14 Common SEO Mistakes: Insights and Advice from Experts
Search engine optimization can make or break a website's visibility, yet many businesses continue to repeat the same costly errors. This article brings together advice from seasoned SEO professionals who have identified 14 common mistakes that undermine rankings and traffic. Their practical recommendations offer a clear path to avoiding these pitfalls and building a stronger organic presence.
Favor Natural, Branded Anchors
Early on, one of my biggest SEO mistakes was overusing keyword-rich anchor text when link building. Back in 2013, that approach was extremely popular and effective until Google updated its algorithm. Overnight, my site went from ranking #1 to essentially disappearing from search results.
That experience forced a complete reset. I shifted away from aggressive exact-match anchors and focused on branded anchors and natural, contextual links that real people would actually use. That change was a true game-changer and it has shaped how I approach SEO ever since.
Advice: Don't chase short-term wins. Build links the way humans naturally reference brands and content, not the way algorithms used to reward.
Pursue High-Quality Backlinks Through PR
The biggest SEO mistake I made early on was not considering the importance of backlinks. There's a lot of mixed information online about whether you need backlinks to rank, and even more about how buying them can potentially get your site struck off Google Search.
As a result, I didn't focus on building backlinks and ended up pouring a considerable amount of time into content creation. For some sites, this worked. But for most of them, it brought slow and inconsistent results.
The truth is that 95% of the time, you absolutely DO need backlinks to rank for any search terms worth ranking for. However, the kind of links you need don't come in bundles of 500 from a random seller marketplace. They come from digital PR campaigns and publishing shareable content that generates passive links for you long after the work has finished.
Strengthen On-Page Before PBNs
One SEO mistake I made early on was relying on gray hat tactics like PBNs while overlooking on-page SEO fundamentals. At the time, it felt like a faster way to get results, but it wasn't sustainable and eventually caused ranking instability.
What I learned is that links cannot fix a weak foundation. If your site is not properly optimized on-page, even strong backlinks will not perform the way you expect. My advice is to focus first on clean site structure, alignment with search intent, internal linking, and content quality. Build links only after your on-page SEO is solid, and always prioritize long-term strategies over shortcuts.
Test Incrementally and Plan Rollbacks
We rolled out a major change to our content page layout without proper isolation or safeguards. The decision was largely based on gut feeling, not data or testing. Shortly after launch, traffic dropped hard across key pages.
We quickly rolled the change back, and thankfully traffic recovered. However, the experience made it clear that - if you can't measure it, test it, or roll it back safely, you're not ready to ship it.
Now, our approach is that any major SEO change should be rolled out incrementally and backed by data and research. We baseline important metrics before launch, such as traffic, conversion, rankings. And we always have a rollback plan ready so we can act fast if performance drops.
Make Optimization an Ongoing Commitment
I started a global branding and digital marketing firm 24 years ago. A common rookie mistake is to assume that SEO is a one-time activity/set it and forget it. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms/keywords/evolving so SEO needs to be an ongoing commitment for content to stay on top/page 1. Don't make a lot of small SEO changes to your site. Although it's smart to update your site with fresh content you have to be careful it doesn't look suspicious/get penalized by the search engines. If you discontinue a product/service do not delete the page from your site. Once the page is deleted both the URL and the keyword for which it was ranked will disappear, simply add a message for visitors to your site to redirect them to the relevant page. You work hard to get your strong rankings so don't let that effort go to waste unnecessarily/by accident. It is important to conduct thorough SEO audits regularly to uncover any technical SEO issues including broken links, good internal and external links show both users and search crawlers that you have high quality content. Over time with content changes links can break which creates a poor user experience and reflects lower quality content, a factor that can affect page ranking.
Tie Visits to Clear Outcomes
One SEO mistake I made early on was focusing too much on traffic growth without considering how that traffic would convert. Seeing rankings and clicks increase felt like success, but in many cases the traffic wasn't aligned with what the business actually needed to support its goals—typically increased revenue or leads.
What I learned is that SEO works best when it's tightly aligned with search intent. It's important to understand where a piece of content sits in the funnel, craft it for that specific intent, and then guide the user toward a clear next step within the content.
For a concrete example, creating a page for a plumber targeting the keyword "how to fix a blocked sink" is valuable informational content and helps build topical authority. But if there's no clear next step for someone who can't fix the sink themselves, they'll leave the site and call the nearest plumber they find on Google Maps—not you.
Ranking for a keyword only matters if the content truly matches what the searcher is trying to accomplish and supports a logical next step. My advice is to evaluate every page by asking, "Does this content solve the intent behind the query and guide the user forward?" When SEO and intent are aligned, traffic becomes far more valuable.
Target Specific, Overlooked Queries
I chased high-traffic keywords because everyone tells you that low-traffic keywords aren't worth your time. My articles never made it past page 2, and my traffic sat at zero for months. So I started to ignore search volume completely. My north-star became: if someone in my audience could Google that, I'll write about it. Those "tiny" keywords now bring me thousands of visitors a month on autopilot, and they convert better because they're specific -- and no one else wrote about it!
Trust Experiments Over Official Guidance
I made the msitake of following Google's SEO guidance blindly in my early years.
The funny thing was that it did work for low competition niches initially. However, once I hit the more competitive niches it seemed like SEO fundamentals and "just writing good content" weren't enough to achieve the big results.
Eventually I was dishearted by the lack of results and became more curious. I started testing alternative SEO tactics for myself and I realised that some of the information that Google's PR engine pushes doesn't reflect how the algorithm actually seems to work in the real world.
