The 5 most common SEO mistakes

Whether due to a lack of knowledge or experience, in the SEO universe, there are many mistakes that, if present on a website, can clip our wings and weigh down our entire SEO in search engines.

Be careful! Some of these errors are small but deadly. We recommend that when performing any optimisation or improvement on your website at an SEO level, you always have the support and experience of a professional.

At our Semso SEO agency, we have conducted thousands of SEO audits, which have revealed hundreds and hundreds of all sorts of errors that affected the SEO of many websites. However, there are always some more "popular" ones that we detect more often.

We have prepared a list of the most common SEO mistakes we find in our agency, so you can easily detect and solve them. (And if you don't know how, you can always ask for the help of an SEO specialist)

Let's start! 5 SEO mistakes you need to fix.

Lack of content

If you're somewhat familiar with SEO, you've likely heard the statement "Content is King". This is entirely true. There are many elements that influence the SEO of a website, but text content is a very important aspect to work on if we want to achieve the best organic SEO.

Google's goal is to make its users happy, and it can only achieve this by offering them the best answer. If we want to gain visibility and rank in its search engine, we must write quality content that perfectly resolves each search intent.

Good content will not only help you rank but also increase the time spent on your website and reduce pogo-sticking (users who leave your website to return to Google and go to another result)

However, if your pages have very little or no content, Google will consider it as Thin Content, that is, low-quality, poor content that adds nothing to the user. Irrelevant content that will not achieve good rankings. How do you solve it? Very simple: Write! Talk about your company, what you offer, communicate, interact with your users, solve their queries... Before you know it, you'll have written useful and valuable content.

Duplicate content

As mentioned in the previous point, the content on your website must be quality and useful for users, but it must also be 100% original. Absolutely all the texts published on the website must be your own: Company information, product or service descriptions...Everything.

Why? Google has been pursuing and penalising websites that use content copied from other external pages for years, so we cannot risk copying anything. Additionally, having plagiarised content also offers a bad user experience, as readers might "catch" us, which would harm our brand's image among the community and the sector.

Moreover, duplicate content is not only that which is copied from other websites; internal duplication also exists. That is, very similar or identical content that appears on many pages of our website: Tags, categories, pagination, author pages, very similar product descriptions... All these pages usually have very little content and also very similar to each other, something we must avoid at all costs. How do you solve it? Externally, avoid copying any content. If you don't know much about a topic, you can always use sources, but never copy the text directly. Internally, monitor this duplication among your pages, and modify or expand the text offered so it is not exactly the same. Or you can also add canonical attributes to indicate to Google which is the main content.

Incorrect keywords

A mistake that may seem harmless but hugely impacts your SEO strategy is not carefully choosing the keywords to work on and instead focusing on those you shouldn't.

If we target our website towards the wrong keywords, the actions we carry out will not bear fruit. You'll invest time and resources but won't achieve the benefits you want.

There are many mistakes when choosing keywords: Targeting very generic keywords, with many searches per month but highly competitive and almost impossible to rank for a new website; very specific terms, which seem interesting to us but then do not translate into actual searches; words that at first seem to have a search intent related to our website, but then turn out to be a completely different type of search...etc. How do you solve it? Take all the time you need when choosing the keywords for your project. Use some SEO tool (there are many paid and free) and conduct a detailed keyword market study. And most importantly: Search. Go to Google and search for those keywords you find interesting, analyse the results that appear and assess whether you could also be there.

Keyword stuffing or excessive use of keywords

Sorry, but writing your keyword 1000 times in the same content will not achieve better rankings. In fact, it might backfire and lead to a loss of visibility.

Gone are the days when to rank, it was enough to repeat the keyword over and over again. This over-optimisation of keywords is called "Keyword Stuffing" and can be very harmful to your SEO strategy. Google's goal is to offer the best to its users, natural and user-friendly content that meets their search needs. We will not achieve this if we dedicate ourselves to bombarding the content with our keywords.

How do you solve it? Don't write thinking only about Google. Keep the users in mind, write content that includes rich and varied semantics, use a broad vocabulary that your readers can understand... and you will succeed.

Not acquiring external links

A good SEO strategy is not only nourished by improvements implemented within the website but also by actions we perform outside of it. Among these actions, the most known and important is Linkbuilding. Linkbuilding is based on acquiring links from external websites, by gaining links, we improve our notoriety and authority on Google.

Not only the number of links matters but also the quality of these. It is better to get a link from a reference newspaper than 10 links from forums or untrustworthy websites. The theme of the website and the traffic that link can attract are also points to consider when acquiring links.

Having a strong and quality link profile will help us achieve better rankings on Google, so not planning a linkbuilding strategy will be a mistake that weighs on our strategy and prevents us from ranking as quickly as possible. How do you solve it? Make contacts, try to be more present in your community, participate in social networks, share your content or your wisdom on websites, forums, and blogs, and above all, offer something unique and quality that makes users talk about it. If you achieve this, we assure you that little by little, those who value you will start to link to you.

These are the 5 most common SEO mistakes... But there are many more! So, don't stop visiting this post; we will continue to expand it to leave nothing out.

Is your SEO not taking off because of these mistakes? Don't worry, contact us, and we will be delighted to create an SEO strategy focused on results for your project.