Search engine optimization is a powerful tool for your website, but it can be quite easy to make a small mistake and see your numbers dwindle—especially if you are new to it and not entirely sure how those actions influence search results. 

If you have been practicing SEO in your website, but are seeing disappointing numbers, here are a few common SEO mistakes people make and how to fix them. 

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to superfluous and frivolous mentions of a keyword query in an attempt to rank higher on search engines. Google defines keyword stuffing as any of following and more:

1. Lists of phone numbers irrelevant to the page’s content
2. Text blocks of cities and states that the webpage is trying to rank for
3. Repeating the same words or phrases so often that it sounds unnatural

Google and other search engines actually penalize pages which practice keyword stuffing. When it comes to long-tail keywords, it may feel like you need to write out the entire phrase exactly as it appears in the queries. However, search engines have also evolved to identify paraphrasing, so you don’t need to keyword stuff at all to get good rankings.

Instead, use keywords strategically

Using keywords in your headings, meta descriptions, SEO titles, and occasionally through the body of your text will do wonders for your SEO where keyword stuffing will fail. Plus, it will keep you in the search engine's good books, and not penalize your website. 

Lacking Analytical Data

The best way to succeed with SEO is to hypothesize and A/B test theories on what works and doesn't. However, without a means of tracking your attempts and taking time to carefully look through them, it defeats the purpose of using SEO altogether.

While you could do this by means of creating an excel spreadsheet to track changes to your website, the little changes you make that could be creating big splashes in your SEO score can get lost along the way. And, before you know it, you've lost sight of how that small change actually affected your website because your attributed it to another change.

We all know correlational data is important for making educated, informed decisions in the future. But how do you do it accurately with SEO, a moving target which seems to take months to start working? 

Instead, see with accuracy what works and what doesn't 

Using an analytical extension of search engines, such as Google Analytics, to get more information on your audience. This can include their demographics (age, region, related search terms, etc.) as well as the platform they are using, the internet browser they are using, and so on and so forth. While you may think this data is redundant, it certainly isn't; small details like how much of your traffic comes from phones vs. desktop can tell you if you need to make your pages more mobile-friendly. 

Focusing Just on Traffic

When it comes to SEO, we all want to heighten our visibility for certain keywords on search engines so more potential customers can discover our website. However, defining success in SEO and how it affects your bottom line can be tricky. It's important to remember that getting searchers to your website is just one step in a multi-step process.

What do you want your searchers to do once they get to the page? Do they book a class, or give you a call to learn more? If you don't give them an option to advance to the next step, they will likely just bounce off the page and head to the next site. Traffic isn't everything, and what you do in those moments you have their attention is crucial. 

Instead, widen your scope for search intent

Search intent tells us more about what the website visitors wants to gain from visiting the page—and not all types of search intent mean that they are in the market to spend money. Types of search intent include:

1. Informational: The searcher is looking for more information on a topic
2. Navigational: The searcher is trying to access a specific page or website
3. Transactional: The searcher wants to buy something
4. Commercial Investigation: The searcher wants more information before making a purchase

As you can see, some searchers intend to learn more about a subject, or even know which page they want to go to specifically. Understanding what it is about your page that attracts visitors will help you better understand how to define your goals for that piece of content and how to define what meeting and surpassing those goals looks like. 

Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are the pages on your website which are not linked to, and do not link to another page. They are essentially undiscoverable on your website, and serve no purpose if no searchers or website browsers are viewing them.

Orphan pages may still be discovered organically by visitors, but the reason they are generally frowned upon is because search engines see them as having little-to-no importance as a web page. For this reason, Google will penalize your entire website for their existence. 

Instead, leave no page on your website unlinked 

According to Yoast SEO, good linking looks like this:

“When you determine your link building strategy you should keep in mind: the reason links were invented was to send you off to pages you might enjoy as well. Use link building as a strategy for the growth of your website audience and place links on sites that will actually generate traffic to your own site.”

Good linking internally will also introduce website visitors to pages they may have never visited otherwise—a good plan if you ask us!

Creating Duplicate Content

The reason why duplicate content is not a great idea for improving your SEO score is because it can confuse search engines, who will not know which one to rank higher or give authority to.

According to Moz, duplicate content can present three main issues for search engines:

1. They don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices.
2. They don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link equity, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions.
3. They don't know which version(s) to rank for query results.

Instead, establish canonical linking for one of the pages

A website crawl will tell you if you have pages with duplicate content, which you can decide what to do with after conducting one. If you do have two similar pages, you can set one up as the canonical link to ensure search engines only rank one of them. 

Ignoring Everything But On-Page SEO

So, you've integrated the keyword you want to rank for into the text/headings, and you've included a few nice images to make the articles you just wrote a nice read. That's great, but what else are you doing to help your SEO score? Ask yourself the following:

1. How often am I updating my website?
2. How many other websites link back to mine?
3. How often is my content shared on social media?
4. How much press am I getting?

Instead, consider all factors that influence SEO

The answers to these questions will help you build on your off-site SEO scores, which are largely affected by how many other websites link back to yours and by how up-to-date your content is. 

SEO is also affected largely by who links to your pages. Backlinking to websites with high authority, and internal linking between your pages, tells search engines valuable information on how your content is related to one another, and to other websites. However, it is now everything as having great content will lead the way to an optimal SEO score. 

Lacking Consistency Across Your Website

You may not think much of your websites small details, such as URLs, parent categories, image names, and so on. But all of these, if not consistently named, can wreak havoc on your SEO score. 

Consistency is a great contributing factor in many digital activities, and SEO is no exception. If your content is consistently updated, consistently linked-through, and consistently shared, it will garner a good score—no doubt about it. 

Instead, create a style guide for naming conventions

Naming conventions are in general a great practice for all marketing materials so that collateral stays organized and easy-to-find for all members of the team. While it can be time-consuming to keep names correct on your website, it has great benefits in the long-run. Using keywords in images on your website will make them easy for image searches to find them. 

Competing With Your Own Pages On Search Engines

Finally, one of the biggest reasons ongoing assessment of your performance on search engines is to see if any of your topics are competing for the same keyword. It is a much more meaningful use of time to diversify your keyword reach and create content specifically for different keywords, instead of trying to clog up one search query with your content; SEO is about quality vs. quantity. 

Instead, consolidate duplicate content onto one page

If you have enough content on one subject, it may be a good idea to create one bigger landing page to serve as cornerstone content and send related links from your website back to this page.