Our goal for seo is to always make google’s life easy. We want google to understand exactly what our website is about, so we can show up for relevant search terms but there’s a lot of on-page mistakes that can confuse google because we’re not giving google a really clear signal, so today we’re going to cover those.
I have se seen a lot of people give opinions on what are the most important on-page seo mistakes. I think a lot of those are wrong, so today we’re going to cover the ones that i see in my day to day that are the highest impact mistakes, the ones that are preventing you from getting the most traffic and the ones that ultimately are hurting your website the most.
At number one, we’re going to be talking about not understanding headers on a page or on a blog post, so we need to understand header tags, why they’re used and how we can use them properly. Header tags help us structure content on a page and give google the different levels of importance of each idea. So we want to have like a hierarchy of headings and we want to have an h1 that sends the main message of what we’re writing about and then for each new section we’re going to have an h2.
Within that h2, if we have different ideas, we are going to have H3’s and so on and so forth; we want to try and not skip any heading levels. We want to make sure that it’s tidy and that it all makes sense. But the main mistake that I see here is, I see a lot of landing pages and blog posts that don’t understand header tags and they end up giving google a really mixed message.
I’ll give you guys an example. I once had a client that when they came to me, they showed me their homepage and on their homepage they had seven or eight different h1s. So in theory, we only want to have one h1 per page and per blog post to show google that “hey, this is the main idea. This is the main topic that I’m talking about on this page”. If we are giving six seven-eight or honestly, anything more than one we can be giving google a really mixed message and it’s not gonna ultimately understand what’s going on.
So we need to be able to understand the content structure of our page for any landing page for any blog post and make sure that we’re giving google the clear signal possible. The second mistake that I see really often is duplicate content, so duplicate content is when we have two pages or more of near duplicate or exact duplicates of exact content on two different pages, and google has a really hard time with this.
Why? Because it doesn’t know which page to pick, and so google, at the end of the day, is trying to find unique content to show for relevant search terms. But if we’re giving them mixed messages and we’re showing a lot of pages that have the same content, it’s not going to know which page to put on the index. So this can be a problem for us because a lot of times google will go out and test different pages to be on the index because we have such similar content, this leads to fluctuations in organic traffic and that’s, a huge problem that we need to avoid.
So guys go out and make sure that all the content on your pages and all your blog posts are unique and that with each new page you’re adding value and they’re not replicas of each other.
The third topic that I want to talk about is internal links, so internal links play a huge part in organic traffic, not only to pass authority from pages that have a lot of authority to ones that don’t, but also as a way to guide users through your internal navigation. So we need to make sure that we’re doing internal links and that we’re doing them properly. On top of this, I see a lot of people making mistakes for anchor text with an internal link, so anchor text at the end of the day give google a message of why we’re using that specific link and whats the context that we want to use that link for right.
So the mistake that I see the most in this area is that I see a lot of websites that get a lot of natural links to their to their home page. That home page is going to be filled with authority. And then we have a lot of different pages on the website that have a lot more traffic potential, but don’t have any internal links coming in!
So this is a huge mistake because we can easily send some internal links pass over that authority and that’s going to be doing a lot better in the SERPs and by the way, this is especially important if you’re an e-commerce. Ecommerce pages need to have a really clean and structured site architecture. And also as a pro-tip, we can’t forget about broken links, so we want to fill out our website with internal links when they’re relevant.
We also need to make sure that we’re avoiding broken links. Broken links can make your user have a terrible experience and it’s a waste of time for search engines. So we want search engines to be crawling our website as efficiently as possible and broken links. don’t help us with that.
The fourth topic that i want to talk about is website speed and I know this is a tricky topic, but we definitely need to talk about it because it’s becoming more and more important these days. So, if you guys don’t know yet, google recently released a google page experience update. With this update what they’re trying to do is that they’re trying to make sure that people are prioritizing the user’s experience on their website and a lot of that has to do with how fast Your website is now.
I understand how difficult it is to get a website to perfect speed in googles eyes, especially if you have a website that has a lot of pages, a website that has a lot of content, a website more dynamic or even a web app.
So, I understand the difficulty here and this is why i usually recommend trying our best to make our website as fast as possible.
Obviously, acknowledging the user experience and making sure that the user at the end of the day can access and can navigate through our website properly and quickly, but guys we can’t obsess over this because a lot of times it’s nearly impossible to get to that perfect website speed without limiting the functionality of our website.
So, the fifth topic that I want to talk about is content, because I see a lot of mistakes for this topic, since people like to either not put a lot of content or put way too much.
Not enough content is gonna show google that we are not really relevant and that we actually don’t know what we are talking about, especially if that user intent is looking for information and they’re looking for a lot of content.
If they are looking for a question that can’t be answered in a few paragraphs, we want to make sure that we go out and we fulfill that intent with the right content.
Now, there’s the other side of writing too much content. So when you write too much content, this is actually a strategy that used to work a few years ago, where you write more than the person that was ranking first and then, with more content. We show Google “hey, we’re more relevant because we’ve written more”. But google is starting to see through that, because they’ve realized that more doesn’t mean better oftentimes.
I see a lot of writers putting in a lot of fluff just to get to a specific word count of 5 000 words or something crazy like that. If the user intent requires that many words then that’s fine, that’s totally, okay, but the goal isn’t to write content just to have as many words as possible!
At the end of the day, we want to be the best resource online, we’re going to be creating content that people engage with, that they share and they come back to, right?
We need to make sure that it’s the best resource online and not focus too much on the quantity of words written. So there is a balance between writing too little and writing too much content. We want to be right to smack in the middle.
So that’s it guys, we’ve covered a lot of really important on-page seo mistakes. I hope you guys learned from this!
