The 5 Most Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Google has recently released a video explaining what the most common SEO mistakes webmasters make and presenting some SEO tips on how to avoid them.

Here is the video presented by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google:

According to Maile, here are the top 5 SEO mistakes:

1. Having no value proposition

As a business owner, you should have a clear value proposition. This value proposition should be clearly highlighted in your website and search engine results pages. Always keep in mind this question: why would a search user select my site in search results?

To do so, make your product or service compelling! Think of what differentiates your business from your competitors and integrate it in your content, page titles and meta descriptions!

For instance, you may be a non-profit organization, you may offer free estimates / demo / audit, or you may be the oldest independent shop in your city!

As an E-commerce, you differentiate from the competitions since you may offer low prices, free shipping, excellent customer service, and of course a great value proposition.

In brief, no need to start your SEO if you don’t have any good value proposition!

2. Having a segmented approach

This may sound a bit theoretical but this is really important.

Instead of having an single approach of your online strategy, you should align with other larger business goals and communication with every department.

You should consider SEO in entire user experience, from marketing campaign to conversion.

For example, your marketing team may have different marketing goals and may want to promote one campaign site, so you should take it into account and add new content and specific keywords into your main site.

3. Spending too much time in workaround

Other useful SEO advice from Google:

- Avoid rel=”canonical” from each component page in a series to page one, use instead new rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup for paginated content.
- Submit new/updated content to be crawled through “Fetch as Googlebot” in Webmaster Tools.

4. Being caught in SEO trends

According to Maile, websites and search engines were used to chasing users in the past, so they can get more visitors and conversions.

However, today, some websites only chase search engine algorithms! They only think of the optimal keyword density for their content instead of writing compelling stuff.

I totally agree with this view. No need to optimize a website if it doesn't contain any compelling content!

5. Slow iteration

Latest SEO tip: be agile, and don't forget to:

- Define metrics for success
- Implement improvements
- Measure impact
- Create new improvements
- Prioritize improvements based on market and personnel
- Repeat!

6. Conclusion

In a nutshell, according to Google, a good SEO is about to:

- Do Something Cool
- Include relevant keywords in your copy
- Be smart about your tags and site architecture
- Signup for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools
- Attract buzz and natural links, votes, +1s, follows
- Stay fresh and relevant (social media, accessible on new devices, etc.)

Read also 10 other SEO mistakes millions of websites are doing!