SEO is a peculiar mixture of both art and science, and when done correctly can gain you enormous amounts of traffic that is relevant and that will convert in the ways you desire your traffic to. However, perform these dark arts incorrectly, and you risk a plethora of issues ranging from spending a ton of money and resources on a website that will never yield anything substantial to a complete deindexing of your site, causing you to pull your hair out and rue the day that you ever thought buying cheap backlinks from Fiverr was a good idea. This post will provide you with a brief overview of nine SEO sins that any business owner should avoid like the plague, even if their nephew, who has seen a TikTok video about SEO, recommends it.
Attempting Advanced SEO Yourself
In most cases, you should be able to handle many of the more fundamental aspects of SEO, including things like entering title tags correctly when creating your content and resizing images (more on that later). But when it comes to the more sophisticated factors, performing these actions yourself could result in unintended consequences at best. According to Bold SEO Melbourne, an agency dedicated to improving website rankings for all manner of businesses, it requires a range of tools to eke the most amount of value from your efforts, and these tools can often run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars to subscribe to. Suffice it to say this puts a lot of the more advanced options out of reach of the average website wonder who simply wants to increase brand visibility and focus on the business of running their business!
Allowing AI To Take Over
Since the advent of ChatGPT and other GPTs, there has been a colossal revolution sweeping across the world of SEO that has utterly changed the way in which websites are managed. Before 2022, it cost a not insignificant amount of money to hire writers to generate content and perform other tasks such as image creation, etc. While AI is here to stay and improve with each iteration (GPT4o being the latest), relying too heavily on this technology can have its downsides. As we saw with Google’s sweeping Helpful Content Update (HCU), hundreds of large and small sites got hit with a raft of punishments. The most widely accepted consensus among professionals and industry watchers was the immense use of AI to craft content that wasn’t up to par. To get the most out of AI tools, you need to use them sparingly and spend a decent amount of time editing and fact-checking them for clarity.
Stuffing In Keywords To Every Post
This one is aimed more at the casual SEO who still believes that placing your keyword as many times as possible into a piece of content will boost in rankings. This won’t work and hasn’t worked for the best part of a decade. Make no mistake, keywords are still a thing as they tell search engines what your content is about, but to use them correctly means using them sparingly and in the right places. It’s still typically advised to use them in your title tags where is makes sense and is scattered throughout a post, alongside similar terms that are semantically related.
Ignoring The Technical Aspects
Technical SEO is often ignored by the masses because it’s complicated and scary, and it has a tendency to white-screen your site if you don’t know what you’re doing. When discussing technical SEO, we are really talking about things like:
- Page speed
- Crawlability
- Content duplication
- Keyword cannibalization
- Indexation
- URL structure
- Canonical tags
There are many more components to this technique, but the fact remains that if you are unsure what to do, you should probably call in the pros. When it comes to things like page speed, you can often improve this in many ways, such as reducing the size of images and making a cleaner, simpler site. However, fixing any keyword cannibalizations takes a little bit more digging, not to mention a detailed understanding of what it actually is!
Believing That Links Don’t Work
From time to time, you will come across industry news that states in one form or another that SEO is dead. Within this running theme is the fact that backlinks simply don’t work anymore, so you should abandon them entirely and instead rely on making your content better. There is some truth to the point that links don’t have the same amount of power to move the needle as they once did, but it is patently false to state they have no use in modern SEO. They remain the backbone of the discipline and are still used by Google and other search engines to get an idea of how authoritative a site is and, therefore, how well or not it should be ranked. What has changed is the type and quality of links that you receive compared with the past.
Overloading The Site With Bloat
Bloat is the enemy of SEO (primarily technical SEO), as it slows down your site for no discernible reason. If you really want to create a website that converts your visitors into users (hint: you do), then it must be clean, fast, and to the point.
Ignoring The Impact That UX Has
UX, aka user experience, significantly impacts how users interact with your content and how efficiently a search engine can crawl and understand it. Any convolution in navigation and usability will have adverse consequences and result in wasted efforts to boost rankings.
Not Compressing Images
As already mentioned, page speed is considered a ranking factor (albeit not as important as some others). However, one of the biggest culprits of a slow website tends to be images. Image-heavy sites that don’t use compressed images will suffer incredibly low loading speeds, which can affect not only your position in the SERPs but also lose you sales from users leaving the site out of frustration. Nowadays, there is no excuse, as you can use free or freemium software to compress images before uploading them.
Disregarding The Data
Data plays a vital role in understanding how your site ranks and is seen and used by users and bots. By not integrating your site with Google Analytics or other software, you risk missing out on the kind of data that can really help you make the big moves.
SEO can be as complicated or as basic as you want to make it, but by disregarding the most common errors, as discussed here, you will be unable to see any results. If you are afraid of making things worse, you should hire an agency that has people who live and breathe the art and should get your site shifting gears and hurtling to the top of the search results in no time.