- As an SEO agency, we look at a lot of different websites,
but there's 10 common SEO mistakes that constantly come up.
So let's talk about them in today's video.
(upbeat music)
The first common SEO mistake that we see is
a lot of people have this issue with their images.
Now, believe it or not,
images actually play a big role in your website's SEO.
Now, I'm not just particularly talking about
the size of the image or to reduce it so that
it fits in perfectly,
but what I'm actually talking about here is the file name
of your images on the alt tag of your images.
Common file names are for images on websites specifically
that we're looking at,
and we've looked at a lot of different websites,
they're usually nonsense.
Now what I mean by that is it might be something such as
6074913.jpeg
or img_1078.png
or something along those lines.
That doesn't mean anything to anybody.
It doesn't mean anything to a search engine,
but believe it or not,
Google sees all of this sort of stuff.
They actually are looking at this as they go behind
the scenes on your website and crawl your website.
Now, if those particular images are on a particular page
that you're trying to rank for a primary keyword, well,
what you should do is you actually use those keywords for
the filing of that image before it's uploaded
to your website.
That brings us onto the other image issue,
which is alt tag.
So the alt tag is what you actually can put there
for accessibility reasons on your website,
or if the image failed to load for whatever reason.
Now, the alt tag should actually describe to people
what the image is.
It shouldn't just be somewhere to stuff your keywords.
However, if you're clever enough,
you can find the good balance of describing
what the image is,
as well as having some important keywords in there also.
The next issue that we usually come across
is low backlink quality.
Now, a website may have thousands and thousands
of links pointing to it.
However, when we compare it to the competitors
who are ranking for lucrative keywords, well,
usually it's a case of other competitors have more relevant
and alternative backlinks pointing to the website.
Now there is several ways of actually obtaining strong
and relevant links to your website.
And that helps to what's known as your off page SEO.
So Google is not only looking at what's
on your home website,
but believe it or not,
anyone who has mentioned you and links to you,
Google actually gets signals from that as well.
Now, as I mentioned,
when we were doing some research about
these four particular different companies,
we can actually do some competitor research on the backlinks
of competitors who are already ranking.
This means that we can see the exact people who are linking
to them.
And if it's a relevant link,
that means more than likely
if they've mentioned your competitor
on their own bias company, they're more likely happy
to mention you as well.
The next issue,
and it's a very big issue, falls under technical SEO.
And that is not resolving your 404 errors.
Basically, meaning you have broken links on your website.
Now we did actually do a recent video,
all about broken links and 404 errors,
how they usually come about and how they can be resolved.
But the reason we wanted to put it into this video also
and include it in this most common SEO problem list
is because it is extremely common.
We say this all the time,
with every single website that we look at.
In a nutshell,
what we'd recommend is doing a crawl of your website
every single morning to make sure that no broken links
have occurred.
If broken links have occurred while usually it only takes
a moment or so to resolve those broken links.
The next problem that we usually find is overuse
of redirect hops.
Now, what the hell is a redirect hop?
Well, basically if you have a website
and you are linking to a page that no longer exists,
if that's the case and you haven't changed it,
it will lead to a 404,
like we mentioned a moment ago,
but if you've been smart enough and implemented a redirect,
that means that when someone clicks that link
or when a search engine follows that link,
they're not going to go to a dead page,
they're going to go with either similar content
or content that essentially can replace the older page
that no longer exists.
However, one thing that we find when people even
are smart enough and clever enough to implement
the 301 redirect
is that in some cases they can go and do,
what's known as several hops.
So it goes to this page and then redirects to this page
and then back to this page and so on and so forth.
We've also seen a case several times where,
when someone implements a redirect,
they actually redirect the website to an insecure version of
their website, which is quite odd.
However, most websites,
especially WordPress websites are smart enough
to automatically register that
you're sending someone to an insecure version
of your website,
and then you'll be redirected to a secure version.
However, this time means you have several hops in the chain.
