website SEOWebsite Traffic
SEO is an evolving discipline. It’s constantly in a state of flux.
Case in point: Google has already rolled out four major algorithm updates in 2023 so far.
To stay ahead of the game and outrank your competitors in search results, you need to follow the SEO best practices and also follow the current trend to ensure your rankings don’t drop.
Here are the 15 most common SEO mistakes in 2023 and the actionable steps you can take to fix them.
Table of Contents
If you want to rank your pages on Google, you need to create content that aligns with search intent (aka user intent).
In fact, user intent is so important that the phrase is mentioned 333 times in Google’s Quality Raters Guidelines (QRG).
All the top-ranking pages pass Google’s litmus test of creating the exact type of content that searchers are looking for.
So, as a content creator, one of the most common SEO mistakes you can make is by creating content that doesn’t satisfy search intent.
Understanding the search intent of a query is the secret sauce that helps content creators rank their pages on top of Google SERPs.
For example, a user who searches for “buy iPhone 15 online” on Google is looking for sites where they can order iPhone 15 online. The intent here is to buy, not to learn about the features of iPhone 15.
Google understands the intent here. Hence the SERPs for this query are filled with eCommerce pages where people can buy the latest iPhone or listicles of websites where people can order the latest iPhone online.
A mistake that many content creators make is targeting the wrong keywords. And in most cases, these keywords are wrong because the interpretation of search intent for these keywords is wrong.
Which is why inferring the search intent of your target keywords is one of the primary things you should be doing before you start creating content.
Typically, there are four types of search intent:
Here are some examples for each type of search intent:
Semrush is one of the few keyword research tools that shows the search intent of the keywords you’re targeting. So, make sure you pay attention to this information when you’re researching keywords on Semrush.
(Side note: If you aren’t using
Here’s how you can check search intent for keywords on Semrush:
To learn more about search intent and how to optimize your content for search intent, check out Search Intent and SEO: The Ultimate Guide.
One of the most common SEO mistakes marketers make is overlooking goal-setting.
When it comes to SEO, setting the right SEO goals is super important. Since SEO’s ROI is in the long run, content creators and SEO professionals often make the mistake of ignoring SEO goals.
Here’s the harsh truth: Without setting SEO goals, you’re unlikely to achieve concrete results.
By setting the right SEO goals, you can bring more clarity and focus to your SEO strategy.
To that end, Ahrefs recommends setting a pyramid-based SEO goal structure.
Here’s what the SEO goal pyramid looks like:
And here’s how you can use it:
Use a spreadsheet to clearly define your goals and to keep track of your progress.
To learn more about setting the right SEO goals, refer to this post on SEO goals by Ahrefs.
Internal links are links from one page that point to other pages on the same website. From an SEO perspective, internal links are one of the ways Google discovers new content on a website.
According to Databox, a blog post should have 2-5 internal links.
That number seems about right, but it’s important not to go overboard with internal linking. Make sure the internal links are relevant and provide better context for your posts.
Internal linking may not be the flashiest part of SEO, but it’s crucial. Overlooking your website’s internal link structure is one of the biggest SEO mistakes to avoid.
Luckily, optimizing your internal link structure is one of the easiest SEO hacks you can do to improve your site’s SEO.
Here are some internal linking best practices you should follow:
A quick and easy way to transfer link value to a newly-published post is to link to it from a top-performing post on your site.
Use a tool like Semrush’s Backlinks Analytics tool to identify a list of the most linked-to pages on your site. Add a link in one of these posts to your recently-published article. But make sure the post is relevant to the topic.
The more descriptive your anchor text, the easier it is for Google to understand the page you’re linking to and for users to navigate your site. Avoid using generic anchor text like “click here” and “check this out.”
Orphan pages are pages with no internal links. If orphan pages are not listed in your sitemap, they won’t show up in search results. Use Semrush’s Site Audit tool to identify orphan pages on your site.
Make sure none of the important pages on your site are orphan pages.
This is why your recently-published post should always get some internal link juice from one of your top-ranking posts.
With Google Search Console, you can examine how your internal links are set up. You can also identify unimportant pages that have too many internal links pointing to them. Reduce the number of internal links to these pages and point them to important pages on your site.
