A winning strategy focuses on what not to do as much as what to do. Most of the time, when a business suffers from SEO, it’s due to repeated SEO mistakes.
In this article, I’m sharing the 18 common SEO mistakes to avoid.
In the last year of launching my blog and running it as a one-person team, I learned some valuable lessons on SEO. One of the lessons was about noting what to avoid when doing SEO. Avoiding these 18 mistakes has helped me consistently increase my website traffic (even during the Google updates).
So, let’s see what those mistakes are:
What is the Main SEO Mistake That Companies Make?
Overvaluing Traffic and Ignoring Conversions
One of the most detrimental mistakes businesses make is glorifying traffic over conversions. Getting caught up in vanity metrics like organic traffic, impressions, and even Domain Authority (DA) is easy. However, the real metric that matters is conversions.
Why Traffic Alone Isn’t Enough
Let’s say your site receives thousands of visitors each month, but only a fraction of those visitors take action. In that case, the traffic might look impressive, but it isn’t contributing to your business’s bottom line.
The end goal of SEO should always be conversions. Your content needs to be tailored to turn visitors into leads, customers, or subscribers, not just to attract random users to your website.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
- Track conversion rates and ensure your content is aligned with driving real business results. Make use of Google Analytics to track the visitors’ actions once they arrive at your website.
- Audit existing content.
- Check GSC to find the posts that are getting the most traffic.
- Filter them by crossing off the keywords that don’t have a business value. For example: If you offer content writing services, an article focusing on how to create GIFs doesn’t align with your service. It has zero business value.
- Now, focus on the keywords that move the conversion needle and optimize them if necessary.
18 SEO Miskates You Should Avoid
SEO is constantly evolving, but many businesses still fall into outdated or harmful practices. Here’s what you need to avoid:
1. Producing Content Without Value
Publishing content for the sake of filling a blog isn’t enough anymore. When you analyze the websites affected the most during Google updates, you’ll find all of them created content at large but didn’t take time to focus on quality.
From my experience in blogging, I can assure you that quality content wins. Even though search engines are at work, readers are the real MVPs. Content needs to provide real value to the reader.
If the content you produce doesn’t address a user’s problem or question, it will fail to engage, and even worse, it can hurt your SEO rankings.
After the recent core update, Google’s algorithm favors high-quality content that is comprehensive, useful, and original regardless of the website’s size.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
When you create content, always ask yourself:
- What problem am I solving for my audience?
- Is this content better than what’s already ranking?
- Does the content offer unique insights or perspectives?
- Am I addressing the full scope of the topic in a way that’s useful and easy to understand?
- Is the content tailored to meet the needs and search intent of my target audience?
2. Acquiring Low-Quality Backlinks
Backlinks remain one of the most important ranking factors in SEO. However, not all backlinks are created equal. One of the biggest SEO mistakes businesses make is acquiring low-quality, spammy backlinks through tactics like link farms or irrelevant link exchanges.
What’s a Low-Quality Backlink?
Low-quality backlinks come from websites that have:
- Poor authority: Sites that Google views as untrustworthy or irrelevant.
- Irrelevant content: Links from sites that have nothing to do with your industry or niche.
- Spammy practices: Links from sites with shady link-building practices or unnatural link profiles.
Another backlink mistake is building no-follow backlinks. Though high-quality, they’re not as valuable as do-follow backlinks. This is because do-follow backlinks transfer SEO benefits like authority, but no-follow links don’t.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Regularly audit your backlink profile using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. Disallow low-quality links and focus on building relationships with credible sites for guest posting opportunities.
Use Digital PR, HARO, and authentic link exchange drives to build real backlinks that matter. Even if you can’t go for the high-end backlink-building methods like Digital PR, try to find websites that can benefit from linking to you. Send them an email explaining how it can be beneficial. Most times, you hear back positive results.
Use ChatGPT to help you find the exact places where you can suggest inserting the backlinks to make it easier for people to accept your request.
3. Focusing Too Much on Domain Authority (DA) or Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Authority and Domain Rating are popular SEO metrics created by Moz and Ahrefs, respectively, to measure the overall strength of a website’s backlink profile.
