. Ordinary content can hamper your SEO effort. It does not provide value to the audience and does not differentiate the website from competitors.

That’s why

72% of marketers say that high-quality content creation is the most effective SEO tactic

Demand Metric

Search engines like Google prioritize high-quality, unique, and relevant content that satisfies user intent. If a website’s content is boring and doesn’t help people in any way, it may not rank well in search engine results pages (SERPs). This is because search engines try to give users the best results they can, and regular information doesn’t meet this standard.

How to fix?

Therefore, it is important to create high-quality, unique, and relevant content that provides value to the audience and differentiates the website from competitors. This can improve search engine rankings, attract backlinks, and increase engagement and conversions on the website.

For that, you can create material with well-organized wordings and phrases, no grammatical errors, and at least 300 words. Short, indescriptive, low readability or irrelevant content lets Google believe that you do not have sufficient knowledge about that particular topic.

04. Publishing plagiarized or non-original content

Did you know?

58% of marketers say that original written content is their most important type of content

Demand Metric

Yes, search engines like Google give more importance to unique, high-quality, and useful information that matches what the user is looking for. If a website posts content that has been copied or is not original, it can hurt the website’s search engine results.

Also, posting copied or non-original content can make the user experience bad, since the content may not be helpful, boring, or keep repeating itself. This can lead to high bounce rates, low involvement, and poor rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). The reason is that Google crawls every blog content quite seriously while determining your content’s ranking in search engines.

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How to fix?

So always try to create original content by putting your own ideas and explaining them in your own words. If you are accepting guest content make sure to check it via an online plagiarism checker for its originality. If not, Google could penalize you without any notice.

Put efforts into generating plagiarism-free original content and maintaining a good standard of English rather than copy-pasting from here and there altering the words. This would ensure that your website gets a below-par ranking in different search engines.

05. Not focusing on long-tail keywords

Most content writers focus on short & precise keywords while writing any content. They feel long-tail keywords would bring in less traffic. But in reality, using long-tail keywords can be a great idea to improve your site’s SEO value. As it often has less difficulty level and so it becomes easier to rank in the search engines.

Long-tail keywords make up 70% of all search traffic

Ahref

Even though these type of keywords has a lower search volume yet they are very specific to your business.

How to fix?

Therefore it has a much better conversion chance as it caters to a particular set of your customers. More importantly, long keyword phrases are precise enough to draw your target customers. Moreover, it even lays a positive impact on your overall conversion rate.

06. Targeting high-traffic keywords only

In the most common scenario, the very first thing that an expert writer does is research a relevant keyword. And the mistake that they do while doing so is that they only go for high-volume keywords as they feel this would bring more traffic to their site.

Not all high-traffic keywords are relevant to a website’s content, so targeting them can result in low engagement, high bounce rates, and lower rankings.

Search Engine Journal

It might help in optimizing the content in the search engines if you have a powerful domain-authorized website but not the best way to rank if you have a relatively new website.

As keywords with higher volume are extremely competitive hence it is probably going to be next to impossible to rank with them. But luckily your competitors are almost certain to miss on the less popular keywords. So you can always find those low-competition keywords and use them.

How to fix?

In this case, you can use one of the better-known keyword research tools like SEMrush. Which will tell you exactly how competitive a particular keyword is along with suggesting high to low-traffic keywords.

You need to analyze them closely and choose a keyword something in between popular and not too popular.

07. Missing meta description & title/image tags

One might think that simply adding a target keyword successfully is the only step to optimize their content. But elements of SEO like meta description and title tags in content should not be neglected.

Meta descriptions provide a summary of a web page’s content and can influence click-through rates from search engine results pages (SERPs). Pages without meta descriptions may have lower click-through rates and lower visibility in SERPs

Yoast

Being careless to add title tags and meta description means missing a huge potential for your content. The search engine considers these factors while ranking your website. And so when it is done carefully, there is every chance to improve the performance of your content.

Many marketers tend to forget to use these factors to let the search engine know what their website is all about. You might think creating content is sufficient but without addressing the meta description and title/image tag the search engine will be unable to understand your content’s context.

How to fix?