So first of all, someone's clicked on a link that
you know doesn't exist anymore.
You've implemented a 301 redirect,
but it's actually after sending them to an insecure version
of the website.
So then your server and your system, it may be at WordPress
or whatever it may be then has to redirect them again
to the secure version of the page
that you wanted to send them to.
So just like we mentioned a moment ago,
that you should crawl your website at least once a month
to check for 404s,
you can do this also to check for 301 redirects as well.
The next common SEO issue that we see a lot
is leaving pages set to what's known as no index.
Basically, this means that you've gone ahead
and you created a page
and you've put a lot of time and effort into it,
and it could have a lot of optimization dorm
with different keywords and headings and images
and whatever it may be,
but the page is set to no index.
Now, usually this issue occurs because
when someone is creating that page
they want on their website to be optimized,
they'll set it as no index,
and then once the page is fully optimized,
then they'll set it to index again.
Basically,
if you do have a website and a page is set to no index,
this means that when search engines such as Google start
to crawl your website, your website is essentially saying,
don't have a look at this page,
don't put it in your search results.
And if it's a page that you've spent
a lot of time optimizing,
you obviously want Google to index it,
and to show it in search results.
So if there is an important page that you spent
a lot of time and effort on optimizing,
make sure it is set to index for search engines.
Now, speaking of indexing,
something that we also see as an SEO mistake,
and this can be
a very big mistake is leaving your staging site as indexible
in Google.
Now, however, as an SEO agency,
this helps us quite a lot because that means if competitors
have done that, which we've seen many times,
we can actually see what your competitors are planning to do
on their website,
what they're planning to publish
before they've actually published it to the public.
Now, the reverse of this is also true,
meaning that if you have a staging site and you've left it
as indexible in Google or your web development team has,
or whoever, that means that your competitors are able to see
what you're planning to do,
what content you're planning to release,
what new products that you are planning to release.
They can see all that before your website has been pushed to
the public.
So if you do have a staging site of your website,
I'd highly recommend to make sure that it's set
to no index for search engines.
Another big issue we see in regards
to SEO mistakes people make is
trying to rank for a keyword
but not having a page dedicated to that keyword.
You know as an example,
we've actually had several different people come to us
on consultation calls on say the main number one keyword
that we want to rank for is XYZ.
Now, when we have a look at the keyword research
on the search intent,
it actually does make a lot of sense for them to rank for
that particular keyword,
but they don't know why they're not ranking.
So when we ask,
"Okay, what page are you trying to rank for that?"
It's usually just the website overall.
So what we would always recommend is that
is if there's a particular keyword
that you're trying to rank for,
then have a dedicated learning page,
all about that particular keyword.
Bear in mind
one of the first things that Google is going to check is
when someone does a particular search query,
they want to send people to a website that has a page
all about that particular search term.
Now, if you want to see an example of this,
you can actually Google something such as simple as,
accounting software or, you know,
restaurants in Missouri or whatever it may be.
And I can guarantee that the majority of the people
who show up in the top 10 list
that have particular dedicated learning pages for it,
that might say /accounting software,
/software for accountants, whatever it may be.
There'll be pages dedicated to that specific keyword.
Now, another mistake that we see quite often is that
you're not using an SSL certificate,
basically, meaning that your website is not secure.
Now, luckily enough, in most cases,
websites are smart enough to automatically redirect somebody
to the secure version of your website.
However,
we were dealing with a well-known restaurant chain recently,
and when we were auditing their website,
every single link was insecure.
Now, when we went back to them,
we said this, they said,
"No, the website's only brand new,
it's two months old.
We just need to optimize it.
But I'm 1,000% sure..."
And this was the digital marketing manager
we were speaking to.
They said that they were 1,000% sure that
the website was very secure.
So, after a bit of digging,
it turns out that they actually had two different versions
of their website.
They had an insecure version of the website
and every single link on that particular version
of the website was also insecure.
