4 SEO Mistakes That Can Crash Your Website Traffic

Considering that SEO drives 1,000% + more traffic than organic social media, it’s imperative for us to ensure that our website is SEO friendly. Though in our quest to achieve this, we often end up making a few SEO mistakes that affects the traffic on our site.

If the website traffic has plummeted or the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rank has dropped suddenly, more often than not, we might be making some common SEO mistake. We will need to identify these and correct them at the earliest.

Fortunately, most of these mistakes can be amended with the right tool and expertise.  

Following are some of the most common SEO mistakes that people can make. Read on to see how they can be rectified and bring back the traffic on your website.

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1. Ignoring Algorithm Updates:-

   1. Google uses over 200 ranking factors in its search algorithm. One of the most common SEO mistakes is not keeping track of search engine’s algorithm updates. There are many tools that can help us keep an eye on any changes.

   2. Google Search Console can be used to check keyword ranking. Considering how keyword ranking can have an impact on the optimisation of the page, its necessary to check this. Following Google Search Liaison updates on X, can help us achieve this.

   
   

2. Poorly Optimised Content:-

   • When several pages on a website contest for the same keyword in a search engine, it leads to keyword cannibalism. This lowers the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) ranking for them as the organic traffic gets divided between them. It also makes their ranking unpredictable as search engine can promote any of them. It dilutes the overall visibility of the page.  

   • Often this SEO error can be resolved using a silo structure. It’s a type of website architecture method where the content on the site is grouped into different sections or silos based on keywords. The website content is grouped in such a way that the pages have their own primary keywords. It helps the search engine crawl the website better resulting in better indexing and higher ranking.  

   • The content in these silos are interlinked using semantic keywords and anchor texts. When keywords related to the primary keywords are used, it allows user to get specific answers to their queries and they spend more time on the website. It helps the search engine to better understand the intent of content. Anchor texts also help in better interlinking of the related pages on a site.

   • Use of HTML elements like canonical tags can help search engines avoid wasting resources by telling it which URL is preferred version of a page that has multiple versions around the same content.

   • Knowing that online content with images receive up to 94% more views than content without them, makes it essential to ensure that we use related images for our content. Using the right images and including the primary keyword in image names, descriptions can help in better optimisation of the textual content.

     
     

3. Absence of Mobile Optimisation –  

   • Absence of mobile optimisation for your website can be a grave mistake considering how often users consume content on their mobile. These days mobile search is more popular than desktop search among users. It’s necessary that we create top notch mobile friendly formats for our website if we want higher traffic on our site.

    

4. Technical Errors –  

   • How ironical would it be if we did everything possible to make sure our page is SEO friendly and goofed up the robots.txt file on it? Robots.txt file can be useful when it comes to instructing the search engine on how to crawl our site including which pages to crawl and which to avoid. However we can accidently goof up if we leave a disallow command on our optimised page after making it live, preventing the page from being even indexed.

   • Another reason for our page not getting enough traffic is if we fail to notice that our page URL got de-indexed. We can use Google Search Console (GSC) to check the index coverage report to check if our page is being indexed. If not, we should use the “Request Indexing” option in GSC and correct this issue.

   • Sometimes when we migrate our website to a different location we end up making redirection errors. URL forwarding has to be done meticulously like using the SEO recommended 301 option for permanent redirection which is the safest, instead of using 302 option. We can also use Meta Refresh when working on page level instead of server level.
     Using a web crawler like Screaming Frog can help us identify any crawling issues that the search engine may be facing on our website.  

   • Absence of tracking codes for our websites or seeing that our tag isn’t getting fired up because of incorrect tracking codes can cost us invaluable data insights from our site. Tracking codes helps us better understand user behaviour and guide us how to optimise our site for generating traffic.
     We should always check on GSC if our website has any manual action and penalties in case our website goes against any search engine guidelines.

Conclusion  
AS important as it is to ensure that our website is SEO friendly, we also need to check for any SEO errors that we may be making.

It always helps when we can track our work and make it more optimised to gain traffic on our website. Using a rank tracker can help us track our site’s performance and allow us to specifically work on any mistakes that we may be making. Reformiqo helps to conduct SEO audit for generating higher user traffic. Google Analytics is one such platform which collects data from our website and provide relevant insights on guiding us how to increase traffic on our site.

Checking for these SEO mistake and rectifying them can help us revive the traffic on our website which make take from a few weeks to several months and give it a higher SERP ranking.