Recommended reading: Internal Links for SEO: The Definitive Guide
Site speed is a critical factor that influences your site’s rankings. A site that loads faster also contributes to a superior user experience. After all, you wouldn’t want visitors on your site waiting around for pages to load.
According to Backlinko, pages on sites that load quickly rank significantly higher than pages on sites that load slowly.
One way you can speed up your website is to install a caching plugin. With a caching plugin, you can significantly reduce your load time and improve your Google PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals scores.
If you use WordPress, there’s a variety of free and paid caching plugins available on the market.
The three most popular free caching plugins on WordPress are:
But if I were to offer my personal recommendation, it’d have to be WP Rocket. It costs $49/year, but makes a huge difference to your site speed.
So, if you can afford it, go for WP Rocket. If you’re just starting out, then go with any of the free caching plugins listed above.
Related: 19 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
46% of all Google searches are local.
If your business operates out of a single location or if most of your customers are from just one location, then optimizing for local search is a must.
Yet there are several businesses that haven’t even claimed their Google My Business (GMB) listing.
Claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing should be the starting step in optimizing your website for local search results.
Once you’ve done that, you can claim and optimize your Bing Places and Apple Maps listings.
Next, you can follow these local SEO best practices:
To help with the above recommendations, you can check out any of these local SEO tools to optimize your website for local search.
This may seem like an obvious point, but you’d be surprised to learn how many mainstream sites are not optimized for mobile.
Case in point: Here’s the mobile performance of The Washington Post:
You can have the best content in the world, but if your website is not mobile-friendly, you’re going to miss out on a large chunk of your target audience.
The importance of having a mobile-friendly website has only grown in recent years. Since Google’s “mobilegeddon” algorithm update, optimizing websites for mobile has become a priority for SEOs.
In 2019, Google announced mobile-first indexing, which means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.
So in order to stay relevant and beat your competitors in SERPs, you need to ensure your website delivers a fast and mobile-friendly user experience.
Here are some steps you can take to make sure your site is mobile-friendly:
An XML sitemap informs search engines about all the pages that exist on your website. Without a sitemap, Google may find it difficult to crawl and index all the pages on your website.
Which is why it’s important to create and optimize your XML sitemap to ensure Google discovers pages on your site faster.
If you use WordPress, then you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to generate a sitemap for your site.
Side note: Yoast isn’t just useful for generating your sitemap, but it’s the best WordPress SEO plugin you can use to improve your meta tags and fix other critical on-page SEO mistakes.
To generate an XML sitemap through Yoast SEO, navigate to:
SEO > General > Features
Just turn the “XML sitemaps” toggle on to generate your sitemap.
You can view your sitemap at yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml.
Another advantage of using Yoast is that it will automatically ensure all of the noindexed pages remain excluded from indexing.
Once your sitemap is ready, you need to submit it to Google Search Console.
Follow these steps to successfully submit your sitemap to Google:
Once your sitemap is submitted, Google will periodically scan your sitemap to find new pages.
Recommended reading: How to Create an XML Sitemap for Your Website (and Submit it to Google)
Evergreen content is a collection of articles on your blog that stay relevant for a long period of time. A good example of an evergreen post in the SEO space would be this beginner’s guide to link building by Ahrefs:
Or, take this post on the list of best books for entrepreneurs from our own blog:
Here’s the 3-step process you need to follow to create evergreen content:
If you want to shield your articles from periodic drops in organic traffic, then you need to update your posts and relaunch them at regular intervals.
It’s a solid SEO strategy that can guarantee higher search rankings. And yet, it’s often overlooked by most bloggers and SEOs because it involves revisiting old posts and updating them with fresh, relevant information.
But updating and relaunching your old posts is one of the most effective tactics to generate even more traffic for posts that are already getting a decent amount of search traffic.
In fact, using this tactic, I was able to boost organic traffic to one of my old posts by 146% and move its organic ranking from position #5 to position #1. You can read more about it in this SEO case study here:
Here’s the 5-step content update process that I follow to generate more traffic for old posts:
Visit your Google Search Console account to identify posts that have witnessed decline in organic traffic. You can do this by visiting the Search results report and clicking on date and choosing the “Compare last 6 months to previous period” filter. Sort the results by “Clicks difference” from low to high. Pick a post that has seen the highest decline in value.
Alternatively, you can use a free tool like Animalz Revive to identify underperforming blog posts.