And they had a secure version of their website.
So what had happened was in the likes of their email folder,
where it links to their particular website,
that was an insecure link.
That's the link that we clicked on to all of the website,
but that was leading us to insecure link
after insecure link, after insecure link.
They also had quite a few backlinks that were also leading
to insecure versions of the website.
Their website didn't automatically redirect people
to the secure version of their website.
So that meant that every time that they themselves
were looking at their website in-house,
they were obviously seeing a secure version of the website
and couldn't find any insecure links.
So when we did say this to them,
we did advise through rep developers need to do X, Y,
and Z to make sure that their website automatically
redirects people to a secure version of the website.
The next really big issue that we see on websites in regards
to SEO mistakes is
not actually utilizing your real estate space
that you have for your meta information.
Now, what I mean by that is your meta title
and your meta description,
because this is actually what shows up
in a Google search result before anyone ever clicks
or sees your website.
Now, this is extremely important because
this is your opportunity
to tell people why they should click on you as opposed
to the nine or competitors who have also appeared
in the search results.
Now, what we see quite a lot to be honest is that
even home pages of websites,
it usually just has that person's brand name,
but that doesn't mean anything in this case,
unless that person already knows who you are,
and if they do a branded search for you,
you're more than likely going to show up first,
if it's your brand name,
but what you should be aiming for
is your other important keywords,
not just for your homepage,
but you need to have a unique meta description
and meta title for every single page on your website.
So what we always recommend is half the benefit.
And then what we'd also recommend is put your branding at
the end.
The branding,
even though you may be extremely important to you,
it might be something that you're very proud of,
the branding at this moment in time of a customer's journey,
it doesn't mean anything.
And I mean that with all due respect.
So I'd always recommend
have your feature or benefit first in your title,
and then have your branding at the end.
Another little bonus tip here is that
if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword
and you have that in your meta description,
and that's the keyword someone
has actually done a search for,
well if it's in Google results,
that word will actually show up as bold
in the Google search results then,
which helps you stand up even more in the search results.
Now, every single website in the world has the ability
to change these.
If you're using the likes of WordPress,
you can install a free plugin like Yoast, that's Y-O-A-S-T.
And that allows you to actually change your meta title
and your meta-description without
any coding knowledge whatsoever.
And the final big mistake that we see in regards
to people's SEO is that
they don't focus on providing a good user experience.
Now, user experience can fall under
a lot of different categories
especially with the likes of Google.
For example,
that might mean something such as how fast your page loads
and if that is the case
well, that might mean, you know,
loading something such as your images faster or getting
what's known as lazy loading images
so they actually only load when that person begins to scroll
your website, so it's not all trying to load at once.
So the page overall loads faster, something such as that,
but it also means user experience,
not just for search engines like Google,
but also for your actual human visitors.
So you do really need to put yourself in the shoes of
your particular ideal audience.
If they were doing a search term that you wanted
to appear for and they click on your website,
you have to then imagine, what did they want to see?
So it might be a case of bullet lists of different things
that you can do for them or solutions that you provide.
If it's something such as a blog article,
we are just kind of educating them and they only want to see
something such as this like 10 things you should
or shouldn't do in regards to X, Y, and Z,
whatever it may be,
but you really do need to put yourself in the shoes
of your human visitors and optimize for that.
We will always recommend optimize for humans first
and search engines second.
Always optimize for your human visitors first.
So that brings us to an end of today's video,
which was all about
the 10 most common SEO mistakes
that we see time and time again.
So if you find that you're doing any of these mistakes,
please do try and resolve them as quickly as possible.
And you will be rewarded by different search engines,
such as Google.
If you do have any questions or comments or perhaps,
or common SEO mistakes that you might see,
if you're part of an SEO agency,
please do leave any questions or comments below as we do
our very best to reply and respond to each and every one.
(indistinct) the end the video here.
Hopefully you've got a bit of value from this video.
I'm gonna speak again soon. Bye.