That’s the catch. Third-party tools created them, not Google itself. So, though DA or DR matter, they don’t really matter that much. Over-reliance on DA or DR can lead to a misguided SEO strategy.
Focusing too much on increasing these metrics can distract you from improving the things that really matter, like content quality, user experience, and search intent alignment.
Here’s an example of a website with a DA 16 but zero organic traffic.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Use DA and DR as supplementary metrics but not as the core of your SEO strategy. Make it a priority to produce excellent, user-focused content that inevitably gets backlinks.
4. Neglecting Search Intent
One of the most common SEO mistakes is ignoring the importance of search intent. I always say that if SEO is the God, search intent is the demigod.
Every query a user types into a search engine has a specific intent behind it. The content you produce won’t rank if it doesn’t follow the intent behind the keywords you’re targeting. The lack of user relevance will result in high bounce rates.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Before creating any content, analyze the SERPs for your target keyword. What types of pages are currently ranking? Are they blog posts, product pages, or landing pages? This will give you insights into the dominant intent behind that keyword.
Pro tip: Nailing the search intent solves 95% of your on-page SEO problems. Since you focus on answering the user query, you answer the main problem immediately. You also use natural variations of the main keyword without stuffing keywords. All these practices help you rank higher while avoiding any mispractices.
5. Not Updating Old Content
Many websites focus on pumping out new content while ignoring the value of updating and optimizing existing content. Content updates account for 20% of SEO work and 80% of the results.
When we say blogging is all about evergreen content, it really means keeping the content relevant by refreshing it every 6-12 months.
A lot happens during this period, which, when added to the existing content, makes it more relevant and thus helps you rank better.
For example: Consider an article on how to cope with Google updates. Though the basics stay the same, some changes are natural with each update. Thus, it’s important to update your article as well.
If not, your competitors will cash on the opportunity and outrank you.
| Suggested reading: How to generate income through blogging by following the best practices
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Perform a content audit to identify older posts that could use updating. Add new information, case studies, data, or insights to make them relevant again. Republishing refreshed content can extend its lifespan and boost its SEO potential.
Here’s my detailed guide explaining how to identify which posts to choose for updating.
6. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place on the web, either on your own website or across different domains. Search engines find it difficult to determine which version to rank, and as a result, duplicate content can hurt your SEO.
Common Sources of Duplicate Content:
- Product pages with very similar descriptions.
- Blog posts copied across multiple websites.
- URL parameters creating multiple versions of the same page.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
- Use canonical tags to signal to Google which version of a page should be indexed. Tools like Screaming Frog can help identify duplicate content issues on your site.
- Avoid creating multiple product pages for varitions of the same product.
- Avoid adding similar content on your blog posts and landing pages.
7. Not Creating Topic Clusters
Topic clusters are a content strategy where you focus on a broad subject (pillar content) and support it with several smaller, related articles (cluster content). The pillar content covers the main topic comprehensively, while the cluster content dives deeper into subtopics that support or expand on the pillar.
These clusters are linked together, sending strong internal linking signals to search engines, which helps boost overall site authority and ensures the content is more discoverable.
Using topic clusters create topical authority which is an important factor search engines use to determine the webiste quality. A single page can’t answer every query or cover all aspects of a broad subject. By creating topic clusters, you’re able to cover a wide variety of related queries and position your website as a go-to resource for that topic.
Not using clusters reduces your website’s performance, limits comprehensive content, reduces rankings and generates a poor user experience.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
When doing keyword research, identify topics to write content for instead of only keywords. Create pillar and content pages and allocate different keywords under each cluster. Focus on creating all-round and in-depth content by answering user queries in detail.
| Suggested reading: How to create keyword clusters
8. Assuming every content needs to be SEO optimized
This is one of the mistakes I made when I started blogging. Thinking every piece of content is created to rank on the first SERP leads to over-optimization, which only backfires.
Any website produces a lot of content—case studies, interviews, webinars, podcasts, and much more. Not all of it aligns with search intent and does not need to rank.
