We all know that search engines serve millions of users per day looking for answers to their questions or for solutions to their problems. With the constantly updating methodology of search engines, SEO has become imperative to help your business grow and meet the business objectives.

Of course, in the process of trying to keep up with SEO demands, businesses make some critical blunders that hurt rather than help their search rankings.

To keep you and your site on track, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes:

RESPONSE TIME:

Since Google takes a site’s speed into account when ranking a website, a sluggish page speed or a slow download time can affect not only your ranking, but it can also hamper the productivity of your website. Thus, to avoid this, it is important that you fix this problem immediately.

DUPLICATE CONTENT ISSUES

Duplicate content means that similar content appears in multiple locations (URLs) on the web, and as a result, search engines don’t know which URL to show in the search results.

Copied content can often be penalized algorithmically or manually.

Also, make sure that you are covering blog post topics on a healthy balance of keyword opportunities and FAQs from your audience to attain your goals of higher rankings and more conversions.

IGNORING THE EXISTING ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Even though you are ranking well on a few pages, there is no way that ignoring those keywords or pages will be fruitful. The truth is that you might get some traffic from keywords you already rank for, but not all of it.

So, try to keep a check on your ranking status and trust us, there is not harm in updating the older content. It will improve your site’s visibility, thus increasing readership, leading to more organic traffic and reduced bounce rate.

NOT USING ALT TAGS FOR IMAGES

Since ALT tags are an effective way of telling Google spiders what a particular image is about, it helps to make your site more accessible, thereby facilitating faster indexing, which leads to more traffic to your site from image-based search engines such as Google Images.

NOT REPLACING BROKEN LINKS

Broken links can have a negative impact on your website’s visibility and ranking as it creates frustration among users. Since they are coming to your website with a purpose, and if you can not provide what they need, they will likely move on to some other website.

That is why you must find these links using this website broken link checker so you can
identify and fix all errors.

FALLING BEHIND ON SEO TRENDS

There are a lot of changes happening in the world of search engine optimization. With trends, such as voice search, taking over the digital marketing game, it is important to continuously make sure your business is being found through every channel online. Thus, pull up your socks in order to steer ahead of your competitors.

These are indeed the most common mistakes that you might need to keep up with in order to polish your SEO skills.