Along with the title tags, image tags are also forgotten by many content writers or marketers. It is as essential if not more as it shows how you are targeting your articles while searching for pictures related to your content title. So try using them smartly and effectively.

08. Using too short or not using headings properly

Heading should always convey a full message of what the paragraph or content is about. Writing confusing short heading is difficult for search engine bots to determine what the content is about. So it should always be more than a few words but not too long yet long enough to convey its full thought.

Short or incomplete headings may not accurately describe the content of a page, making it difficult for search engines and users to understand the content. Pages with incomplete or inaccurate headings may have lower visibility in search results and may be penalized for poor relevance

Search Engine Journal

Also just like the title tag mentioned above, the H1 heading tag is also very important for the Google crawler to interpret what the content is about. A common mistake that a content writer makes is using more than one H1 heading tag in the same content.

This sometimes gets the search engine bot confused about the real heading of the content.

Not just H1 heading tags or using short confusing headings, using too few headings in the content also could lead your content to rank lower. As an SEO expert, you would want to grab all probable searchers available online.

How to fix?

Therefore you are required to target various searched topics creating distinct headings. This, along with optimizing the SEO of your content would also enable your potential customer to have a better idea of what they are reading about.

09. Poor use of external & internal links

In order to make the best from SEO, it is really essential to include quality external links in the content. More than the number of external links, it is the quality of it that matters the most. This is why don’t add external links from any site just for the sake of adding it.

Always make sure your external links are from a relevant, high-ranked website with a higher Domain Authority (DA). More so, it is always useful to have backlinks from sites that have linked to yours. In the future, this may bring back a notable amount of traffic as well.

How to fix?

As for having your own internal links, you should have a note of the content that is relevant and lead to similar posts within your published content. In addition, this will verify as valuable providing clarity. Moreover, you should not include any internal links that are not comparable in relation to the subject of the posts.

Go through this comprehensive guide to learn how to use internal and external links in an article

Another critical thing to keep in mind is that, just like keywords, stuffing up excessive links in a single content could lead to hampering the rank of your site. So it is always advisable to go after quality links rather than forcefully adding too many of them.

10. Not utilizing the right SEO & analytical tool

You can only know whether your content marketing practice and SEO optimization going in the right direction or not by tracking their progress. For the right kind of tracking, you need to utilize the right tool as well. Many marketers would simply want to overlook the importance of using a solid SEO and Analytical tool.

48% of SEO professionals use SEO tools to track rankings, 39% use them for keyword research, and 34% use them for link building

Moz

You can use SEO or keyword optimization tools like SEMrush and Google keyword tools. This will give you a clear idea about the queries that your target audiences are making in online search engines. This will enable you to create content based on that enabling you to reach more of your potential clients.

How to fix?

It is absolutely crucial from a site optimization point of view to set up a regular analytics review session. This can be performed successfully using popular Google suites like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

This will effortlessly allow getting an overview by letting you measure the overall performance of your website. Not just that, you will also be able to notice how all your optimization is performing for different types of content.

Based on that, you can compare and adjust the digital & content marketing strategies that you are applying.

So that’s it. These were the biggest SEO mistakes that many of us commonly make. And we would require to avoid them if we want to achieve a good rank in our search engines.

FAQs related to common SEO mistakes

So, how do you encounter these SEO blunders?

If you are still making these SEO mistakes, then it is high time you correct them before it gets out of your hand and costs you your digital marketing budget. In order to achieve your marketing goals, there is no alternative to the right application of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

And if you keep on making these common SEO blunders then the work gets even harder. But thankfully now you know what needs to be done to avoid these SEO blunders. There are hundreds of SEO tips and tricks that Google searches generate for users. But often those techniques are difficult to implement.

So therefore you need to identify what method of SEO you need to carry on. And apply your digital marketing strategy to get positive results always.

In many cases, one can easily find out how effective their SEO optimization was by tracking them. In this case, as mentioned earlier, there are tools like Google Analytics 4 (a newer version of Google Analytics) and Google Webmaster.

These tools enable the users to fix their common SEO mistakes letting them understand its performance analysis. Moreover, this helps determines which strategies of content/digital marketing are proving to be most beneficial for them.

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