These content pieces mostly help you nurture an existing audience, not create a new one. The existing audience already knows you, and there are multiple channels (for example, email marketing) to update them about the new content release.
Instead of spending resources optimizing every content on the website, focus on the one that needs to be so you get better results.
9. Pushing Out Low-quality AI content in bulk
This mistake aligns with the one I discussed earlier about producing content for the sake of it. AI content creation has become the norm, and I don’t see a problem with using AI to aid or speed up content creation.
But that doesn’t justify putting out low-quality content in bulk in the hopes of getting it ranked. Low-quality content won’t get ranked, period.
Even Google says it has no problem with AI content; it objects to spammy or poor content.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
The right way to use AI, you ask?
Here’s a few I use myself:
- Brainstorming ideas to find what “extra” you can add to make the content really supreme
- Using AI to write the mundane parts of articles, such as definitions or filler sentences, while keeping the real stuff for human writers
- Asking AI to analyze the written content and find gaps based on E-E-A-T guidelines
- Using premium AI tools such as Perplexity to find research data that aligns with your content
Thanks to AI, the content space has already become saturated and will continue to be so. The Humans + AI formula will lead to success.
10. Over-Reliance on Technical SEO
Another mistake I frequently see is an over-reliance on technical SEO. Your website should be technically sound, but SEO isn’t just about the nuts and bolts. While things like page speed, schema markup, and sitemaps are essential, they won’t drive growth on their own.
Many companies get stuck in a cycle of constant technical tweaks. They update title tags, tweak meta descriptions, and implement structured data but fail to realize that these changes are only incremental. Over time, these little technical updates stop driving consistent growth because a more holistic strategy does not back them.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Ensure your site is technically optimized, but don’t over-prioritize it.
In the universe of SEO, strategy is the big bang. Invest more time in content strategy, keyword research, and user experience improvements, which often have a larger impact on SEO success.
11. Targeting Keywords That Require More Authority Than You Have
Another crucial mistake businesses make is targeting high-competition keywords too early.
Ranking for a high-competition keyword is difficult if your site doesn’t have sufficient authority yet. Google tends to favor well-established sites for competitive terms.
Though Google has decided to reward quality content regardless of the website authority, targeting very high-competition keywords isn’t a sound decision for small businesses.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
With each keyword comes an opportunity cost. You can’t afford not to get content ranked after investing time into it. So, start by targeting low-competition, long-tail keywords.
These keywords typically have lower search volumes but are easier to rank for. As you build authority by ranking for these terms, you can gradually aim for more competitive keywords.
12. Relying Too Much on SEO Plugins
SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank Math are helpful tools, but many marketers overrely on them to handle their SEO. They’re not a substitute for a well-rounded SEO strategy.
All green lights on these plugins don’t mean you have a flawless SEO strategy. I always get a lower-than-expected keyword density for my articles, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t optimized for keywords. These tools only look for the primary keywords, but we know better to optimize for the semantic keywords, right?
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
SEO plugins focus on optimizing individual pages, but they can’t guide you on the bigger picture of content strategy, keyword targeting, or link building. Plugins are great for handling the basics, but they won’t do the heavy lifting of ensuring your site is positioned for long-term success.
13. Checking SERPs 10x a Day and Taking Rankings for Granted
It’s easy to obsess over your rankings, I’ve been there, too. But constantly checking SERPs is a mistake. Not only does it waste time, but rankings fluctuate regularly due to numerous factors, including algorithm updates, seasonal trends, and competitor activity.
Fixating on daily ranking fluctuations leads to short-term thinking. You may panic when you see a ranking drop and make hasty decisions that do more harm than good. SEO is a long-term game, and it’s crucial to look at trends over time rather than focusing on daily changes.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Focus on tracking broader trends over weeks and months rather than obsessing over daily positions.
Understand that rankings will naturally fluctuate and that long-term improvements come from a consistent and strategic SEO approach.
14. Not Combining SEO and Content Marketing
SEO is always evolving, and it will change significantly in the next 5-10 years. Only doing the technical part of SEO won’t suffice. Going forward, you’d need to use content marketing together with SEO.
