Everyone makes mistakes. But the good thing is with a website, you can usually fix it. By keeping an eye on signs of bad website practices, you can nip mistakes in the bud so your website presence can flourish.
How do you know your website may have a mistake hurting your Google presence?
You may see:
- Significant and sudden changes in organic traffic
- A dramatic increase in bounce rate
- A drop in ranking for a large number of keywords
- Notifications and warnings in Google Search Console or your SEO platform
- Lower click-through rates
- A decrease in online leads and customers
- An increase in abandoned shopping carts
- A change in engagement on specific pages
None of these are fun to see as a business owner. But there are common culprits to check for when you do deal with one of these symptoms.
What are common mistakes to look for?
Pages with poor content quality
Do you have any pages that only have a few sentences of content on them? You may be dealing with a poor page quality issue.
Poor page content quality can come from multiple aspects of your page. The amount of written content, duplicate content, and page speed can all impact the level of page quality.
By taking inventory of pages with the highest bounce rate and least amount of time on page, you’ll probably spot a few pages that need some beefing up. This comes from writing unique page content and taking steps to increase page speed.
Weak Metadata
Weak or ignored metadata will do you no favors on Google.
Metadata is an easy way to set your pages up for success and if you don’t touch it, it’s an easy way to miss out on opportunities. By setting custom copy for your title and meta description, you can tailor-fit your copy to your overall website ranking strategy.
Align your metadata with your specific goals for each page to make sure Google ranks your content on the right searches.
Sub-Par Page Experience
Whether it’s loading time, web design, or user experience, there are many ways to impact your page experience.
It could be a bug or broken functionality that immediately decreased the value of a historically great page. Or, it may have been built like that from day one. Poor user experience could be impacting specific pages, or it could be site-wide. No matter the situation, the quicker you fix any page experience issues, the faster you’ll improve your overall site value.
Cannibalized Content
Are you using the same content, information, and strategy on every page? Then the only website you’re hurting is your own!
Focusing on the same keywords and content strategy throughout the website will muddy the waters of what pages Google should be showing for specific
Say you sell makeup online. You may want to rank for “Organic Nude Lipstick”. If you try to fill every page on your site with “Organic Nude Lipstick”, not only will you confuse Google on what pages to rank, you miss out on opportunities for other pages to rank for different focus keywords.
By mapping out focus topics and keywords per page, so you never repeat a page strategy, you broaden your horizons and create new ranking opportunities for myriad important key searches.
Black Hat SEO Tactics
Sneaky SEO tactics come and go. But the one inevitability (if Google can help it) is that they won’t be beneficial to your website’s success for long. Most black hat SEO tactics will almost certainly eventually hurt your search engine presence.
Some black hat SEO tactics that will hurt your presence include keyword stuffing (using keywords unnaturally and with reckless abandon) or sleazy link building (using websites specifically made to increase other websites’ backlinks. Trying these will probably bite you in the butt later.
Overlooked Image SEO Practices
Don’t sleep on your image SEO! Huge, page-slowing images will certainly impact your user experience. But ignoring best practices for using images on your site means you miss out on a lot of opportunities to rank even better.
A large portion of searches is image searches. By adding just a few image SEO steps to your image uploading process, you can start ranking for these possible opportunities for traffic.
This list is a great start but only scratches the surface of the possibilities for improving your overall website quality. Is it time to give your website an upgrade? Reach out to our team to discuss optimization priorities for your website!
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