5 (Small) Blunders That Are Killing Your SEO In This Year

Bad quality content, poor keyword optimization, low-quality backlinks…

You’ve heard of all these cliché SEO mistakes countless times. They are, of course, quite serious that should be heeded to. But then they are also very obvious.

In the hindsight, away from the spotlight, there are many “small” SEO mistakes that, at times, do just as much damage.

If you’re trying to gain a competitive edge on SERP and ace SEO, it’s essential that you - or your SEO company San Jose based you’re working with - pay equal attention to these small SEO mistakes.

What are they?

Here are 5 small blunders that are killing your SEO in this year:

1. Too Many Broken Links

For a large website, it’s only common to have broken links. However, if the number of such broken links is too many, it negatively hurts SEO.

After all, why would search engines want to rank a domain that has so many broken links?

So, go ahead and check how many internal broken links your website has. There are many free, freemium and premium tools out there that can make the task a matter of a few minutes.

Once you have a list of broken links, you can either remove them entirely or replace them with live links.

If your broken links are indexed - or are backlinked by other websites - instead of removing them, you should use 301 redirect, which tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved.

301 redirect will help you preserve link equity of the page in question.

2. Duplicate Content

Admittedly, search engines do not penalize sites for duplicate content.

However, duplicate content does confuse them as to which is the original source of the content. In that confusion, the ranking of the page is hurt.

So, audit your site and find how much of your site has duplicate content

Following, you have two options:

• Replace it with original content
• Use canonical tag to fix the problem. This will help search engines know which URL is the original source of the content; they will rank this original URL.

3. Lack of Readability

This is one of those underrated SEO mistakes that destroy two key metrics: bounce rate and session duration.

No matter how great your content is, people wouldn’t consume it if it’s not readable. A large part of your traffic would leave without engaging with the page. This will send a bad signal to the search engine. Your URLs will eventually get demoted.

So, how readable is your content on the site?

You can take direct feedback from your visitors and audience on social media platforms.

Or, you can simply compare the readability of your site with that of your successful competitors’.

Next, as and how needed, fix your font family, font size, font-weight, letter spacing, line height, and other elements to make your content readable - on desktop as well as the smartphone.

4. Lack of Outbound Links

The idea of “leaking” link juice is old, outdated and must be put to rest.

So many webmasters avoid linking other websites fearing they would leak their link juice. Out of the same fear, they even fail at internal link building. Don’t be one of them!

Outbound link is an important search ranking factor now. When you link to other websites - and doFollow that link - it helps search engines better understand the context of your page, as well as, in some ways, analyze your domain relevancy to the outbound site.

So, have you been avoiding linking other websites - or are using noFollow directive - you’re hurting your SEO.

Start including outbound links throughout your content. Of course, make sure the sites you’re linking to are relevant, authoritative, and of good quality.

5. Too Many Bad Quality/Irrelevant Pages

Bad quality pages, in itself, are bad. And they must be done away with. The search engines are now more vigilant than ever in measuring the site’s quality and relevancy.

But there’s another take here…

Each domain is assigned a crawl budget based on several factors. Crawl budget is nothing but the number of pages Google bots crawl and index within a timeframe on a domain.

Indeed, wasting too much of crawl budget isn’t a worry for many websites.

However, if you have a large website (usually with more than a thousand pages) and most of the pages are of poor quality, you will end up draining a significant portion of your crawl budget, which might leave parts of your site un-crawled and un-indexed.

Also, if you have too many redirects, canonical tags, and soft core pages, it also wastes your crawl budget.

So, foremost, make sure you aren’t wasting your crawl budget. Second, ensure the pages that are being crawled are worth crawling.

There are many ways how you can block bad quality, irrelevant pages: robots.txt, noindex and more.

Conclusion

These are five small blunders that can do real damage to your SEO in this year.

You can hire the best digital marketing company in USA and have them fix these for you.

But if you’re a DIY-ninja, take effective measures right away.

Small mistakes like these combine to make a big difference. So, if you’re looking to outdo competitors and dominate SERP, focus on the little things just as much as you do about the big stuff.

Kreative Machinez is a highly trusted digital marketing agency. For more than a decade, we have worked with hundreds of clients from across different industries, helping them grow their digital footprint and build a sustainable business. We’re offering free website analysis at present. If you like to have your website analyzed by an expert, please contact us today.