Top 10 mistakes in SEO website promotion

When a site does not attract traffic and does not rise in search results, there is uncertainty about what to do next. Promotion is influenced by many factors, and each of them may require improvement. In this article, we will look at the most common SEO mistakes and tell you how to avoid them so that the site begins to attract more visitors and improve its positions.

1. Lack of a clear goal for search engine optimization

A clearly defined goal is a key aspect of success in SEO promotion. It is necessary to formulate specific and measurable goals, whether it is increasing traffic or improving positions in search results, regardless of whether you are working on promotion on your own or together with a team.

It is a mistake to set vague goals, such as “I want to be number one in search results” or “I want to have a higher rating than my competitors”, as this does not allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your investments in SEO.

Examples of good goals: “I need to get into the top 100 sites on the topic in six months” or “increase traffic by 25%”.

2. Poor quality page tags

Headings H1, Title and Description of pages were and remain one of the main factors for determining the relevance of page content by search algorithms. Their “incorrect” composition without taking into account the recommendations of search engines is one of the most popular mistakes for SEO:

• unfilled tags;
• presence of 2 or more tags on a page;
• Tag value is too long.

Examples:

Low quality tag – “cheap coffee in Kyiv, coffee in Kyiv, the best restaurants in Kyiv”.

Quality tag – “coffee in the center of Kyiv from 50 hryvnia”.

3. Low quality content

The content of the site pages may be “incomprehensible” to search engine bots:

• lack of hierarchy of headings, subheadings and logical structure of the text;
• small amount of content;
• huge texts full of “water” or spammed SEO texts;
• hidden texts.

A page with low-quality content is inconvenient and useless for users. The lack of response to a visitor’s request, negative behavioral characteristics of visits – all this makes the site “useless” in the opinion of search algorithms.

Before creating content, it is important to research keywords and make sure that it matches their queries. This helps search engines recognize the context and helps users find the information they need. Don’t forget that the content must remain relevant and unique. The path to the first page of search takes time, but quality content will be the key to long-term success.

4. Doubles in any of their manifestations

Content theft – publishing texts from other resources, copying content from pages of your own site, similar page content, duplicating pages, URLs, meta titles and descriptions. Pages containing non-unique content negatively affect the ranking of the site in search engines. Pages with duplicate content and tags (sorting pages, filters, etc.) reduce the resource’s rating in search or are completely excluded from search indexing as junk.

This error is especially common on sites with URL parameters for filtering or sorting products, where random duplicates may occur. It is important that all content is unique, and duplicate pages are correctly configured for indexing.

5. Poor website architecture

Using an illogical, inconvenient and unclear website architecture does not allow the user to find an answer to their request, and they will leave it, considering it useless. Accordingly, the behavioral characteristics of the resource will negatively affect the ranking of the site in search engines. An ill-conceived structure of site directories with large nesting levels can significantly complicate the indexing of site pages by search engine robots.

Often on news sites and online stores, articles or products are perceived as isolated elements, not related to other similar objects. This prevents the creation of a coherent content structure, which also negatively affects SEO.

6. Lack of a mobile-friendly version of the site

Adapting your website to different devices is extremely important. Major search engines like Google have long attached importance to the convenience of mobile use. Today, more than half of users browse websites from mobile devices, and ignoring this factor can negatively affect the site’s performance.

It often happens that there is no mobile version of the site, or it is significantly different from the main one, which causes negativity among visitors. It is necessary to make sure that the mobile version is adapted for all types of devices.

7. Lack of links or, on the contrary, their excessive number

It is often believed that external optimization does not play a role in promotion, so many do not pay attention to increasing the link mass. This erroneous opinion can lead to a deterioration in the site’s position. Links reflect the popularity of the resource and help search engines assess its importance. Therefore, it is important to regularly replenish this resource by purchasing paid links and placing free ones. By carrying out this process gradually and slowly, you can achieve good results.

However, using a large number of links without context can lead to the opposite effect, when search engines regard it as spam. And its search engines track and lower the ranking of suspicious resources with low-quality links. It is important to control links, for example, through the rel=«nofollow» attribute for user comments, to avoid lowering the ranking.

8. Website promotion only for high-frequency queries

Keyword selection — is an action that carries great significance and responsibility. The correctness of this process determines who and how will find your offer when searching for information or products. One mistake, and your target audience may never stumble upon your site, and therefore not bring you any benefit.

One of the most common mistakes in SEO at the keyword stage is ignoring mid- and low-frequency queries. Website owners are often convinced that it is better to focus on frequently used queries, as hundreds of thousands of users are hunting for them, as opposed to mid- and low-frequency queries, which are of interest to far fewer people. While this logic is understandable, it is flawed.

Pay attention to the queries that you enter into the search bar yourself. In 9 cases out of 10, you specify the most specific words to get the most relevant results. Other Internet users do the same. That is why it is currently more effective to promote your project using medium and low frequency queries. If you follow not guesses, but turn to statistics, you can see that about 70% of the traffic of any site comes from queries with low and medium frequency.

9. Ignoring competitors

Often, when promoting their project, people overlook the actions and strategies of their competitors. Why it is worth keeping a close eye on your rivals:

• so as not to miss interesting approaches that may prove useful and, therefore, worth implementing;
• to avoid the same mistakes that competitors may have made;
• to become even better and rise higher thanks to this.

You shouldn’t compete directly with your rivals. It’s important to be able to coexist with them and benefit from it. Only by studying your competitors’ sites can you make your resource better. There are no champions without worthy rivals.

10. Lack of analytics

No promotion strategy will be effective without ongoing analysis of results. It must be specific, provide clear and objective answers, and include numerical data that can be used to track changes.

The presence and ability to analyze statistics on many parameters of interaction with the resource allows you to evaluate the results of work and control the promotion process. Immediately upon creating a site, you must connect the Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity statistics system. Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, improving, and for successful search engine optimization of a site, it is necessary to take into account many factors and parameters.

To summarize

Internet promotion is a complex and labor-intensive process that requires significant effort, time and attention. With the right approach, it can give you a significant advantage over your competitors. Therefore, it is important to avoid the typical mistakes discussed in the article. If you encounter difficulties, you can always contact specialists, ready to help you with SEO promotion.

Oleksandr Romanenko

Team Lead/Senior SEO specialist

Author's page