5 Critical SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Rankings

5 Critical SEO Mistakes That Can Hurt Your Rankings.

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is an integral part of marketing, but many sellers still do not utilize its opportunities or understand how to use SEO correctly. The goal of SEO is to have your website pages show up when people are searching for the types of products and services that you sell.

Google is a leader in determining best SEO practices because it has over 92% of the global search engine market share. Basically, if you want people to find your business, you need to understand the factors Google uses to rank pages in its search engine results pages (known as SERPs).

If you don’t understand how to play by Google’s rules, then your website could languish far back in the search results, where no one ever goes. 

91% of people never go beyond page 1 of the Google search results.

If you aim to optimize your site and grow your sales, you need in-depth knowledge of SEO or work with a team that does and can help you with your business search optimization.  

While some SEO mistakes are less severe than others because they may not cause Google to punish you, a mistake remains a mistake regardless and needs to be avoided if you want a chance at driving leads and sales through your website.

Here, we’ll discuss five critical SEO mistakes that can affect your rankings.

1. Poor website design quality

Poor website design is a mistake that can be easily corrected with the proper guidelines. Sites that are not well-designed are ranked lower. Their rankings suffer because Google can detect that the site is not being well received by people that search it, who will hit the “back” button in a few seconds if they don’t like what they see. 

Google rates website quality using certain features such as:

  • User-friendliness: An essential factor that Google considers in website design is user-friendliness. This implies that the website needs to be easy to be, clear, with good font size, and use plenty of white space.
  • Mobile-friendly: Google expects your website design to be easily accessed using any device. Non-responsive sites are penalized in the ranking algorithm.

2. Absence of product description

Research shows that 30% of people who shop online in the US would refuse to purchase products based on poor product descriptions. In the same vein, Google will also penalize your site if dwell time is low – this is how long someone “dwells” on your site, basically shopping around.

Google’s Panda algorithm pays attention to the quality of content on your site. This means that it checks for grammar and spelling usage, the format of the text, subheadings, and the length of the content. 

If the content of your product description is poor, Google pushes it down further. This is also applicable when you do not provide any product description at all on your site.

3. Failing to optimize content for search queries

Most times, search engines index a site based on the search needs of the internet users. The search queries that internet users make use of are what are popularly known as keywords. 

Unfortunately, when your content is not optimized to suit the needs of what internet users are looking for, it will not be able to achieve visibility even if your business provides the right solutions to their problems. 

The keywords on each page should be unique to that page’s content. Companies often make the mistake of using a general keyword on every page. You rank better when keywords are tailored to the content on the page.

4. Using non-friendly URLs

Incomprehensible URLs are always confusing to users, and they may end up abandoning your site. If this continues for too long, it will affect your SEO and ranking. To avoid this type of situation, always use simple URLs that display your site’s keywords.

Your page about “blue filing cabinets” is going to rank much better if the URL has something like “blue-filing-cabinets” in it rather than a generic system-generated URL, like “page-23.”

5. Stuffing the keywords

Keywords are vital if you want to optimize your SEO. However, it becomes a problem when you stuff the keywords. This is what’s known as too much of a good thing.

In the early 2000s, it was an excellent strategy to stuff keywords on your site, until Google caught on and saw that this makes for a bad user experience. Unfortunately, a lot of people still think this strategy is effective. On the contrary, stuffing keywords is no longer effective. This is because it focuses only on using the keywords and ignores providing good content.

Now, Google only encourages excellent and creative content and keyword stuffing will be penalized. 

Get Your SEO Optimization on Point With Unbound Digital

SEO mistakes are not as painless as they may seem. These mistakes are costly and can get you penalized. When this happens, your business will be significantly impacted and unable to grow in the way you’d like. 

Implementing SEO best practices is a common way to generate traffic and grow your business. Need help in optimizing your website? Contact us at 423-467-7777 to help you achieve it.