15 Common SEO Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

If Google can’t crawl your content, it can’t see what’s on the page. And if it can’t see what’s on the page, it’s unlikely it’ll rank for any relevant keywords.

How to ensure Google can crawl your site

Make sure you’re not blocking Googlebot.

Do this check by going to your robots.txt (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and looking for these two snippets of code:

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /

User-agent: * Disallow: /

Both lines of code tell Googlebot it’s not allowed to crawl any pages on your site. To fix the issue, remove them.

Further reading

Robots.txt and SEO: Everything You Need to Know

If you’ve accidentally blocked Google from indexing your site or its pages, it's impossible to rank. For example, that can happen if you accidentally added a noindex tag on any of your pages.

Fix the issue by removing the noindex tag.

Further reading

How to Get Google to Index Your Website

Many people randomly create content and expect to get search traffic. But if no one’s searching for those topics, then no one’s clicking through to any pages.

That’s likely one of the reasons why 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google, according to our study.

If you want search traffic, you need to target topics people are searching for.

How to do keyword research

Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
Enter one or a few relevant keywords related to your website or niche
Go to the Matching terms report

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you’ll see >1 million potential keywords you can target. Look through the list and pick out keywords that are relevant and have traffic potential (look at the TP column.)

Further reading

Keyword Research: The Beginner’s Guide by Ahrefs

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant result for every query.

So, if you want to rank high on Google, you need to be the most relevant result. This means matching search intent, the why behind a query.

For example, we previously created a landing page to target the keyword “backlink checker.” But it didn’t rank well because searchers wanted a free tool. So, we added it.

The result: 516% more traffic in less than six months.

How to match search intent

Enter your keyword into Keywords Explorer, scroll down to SERP Overview, and click on Identify intents. This feature will suggest the most likely search intent for your target keyword.

Further reading

Search Intent in SEO: What It Is & How to Optimize for It

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

How to build more links

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

Go to Site Explorer
Enter the Twitter profile URL of your competitor’s CEO, CMO, or whoever the most prolific marketer is within the company
Go to the Backlinks report
Filter for results where the referring page URL contains “podcast,” “episode,” or “interview”

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Further reading

How to Find Your Competitors' Backlinks (And Get Them for Yourself)

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

@NicheDown on X

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

“If our systems recognize that they can’t isolate and ignore these links across a website, if we see a very strong pattern there, then it can happen that our algorithms say well we really have kind of lost trust with this website and at the moment based on the bigger picture on the web, we kind of need to be more on almost a conservative side when it comes to understanding this website’s content and ranking it in the search results and then you can see kind of a drop in the visibility there.”

How to avoid this SEO mistake

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

How to avoid this SEO mistake

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Doing keyword research
Creating content that aligns with search intent
Trying to build and earn more backlinks
Ensuring your site is technically sound
Updating content when it’s outdated

Case studies like this are seductive:

@jakezward on X

It’s tempting to follow their example, upload a list of target keywords into an AI writing tool, and have it generate all the content for you.

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

How to use AI in content creation

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Experimentation — Go into the real world, test ideas, and collect new information that has never existed before. For example, conducting industry surveys or running tests.
Experience — Prove to the reader you have experienced the thing you’re writing about. For example, only writing about topics you have experience with or interviewing people on topics you don’t.
Effort — Expend energy and create content that’s more than just words on a page. For example, webcomics, video series, books, and more.

Further reading

AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy

Internal links are important:

Google uses them to discover new content.
They aid the flow of PageRank around your site. Generally speaking, the more internal links a page has, the higher its PageRank.
Google looks at the anchor texts of internal links to better understand the context.

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

How to find internal link opportunities

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Further reading

Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

How to fix slow pages

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Use caching — If you’re using WordPress, you can install a plugin like W3 Total Cache or WPRocket
Make files smaller, e.g. images — Plugins like Shortpixel help to compress and optimize your images
Serve files closer to users — For example, you can use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Optimize fonts — WPRocket helps with this
Reduce the amount of JavaScript — Similarly, WPRocket helps with this. You can also use Autoptimize

Further reading

What Are Core Web Vitals (CWVs) & How To Improve Them

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

How to avoid this SEO mistake

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Follow the spam policies for Google web search.
Provide up-to-date information.
Provide original content that you or your users have generated.
Don't mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.
Don't mark up irrelevant or misleading content, such as fake reviews or content unrelated to a page's focus.
Don't use structured data to deceive or mislead users. Don't impersonate any person or organization, or misrepresent your ownership, affiliation, or primary purpose.
Content in structured data must also follow the additional content guidelines or policies, as documented in the specific feature guide.

Further reading

Schema Markup: What It Is & How to Implement It

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

How to avoid keyword stuffing

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

Go to Keywords Explorer
Enter your target keyword
Scroll down to SERP Overview
Check three relevant top-ranking pages
Click Open in and choose Content gap

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

What is inbound marketing
Inbound marketing strategy
Inbound marketing examples
Inbound marketing tools

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

How to avoid this SEO mistake

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary.

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Meta description tag missing or empty
Page and SERP titles do not match
Title too long
Meta description too short
Meta description too long

Were in the top 15 most common.

How to fix under-optimized meta titles and descriptions

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Further reading

What Are Title Tags? How To Write Them for SEO

How to Write the Perfect Meta Description

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

How to fix missing alt text

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

Further reading

Alt Text for SEO: How to Optimize Your Images

Keep learning

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Post bySi Quan Ong

Si Quan is a content marketer at Ahrefs. He has been involved in digital and content marketing for the past 5 years. Before he joined Ahrefs, he was content marketer at ReferralCandy, a 7-figure ARR SaaS company.

Si Quan has spoken at some of the industry’s largest conferences in the Asia region, which includes TIECon and Digital Marketing Skill Share. He has also written for some of the industry’s most popular blogs like Sumo and SmartBlogger.

His earliest work was marketing a product on Kickstarter, which eventually raised $150,000, more than double the original funding goal. The product was also featured on prominent tech websites, including Engadget, CNET and Digital Trends.

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