This tool analyzes your Google Analytics data and provides a list of posts that need to be refreshed.
The next step is to update your content with new and fresh information. Check out some of your competitors’ posts on the same topic that are outranking you in SERPs. See what your article is currently missing — add unique insights, provide examples, and address more pain points. Add an FAQs section to your post to have a greater chance of ranking in Google’s featured snippets.
Don’t repeat your target keywords too many times. Instead, use keyword variations like related keywords or question-based keywords. Use a tool like Semrush to identify long-tail keyword variations for your target keywords.
Use images, screenshots, and videos to supplement your content. Make sure your updated content has new and improved visuals to improve user engagement.
Make sure you change the “published” date of the article to the current date. This updated date will be highlighted in SERPs.
I follow this 5-step process for cornerstone content on my blog once every three months. You can do the same to revive some of your older posts and breathe new life into them.
Recommended reading: Content Upgrade Strategy: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts to Get More Traffic
Here’s a simple question you need to ask yourself before you start working on a new blog post: Are you writing on a topic that your audience likes or something that you like? If the answer to this question is latter, then you shouldn’t be disappointed when the post doesn’t generate any organic traffic.
I’ve had several clients at my digital agency who were under the impression they had the best ideas for blog posts in their niche. But when I did a bit of research on the topic, I found that the search volume for these keywords was either non-existent or too small to justify a blog post.
You may have the best intentions, but assuming that your audience is ready and eager to read anything you publish is just not a good practice.
One of the biggest SEO mistakes you can make is try to create content without identifying the most popular topics and subtopics through keyword research first. I’ve noticed a lot of startups and small businesses falling prey to this fallacy and it’s amongst the most common SEO mistakes small businesses must avoid.
There’s no easy way to put this: In order to rank higher in search results, you need to master keyword research.
While you can get a ton of valuable insights from free Google tools like Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll miss out on key insights if you don’t subscribe to premium SEO tools.
To that end, I’d recommend two SEO tools that are perfect for keyword research out of a plethora of premium SEO tools on the market: Semrush and Serpstat.
Semrush is, hands down, the best keyword research tool on the market.
Semrush’s ability to conjure up keywords and offer data on competitor and question-based keywords is second to none. With over 20 billion keywords and 142 geo databases,
Whether you’re looking for quick keyword data or deeper keyword research data like keyword variations and advanced keyword research,
Sign up for a 14-day free trial of
There’s only one drawback: Since
If you’re looking for a budget-friendly SEO tool that’s best for keyword research and not too heavy on the pockets, then you should go for Serpstat. The basic plan of Serpstat is priced at $50/month.
Try Serpstat free for 7 days
If you’d like a deeper understanding of how to get the best out of both these tools, check out their in-depth reviews below:
You can’t expect to rank on top of SERPs for your target keywords without building high-quality backlinks. Especially if there is stiff competition for those keywords.
Link building remains one of the most challenging aspects of SEO. But there is a link building method that is relatively easy: link reclamation.
Link reclamation is the process of converting brand mentions into backlinks. Since it’s so easy to do, it’s also easy to ignore or procrastinate over. And failing to convert brand mentions into backlinks can make you miss out on some of the most authoritative backlinks your site can obtain.
Here’s how it works:
Need an example of how link reclamation works? Below is a link reclamation email I received from Canva:
Needless to say, I added a link back to Canva. In most cases, it’s as simple as that.
So don’t miss out on an opportunity to get easy backlinks.
You may be asking yourself: Are title tags and meta descriptions still considered important? The answer is yes.
Title tags remain the second most important on-page ranking factor, after content. On the other hand, while meta descriptions are not a direct ranking signal, they do impact your organic click-through-rate (aka organic CTR).
When it comes to title tags, it’s best to heed Google’s advice:
Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality title text on your web pages.
Here are some title tag best practices to keep in mind:
Pro Tip: Use a free tool like Headline Analyzer to create compelling title tags for your blog posts.
Next, let’s examine meta descriptions.
Here’s what Google says about meta descriptions:
A meta description tag generally informs and interests users with a short, relevant summary of what a particular page is about. They are like a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.
Here are some meta description best practices you should follow:
Since both these meta tags influence organic CTR, it’s important that you spend some time crafting the best possible title tags and meta descriptions for your posts.
