Search engine optimization (SEO) is a strategy that demands attention to hundreds of different ranking factors, so it’s natural to feel overwhelmed. Fortunately, it’s easy to make up for small mistakes; if you forget about a small technical optimization, or if you write a blog post that isn’t on par with the rest of your exemplary work, it’s not going to cost you that much. As long as you’re paying attention to most important ranking factors, and are moving in the right direction, you’ll see good results.
However, there are some big-picture, impactful mistakes you could make that have the power to jeopardize your entire SEO strategy—no matter how long you’ve spent developing it.
Major SEO Mistakes to Avoid
These strategy-killing SEO mistakes could compromise your entire campaign:
Botching a migration
Migrating your website from one domain to a new one, or simply reconstructing your site, is a major change—and one that can benefit your company in the long run. However, there’s a massive SEO website migration checklist you’ll need to follow if you want to succeed. There are many things that could independently go wrong here; for example, old links pointing to your domain need to be updated, and you’ll need 301 redirects for all the links you missed. If you fail this step, you’ll be starting from scratch with no domain authority. Other mistakes, like failing to update your robots.txt file, could prevent your site from being crawled by Google’s search bots, or being listed in Google’s search index altogether.
Misdirecting your strategy
Your SEO strategy requires forethought and direction. It’s not enough to want to “rank higher” in general; you should know what you want to rank for, and who you’re going to be competing against. If you target keywords that are too competitive, you’ll end up burning through your budget with no meaningful results. If you target keywords that are irrelevant or low-volume, even a rank-one position may not be enough to warrant your efforts.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword research and keyword targeting are important elements to any SEO strategy, but some optimizers take it too far. Keyword stuffing is the practice of including an excessive number of specific keywords in the body of your written content, and sometimes in the architecture of your site. With Google’s advancements in semantic search, exact match keywords aren’t as important as they used to be—and egregious examples of keyword stuffing could end up getting your site penalized.
Writing thin content
Content remains at the heart of any SEO strategy, so when your content suffers, your entire strategy suffers with it. Bad content means you’re not going to attract valuable backlinks to your site. It means Google isn’t going to flag your site as trustworthy. It means the customers who do discover your site aren’t going to be interested in sticking around or buying products from you. The most common offender here is “thin” content; content that was written for SEO purposes only, offering little to no real value to readers. Write thin content often enough, and your entire campaign could collapse.
Spamming backlinks
Backlinks are the gateway to building your domain-level and page-level authority, which is vital if you want to rank. However, Google takes the quality of a backlink into consideration in its calculations; each link should appear natural and provide some kind of value to the users encountering it. If you mindlessly spam backlinks, it’s going to earn you a manual penalty, which could set your SEO campaign back for months, even if you correct the issue.
Getting cheap
“Getting cheap” is a catch-all term for any attempt to cut corners. SEO is a time-intensive and cost-intensive strategy that can offer a massive payoff—but if you work with disreputable agencies or try to hack your way to growth, it’s almost always going to work against you.
Failing to measure or analyze your results
If you aren’t measuring or analyzing your results, how can you be sure that your tactics are working? It’s important to get an idea of which tactics are performing and which ones aren’t. That way, you can adjust your strategy and keep improving. If you don’t gauge the numbers regularly, you could end up trapping yourself with strategies that aren’t really working.
Making Up for a Massive Mistake
In the SEO world, everything is constantly changing, so there’s no such thing as a permanent mistake. You may suffer significant setbacks in the meantime, but even in the wake of an egregious error, you can employ corrective action to set things right. Keep managing your SEO tactics to the best of your ability and keep moving in a positive direction.