{"id":117025,"date":"2019-06-18T17:28:13","date_gmt":"2019-06-18T09:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/?p=17025"},"modified":"2021-05-11T05:49:01","modified_gmt":"2021-05-11T05:49:01","slug":"10-crucial-seo-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seo-hacker.com\/10-crucial-seo-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Crucial SEO Mistakes You Might Be Doing"},"content":{"rendered":"

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With hundreds of ranking factors being used by Google to identify websites that deserve to be on the first page of the search results, us SEOs are getting crazy with the number of things to think about and tasks to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

SEO is competitive. Once you get to the top page, you can never afford to make any mistake that can affect your website gravely. There is no perfect SEO campaign but these SEO mistakes are something you should take a look at.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Unoptimized Page Titles and Meta Descriptions<\/span><\/h2>\n

Page titles remain to be one of the most important on-page SEO factors. It is important for both search engines and users. I\u2019ve seen a lot of websites only use their brand names as the page title of their homepage and that alone is causing them to miss a lot of ranking opportunities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Page titles alone can increase organic rankings by a huge margin. This is one of the small things you can do A\/B Testing with to see what works for you.<\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, there were a lot of violent reactions to Google\u2019s SEO Mythbusters<\/a> episode where Google\u2019s Webmaster Trends Analyst Martin Splitt said that Meta Descriptions is one of the top important things for SEO. While there is a lot of criticism by this statement, I am actually with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Yes, meta descriptions<\/a> are not a direct ranking factor anymore but just like Page Titles, it is the first thing users see before entering your website. <\/span><\/p>\n

Even if you produce high-quality content regularly but write crappy titles and descriptions, searchers would click on your website less and those clicks will belong to your competitors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not Doing a Regular Audit of Indexed Pages<\/span><\/h2>\n

An <\/span>SEO Audit<\/span><\/a> is something all SEOs should do regularly. While there are a lot of SEO Audit checklists that can be downloaded around the internet, the most important audit should be in your Google Search Console data.<\/span><\/p>\n

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The Coverage report will show you all pages being indexed by Google. If you\u2019re seeing an absurd number of pages being indexed by Google, then you might need to de-index some pages to save crawl budget. At the same time, there might be some important pages not being indexed by Google because of a crawl error.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fixing detected errors in the Search Console is also a must. This could be problems with indexing your content that could negatively affect your rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not Scouting Your Competitors<\/span><\/h2>\n

Competitor research should be a part of any SEO campaign. If you\u2019re not doing this, then you\u2019re missing out a lot.<\/span><\/p>\n

Scouting on your competitors will give you an idea on what type of content they are publishing or what keywords they are targetting. Use this data to gather keyword suggestions and create better content and dominate them in the search results.<\/span><\/p>\n

You also miss out on link building opportunities if you’re not spying on your competitors. Checking their backlinks and reaching out to these websites are a great way of gathering links for yourself. It might sound like a lot of work but if you have the right tools then you can save a lot of time and work more efficiently. There are a variety of backlink checker tools that you can use but I personally prefer using GrowthBar<\/a> because it is much more convenient to use. I can immediately check competitor information right from the search results or track their rankings for the keywords I target.<\/p>\n

Not Optimizing for Long-Tail Keywords<\/span><\/h2>\n

Long-tail keywords are often overlooked because they bring in less traffic but they are great opportunities. Often, long-tail keywords have low difficulty so it\u2019s easier to rank for and increase a website\u2019s SEO value. At the same time, long-tail keywords have a higher chance of converting because they cater to specific searchers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not Matching Content with Search Intent<\/span><\/h2>\n

Yes, content is king. We\u2019ve heard it time and time again. But that doesn\u2019t mean you just put out any content that you like.<\/span><\/p>\n

Search intent<\/a>, in my opinion, is one of the most important things SEOs should think about when producing content. Google is always for the user and the most important thing to them is serving the right information to searchers.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are 4 types of search intent:<\/span><\/p>\n