You Are Losing Traffic Because of These 10 SEO Mistakes

Everyone who has spent any time doing digital marketing knows the loneliest place on the Internet is page two of a Google search. If your website appears there - or worse - for crucial keywords in your niche or industry, you are probably making one, some, or most of the SEO mistakes on this list.

1. Keyword Stuffing

You might be thinking that everyone knows this, and in a sense, you are right - everyone should know it. After all, it's a strategy that hasn't worked for at least 10 years. You might get a short boost in rankings if you're lucky, but it will probably only last a couple of weeks. After that, get ready for a long stint on Google's naughty stool.

2. Low-Quality Content

The "content is king" moniker to describe a content-focused strategy to digital marketing and SEO has become clichéd, but it is no less important or true. Thin websites with tiny amounts of content, poorly written content, spun content, or generally unhelpful or uninteresting content will get you nowhere. Google may not spot it right away, but it will eventually, and you will lose traffic.

Content takes effort and investment, but to get good levels of traffic from organic search, you have no other choice.

3. Not Doing Proper Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential part of SEO, so it is surprising to see how many websites fail to do it. They think they know their customers and their industry, so they make assumptions. In many cases, they do know their customers, but they often don't know how those customers use a search engine to find their products or services. What words and phrases do they use? What types of search terms are used at each stage of the buying cycle? Knowing the answers to these questions will help you get more traffic, and that requires keyword research.

4. Broken Links

It's very easy to end up with broken links on your website - both internal and external. They will hurt your SEO efforts though, so they can result in lost traffic. The solution requires regular audits of your site to identify and fix broken links.

5. Internal Duplicate Content

There are lots of ways that websites can take their eye off this ball to end up with duplicate content. For example, you can have different pages, often created by a CMS, but the same content on those pages. And unless you spend time manually writing and checking page titles and descriptions, those can end up duplicated too.

6. Copying Content

Copying content from competitors and other websites is often illegal. Even if it is not, it is ethically wrong in the vast majority of situations, so you should never do it. Google hates it too and penalizes websites that contain duplicate content.

One area that some website owners often forget about, however, is product descriptions. The common practice is to lift the description of a product from a supplier or manufacturer and copy it into your website. This is one of those unique situations where it is probably neither illegal nor ethically dubious; in fact, the supplier or manufacturer probably welcomes your use of their approved description. This is still duplicate content in the eyes of the Google algorithm though, so it is likely to have a negative impact on your traffic levels.

7. Being Lazy With Meta Descriptions and Page Titles

Meta descriptions and page titles have already been touched on in a previous point in regard to duplicate content. There are two other mistakes you could be making with them however.

The first is not including the main keyword for the page in both the title and description. Ideally, the keyword should be as close to the start of the title and description as possible.

Also, your page titles and descriptions must be the right length - 60 characters for a page title and 120 characters for a page description. This is because they are used for much more than helping the Google algorithm figure out what your page is about and how useful it might be for a visitor. Of course, they are almost certainly a ranking factor, but page titles and meta descriptions also influence click through rate in SERPs.

People are given very limited information about your website on a search result page; the key information is the page title and meta description. It should therefore be enticing and highly descriptive. Crucially, it shouldn't be too long, as Google will just cut it.

8. Thinking Too Much About Google

This is one that Google engineers have been preaching for years. They want everyone to stop trying to second guess their search algorithm and instead simply make content that is great for users. The theory behind that is if the content is good enough, the algorithm will naturally find it and rank it appropriately.

Of course, that is not all you should do in SEO, but the spirit of the Google viewpoint is still a valid one. Everything about your website and SEO strategy should be focused on people first. The above point about page titles is a good example. It is good SEO practice to have a unique page title that contains the keyword and is not too long. That helps search engines, but more importantly, it helps people looking at a search result understand whether you can answer their query or solve their problem.

9. Using Low-Quality Outgoing Links

Including outgoing links on your website to low-quality pages can hurt your SEO efforts. It is much better to link to well-known and/or high-authority websites.

10. Getting Poor Quality Links

This is another one that most people should be aware of, but it is still a problem: getting, by paying for them or otherwise, low - quality backlinks. Quality always trumps quantity when it comes to link building strategies.

A bonus tip is that you should study your analytics critically and take decisive action if the numbers are not what they should be. The top 10 SEO mistakes on this list are a good place to start.