Common SEO Errors
Even if you’ve mastered the fundamentals of SEO, there’s a high chance you’re making at least one mistake. After all, with so much to think about, errors can easily occur, and this can impact organic rankings if you’re not careful. So what are the most common SEO mistakes and how can you avoid them? Let’s delve deeper.
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Duplicate Content
If the same content is duplicated on two or more unique URLs, this can harm your SEO efforts as Google won’t know which page to display and the link value will be diluted. Similarly if two or more websites publish the same content linking back to your site this is not good news for SEO either. Essentially, duplicated pages will compete against each other, so it’s really important to write unique content for absolutely every URL. You also need to make sure that separate URLs aren’t created for the same product. This often happens when products are organised by a specific category in a content management system.
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Misusing ‘Noindex’ Tags
In order for your pages to rank for a particular search, they need to be indexed. The Google spider will crawl your site looking for new content, but this can take time. So brands often submit a sitemap to ensure their pages are indexed quickly. If your site still isn’t performing as you’d hoped, check for noindex tags. These stop search engines from indexing your content and could be impacting your SEO performance.
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Thin Content
Google is providing a service to consumers and therefore wants to bring up the most relevant pages for a particular search. Pages with thin content are described as having ‘little or no added value’ and won’t rank highly. Pages with minimal content are also likely to contain less internal links and keywords which can also harm your SEO strategy. So, with thin in mind, think about the relevancy of each page and provide as much helpful information as possible.
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Orphaned Pages
One of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make is to neglect your internal linking strategy. This will result in a host of orphan pages that are difficult to index. Internal links give your site a structure and tell Google which pages are important. As orphaned pages can’t be crawled, they often go unnoticed, and your content won’t rank.
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Poor Page Experience
Page experience is now part of Google’s ranking algorithm. The recent update which rolled out in May 2021 now takes into account Core Web Vitals which are a subset of factors that form part of Google’s ‘page experience’ score. Page speed and user interaction measurements include – largest contentful paint (how long it takes a page to load), first input display (user interaction with your page) and cumulative layout shift (visual stability as the page loads). And you can find Core Web Vitals data in Google Search Console.
Contact Whitefish Marketing today for help with your content marketing strategy and avoid making common SEO mistakes that could impact your search engine rankings.