Understanding user behavior, crafting content strategies that match user needs, and knowing how to convert an audience will define the success of SEO. Hence, the a need to make content marketing and SEO work together.
SEO brings traffic, but it’s your content that engages visitors and turns them into leads or customers. Traffic, rankings, or clicks alone won’t help much if you can’t master the science of conversions.
15. Forgetting to Prune Content
Google’s Helpful content update introduced a site-wide signal to check content quality. A bunch of poor content pages on your site can affect the entire site’s performance.
There’s a solution to avoid it all. It’s content pruning.
Websites generate vast amounts of content over time, not all of which stay useful. Why not prune that content instead of letting these pages hurt your site?
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Here are some ways you can prune content:
- Right away, delete the blog post. It’s simple and direct.
- Merge the content into a better blog post on a similar or related topic. It’s possible if you’re rightfully leveraging topic clusters. Then add a 301 redirect from the old blog post to the new one.
Conduct a content audit at least once a year. Identify pages that no longer serve a purpose and either update or remove them. An easy way for that is to find the pages with fewer clicks.
This will ensure that your site remains lean, relevant, and optimized for search engines. Here’s a video by Matt Diggity that explains content pruning in depth.
16. Forgetting Semantic SEO
When we talk about helpful and useful content, we think at the semantic level. As search engines get better, they prioritize pages that deliver thorough, relevant responses to user searches.
Semantic SEO is about understanding and optimizing for the meaning underlying search searches, not just the keywords themselves. This way, you can show the search engines that your information benefits the users.
Semantic SEO allows you to create content that covers related topics and subtopics, providing a more complete answer to user questions. It also helps avoid keyword stuffing through the natural use of semantic and LSI keywords.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
Use tools like Google’s People Also Ask feature and related search suggestions to identify semantic variations of your target keywords. To improve relevance, ensure that your content answers related questions and addresses multiple aspects of a topic.
The new SEO is about letting Google know that your content answers the user’s intent. The focus is on content depth, relevance, and user satisfaction which is achieved through semantic SEO.
17. Not Targeting ICP-Based Keywords
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) keywords are terms that directly align with your ideal customer’s needs and pain points. Many marketers focus on high-traffic or popular keywords, which may not always resonate with your target audience.
Popular keywords might bring you traffic but not conversions. To do that, you need to understand what your ICP is really searching for. Focus on the common phrases or seed keywords your ICP often searches for. Research their pain points.
For example: If you’re a business coach, an ICP-based keyword can be “How to start a side-business while working a 9-5.” It’s directly aligned with a high-priority pain point of your ICP.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
- Create accurate buyer personas to guide your research.
- Focus on terms that align with their specific pain points, industry jargon, and search behaviors.
- Don’t be afraid to explore zero-volume keywords if they fit into the ICP-based keywords category. Though they have less search volume, they have the potential to bring conversions.
18. Thinking SEO is limited to only Google
Not just SEO, the entire search is changing. One big predictation is that Google might not remain at the centre of the searches. With AI on the rise and tools like Search GPT coming in the play and also the fluctuating nature of Google, it is possible that organic search world would shift.
Traffic might be low for all but conversions would be steady. But it’ll hold true for those who evolve with the evolving nature of search.
You need to widen your scope from Google to other search engines. Bing search has become more relevant after integrating with Microsoft Copilot. They’re focusing on precision searching and user experience.
Overall, many solutions are coming up that can defeat Google, so those who stay relevant will be those who don’t rely only on Google.
How to avoid this SEO mistake?
- Leverage other search engines like Bing
- Focus on answering conversional queries as most AI search tools rely heavily on conversational search queries
- Focus on user intent across platforms
- Diversify content distribution channels
- Build a brand outside of Google on social media and through branded content
| Suggested reading: Does your business really need SEO?
Conclusion: Steps Ahead
Now that you know the common SEO mistakes to avoid, march on to create a content that meets your business goals.
Keep your audience at the center of your SEO strategy and only take actions that aling with your busienss goal. That’s the ultimate way to enusre you only get benefits from your SEO strategy.
Remember that SEO is every-changing. Those who adapt with the changes go far without hiccups.