My advice to others who are new in the field of SEO is:
Don't blindly trust Google or self proclaimed SEO gurus. You should be running objective SEO tests on your own domains to see what SEO tactics truly work.
Design a Coherent Site Ecosystem
One of the biggest SEO mistakes I made early on was treating pages as isolated assets instead of components in a larger system. I spent too much time perfecting individual articles—metadata, headers, keywords—without realizing that Google evaluates the structure behind the content just as much as the content itself. The result was a site that looked polished on the surface but had no interconnected logic underneath, so rankings were inconsistent and fragile.
What I eventually learned is that search engines reward coherence, not fragments. When your taxonomy is unclear, internal linking is inconsistent, or your schema and topics don't reinforce one another, even great pages underperform because the system around them is weak.
My advice is simple: before you produce content, architect the ecosystem. Define your hierarchies, your comparison logic, your entity relationships, and the user journeys you want to support. Once the foundation is sound, every new page compounds authority instead of competing with the rest of your site.
SEO success in 2026 won't come from publishing more—it will come from building structures that strengthen every page automatically.
Albert Richer
Founder, WhatAreTheBest.com
Seek Relevant, Diverse Referrers
One big SEO mistake I made in the beginning was thinking that if I got a link from a website, I should take more and more links from the same site. But I was wrong.
Those "overlap links" only increased the referring domains count, not the real power.
If that website was giving even a little authority, too many links turned it into spam.
My advice
SEO has changed now.
Focus first on your content — make your first piece strong, helpful, and well-optimized.
If you want backlinks, buy paid links only from sites that match your niche.
Avoid links that create auto backlinks like PBN footer links, sidebar links, or overlap links.
Also keep your page speed under 5 seconds.
If you want to ask more — like which backlinks are best or how to make strong content — feel free to ask me.
Aim for Breakout Articles
Swing for the fences when you produce SEO content. Early in my career I did not realize how top heavy SEO traffic distribution was. If you regularly blog for SEO purposes, the majority of your traffic will be driven by the top 10-20% of article performers. A lot of your content is going to miss the mark and generate few visits. Be ambitious with what you create even if it takes you more time to do so. Lower content volume is fine. Just a couple home runs can save an entire campaign.
Serve People, Not Keywords
One SEO Mistake I Made Early On (and the Lesson It Taught Me)
Early in my SEO career, I made a mistake that many beginners still repeat: I optimised for keywords, not for people.
Back then, I believed that if I could just fit my primary keyword into the title, H1, URL, meta description, image alt text, and repeat it a few times in the content, rankings would follow. And for a short while, they did. Pages moved up... then slowly slid down. Traffic dropped. Engagement was poor. Bounce rate was ugly.
The real problem?
The content looked optimised but felt empty to users.
People landed on the page, didn't find clear answers, and left. Google noticed. Over time, those behavioural signals mattered more than my "perfect" on-page SEO.
What I Learned from It
SEO is not about impressing search engines. It's about earning user satisfaction at scale. Keywords are just signals; intent is the engine.
Once I rewrote pages with clearer explanations, better examples (especially Indian use cases), natural language, and stronger internal linking, rankings stabilised—and stayed.
Advice to Avoid This Mistake
Don't write for rankings. Write for resolution.
Ask one simple question before publishing any page:
"Does this genuinely solve the searcher's problem better than what's already ranking?"
Some practical tips:
Use keywords naturally, not mechanically
Prioritise clarity over cleverness
Match content depth to search intent
Track engagement, not just positions
Update content instead of constantly creating new pages
Final Thought
SEO today rewards understanding, not manipulation. If users trust your content, Google eventually will too. That lesson took me a ranking drop to learn—but it shaped every smart SEO decision I've made since.
Prefer Expert-Driven Content Instead of Volume
I started my career in 2008 as a digital marketer and fell into the trap of purchasing low-quality, outsourced content. It worked for a few months. Within a year, clients began falling off Google. Some disappeared entirely. Around 2009, I hired my first in-house content writer. The results were night and day. Don't fall into that trap. It was and always will be quality over quantity.
Fast forward to today and the introduction of AI. I ran a few dozen controlled experiments, publishing unedited AI content just to see what would happen. Sure enough, it echoed the same negative results I saw with content farms years ago. The unedited AI content lacked human-in-the-loop nuance, the specific, technical knowledge that only a subject matter expert can provide.
TLDR: If you wouldn't pay a content farm $5 for an article, don't publish unedited AI content either. Quality> Quantity is always king. Use AI to build the bones, but you provide the meat, case studies, technical specs, real experiences AI can't simulate. That expertise is your only real competitive advantage.
Prioritize Core, Local Listings
The one SEO mistake that we made early on Deals with directories and listings. When we first started five years ago, the impression about directories and listings was that they were some of the most important aspects of SCO because they gave a brand further reach that they wouldn't gain without being a part of a directory or a listing. The first fallacy about this thought process was that a significant amount of traffic was coming to directories and listings that were not Google Bing yelp Apple map or Apple Maps. The reality is that a business only needs three listings Google being for business and Apple maps. The reality about directories is that most companies that were using directories to "build your brand awareness" for small businesses we're using directories that were nowhere near where the business was physically located. An example is a small workout facility in a small town in South Carolina. The company building their listings and directories with building directory for them in Japan. No one from Japan is coming to South Carolina to work out. In this case, creating directories outside of the sphere of the businesses, influence was completely unhelpful to the business and provided absolutely no value at which point we stopped doing directories if they did not provide a localized absolute value to that business.