Recommended reading: Meta Tags for SEO: The Definitive Guide
Think back to the last few websites you visited. In all likelihood, in most cases you were greeted by an annoying popup as soon as you landed on their page. This intrusive practice is all too common on the web.
A lot of marketing blogs are guilty of using intrusive popups to capture email addresses and I confess I’ve been guilty of using them in the past as well.
This is a problematic trend that’s not just restricted to the online marketing industry anymore. Even reputed publications like The New Yorker and The Economist are guilty of this intrusive practice:
While it’s important to build your email list, it shouldn’t be done at the cost of user experience. Doing so will lead to pogo-sticking (a situation where a user quickly navigates back to the SERPs after landing on your page), which will ultimately derail your rankings.
So what’s the solution?
An easy solution would be to get rid of popups and email capture forms entirely. But that’s not practical advice. As marketers, building an email list is crucial.
Here’s the truth: It’s not the popups themselves that are annoying. It’s the timing of those popups.
For that reason, I’d recommend you use exit-intent popups.
This is how an exit-intent popup works:
GIF Credit: OptinMonster
As you can see above, these popups get activated when a user decides to leave your website. As a result, they are the least intrusive type of popups out there.
This is a controversial opinion, and I know a lot of marketers who would advocate getting rid of popups entirely. But building an email list is one of the most effective ways to promote your content and grow your audience. As such, I’d suggest you use exit-intent popups to build your list.
All the leading email capture tools allow you to enable this option with their popups. Here are some of the best email capture tools you can choose from.
The most effective way to ensure you’re on the right track is to track the progress of your content marketing and SEO efforts.
Once you’ve set your SEO goals (see #2), you need to keep a track of the most important SEO metrics.
To that end, data and insights generated via analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console are crucial to staying at the top of your game.
Yet there are some marketers who downplay the importance of analytics and disregard key data in their analytics reports.
Ignoring important SEO metrics can prove detrimental to your site’s rankings.
As such, it’s imperative that you keep a tab on your site’s performance.
In the context of SEO, here are the 10 most important performance metrics that are worth tracking:
To learn more about these metrics and the best ways to track them, check out our in-depth post on SEO metrics.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It first became a part of the SEO lexicon when Google released its Search Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) in 2015.
In the document, Google specifically stated that E-A-T is one of the most important factors that it looks into while evaluating the overall quality of webpages.
In fact, E-A-T is so critical to Google that the term has been mentioned 186 times in the QRG document.
So how do you demonstrate E-A-T with your content? We have already discussed three ways you can do that: pay attention to search intent, content upgrade, and keyword research (refer to tips discussed in mistake #1, #mistake #9, and mistake #10 respectively.)
In addition to these tips, here are some more ways you can demonstrate E-A-T with your content and rank higher on Google:
Recommended reading: Google E-A-T: How to Create Content That Ranks Higher on Google
Avoid the aforementioned SEO mistakes like the plague and you should see drastic improvements in your search rankings.
To summarize, here’s a quick recap of all the mistakes in my “SEO: What Not to Do” list:
Have you been guilty of any of these common SEO mistakes? What other major SEO faux pas do you think should be added to this list? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Editor’s Note: This article was first published on March 19, 2022 and has been updated regularly since then for relevance, freshness, and comprehensiveness.
Related Articles
[…] strategy. However, there are some common mistakes that may make your efforts less impactful. Check out this 99signals post by Sandeep Mallya to learn which errors to […]
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
Hi there, I’m Sandeep Mallya!
I’m an entrepreneur and digital marketing consultant from Bangalore, India. I founded my own digital agency, Startup Cafe Digital, in 2015 to help SMBs leverage SEO, social media, and content marketing to grow their traffic and generate qualified leads for their business.
I launched 99signals in 2016 as a side project to document all the strategies, tools, and tactics that I was using to grow my small agency. The goal was simple: to arm other entrepreneurs and bloggers with all the right information and tools they needed to launch a successful online business.
Since then, 99signals has grown significantly and generates over $10,000 in side income each month. Read More about “About Sandeep Mallya”…
A few links on this blog are affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service through one of these affiliate links, I’ll receive a commission at no additional cost to you.
Rest assured, I recommend only those tools that I personally use and genuinely trust. In most cases, you’ll find in-depth reviews, tutorials, and how-to guides of these tools on my blog to help you make informed decisions.