Have you spent months doing website SEO and still not getting the desired results? Don’t worry, it happens to the best and most experienced Search Engine Optimization experts occasionally. Sometimes several errors go unnoticed, despite trying our best. The seemingly minor problems can be major in the eyes of Google and may even prevent your website from coming into the rankings.

If you are facing a similar situation, there may be several problems that may be plaguing your website. Let us look at some of the website SEO problems and mistakes that you might need to take care of.

Common SEO errors that hurt rankings

Issue 1: Not Using Google’s Tools For Tracking Website SEO Status

Not paying adequate attention to Google Search Console and Google Analytics regularly will mean that you will always have to guess how your site is doing in search rankings. It will also make it extremely difficult to get a ranking in the first place and also to recover if the ranks drop.

Solution

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are two of the most important weapons in any webmaster’s armory. Both can be used for free, and it just takes minutes to set up an account and get your website verified. Google Search Console will give you a ton of inputs regarding essential website SEO data like crawl errors, server problems, structured data errors, and the indexation status of the website. Google Analytics will give you site metrics which will help you to understand from where the visitors are flowing in and what the yearly, monthly, and daily traffic has been. It will also give you insights into how they interact with your website.

If you notice a sudden drop in traffic, Google Analytics should be the first tool you should use to find out the pattern of the drop, and also for identifying the pages which have been hurt the most. Thereafter, log on to Google Search Console and find out whether any apparent issues are affecting the pages or the site overall. When you use both tools simultaneously, SEO becomes more focused and in many cases, the trial-and-error process drops significantly.

Apart from Google Analytics, you can also use any of the many other free and premium analytics tools for website SEO.

Issue 2: Featuring Low-Quality Or Copied Content

This may happen if you have deliberately, or inadvertently copied large chunks of text or entire posts from another website or have created very low-quality content which serves no purpose altogether. There have been millions of words written on this matter, which was a rampant practice at some point in time. Google came up with a major algorithm update called Penguin to specifically discourage this practice.

This is a case of blatant plagiarism, and no search engine worth its salt will encourage this. Not only will the page be penalized for being spammy, but repeated instances of plagiarism will get your website blacklisted altogether. Not surprisingly, since Penguin, the Internet has become a much better place to be.

Solution

While creating a website page or blog post, never copy content from anywhere. While it is perfectly okay to research finding out facts and figures that you can include in your post, do not lift content from other websites. Use a tool like Copyscape to check the content for originality before posting. If you are looking for a free alternative to Copyscape, then you can use the Duplichecker Plagiarism Checker.

Issue 3: Using Keywords That No One Searches For

If you have created a blog post or an entire page around keywords that no one is even looking for, or have omitted the keyword altogether, then SEO will suffer badly. By keywords that no one is looking for, I mean keywords that have low or no traffic at all.

Solution

The easiest way to work around this problem is to do thorough keyword research before even writing the first word. If you do not already know, then look at this post by HubSpot on How To Do Keyword Research for understanding how to do keyword research thoroughly.

Issue 4: Images Are Not Optimized

If you have put images with large file sizes on your website, the pages will take a long time to load. Page load speed is a critical factor for SEO rankings, so you need to pay attention to this factor. Also, if the image titles and ALT tags are missing, then the page rankings may drop.

Solution

Check the performance of the site through the Google Pagespeed Insights Tool. Google will not only tell you whether the images need to be optimized or not, but it will also give you the optimized versions of the images in a zip file. You just need to replace the existing images on the webserver with these optimized versions, and the Page speed score will improve.

Issue 5: Improper Navigation Structure.

A website built with a clear navigational structure helps the users to find their way to different pages, and the search crawlers to index the site well. Unless the site is crawled properly, most pages will not even be known to Google, let alone be ranked properly.

Solution

There are two possible solutions to this website SEO problem. The first involves the installation of the proper links to every page. Start by doing a thorough audit of the hierarchical structure of your website by analyzing the site map carefully. Find out whether all the pages are linked either through the main navigational menu or from any of the other pages. If you find any orphan pages, then install the necessary hyperlinks. At the end of this exercise, you need to ensure that all the pages of your website are properly interwoven. Once done, submit the fresh site map in Google Search Console and request for a fresh indexation by Google.

Issue 6: Duplicate Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

If you repeat the SEO title tags and meta descriptions on multiple pages or posts, invariably they will fight against each other for better rankings. This is going to reduce the chances of any individual page ranking high in search results. If you have a website that has been in existence for a long time, then different people may have created content over the years, and keywords, meta titles, and meta descriptions might have been repeated.

Solution

Ensure that the title tags and meta descriptions of every page are unique, and never repeat them. The other thing to ensure is no keyword should be repeated on the same website. Conduct a thorough SEO audit to detect such instances, and immediately take steps to make the SEO parameters of every page unique. Screaming Frog is a great tool for finding out these errors.

If you think that these website SEO problems are difficult to identify and rectify on your own, contact us for a free SEO audit that will pinpoint the problems that might be plaguing your site. We are experienced in handling websites of all sizes and would love to hear from you.

In the meanwhile, share this article for the benefit of your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or want to share your experience, comment here.