We actually have 103 and the list keeps growing! Here are the top 99 SEO mistakes made by small businesses today.
- Your website pages content is too simple and generic
- Not putting your site on Google Search Console
- Not paying attention to SEO best practices
- Not using popular keywords or search terms in your content
- Having duplicate page titles and descriptions
- Not using alt tags on images
- Having a poorly designed webpage structure
- Having a slow website
- Not using SSL or HTTPS
- Not using Google Analytics or having that code on your website
- Not submitting your sitemap to Google
- Marking your site as no-index (yikes!)
- Not claiming your Google My Business (GMB) listing
- Not optimizing your Google My Business listing
- Not responding to every client review on Google My Business
- Not updating your business hours and phone number on Google My Business listing
- Having unneeded web pages
- Using poor, low-quality images or too high-res images
- Having webpage titles that are too long
- Having bad meta descriptions
- Not using a content tool or plugin to optimize your pages
- Not optimizing for mobile!
- Having mobile menus that are not usable
- Having bad user-interface UX for mobile
- Trying to do it all yourself
- Not asking enough questions or giving up
- Knowing that your site is a problem and doing nothing about it
- Using bad and poorly optimized website hosting can affect your page speed and Google ranking.
- Not updating your website…like ever.
- When you use keyword stuffing on your pages. This means just putting in keywords for the sake of ranking, this really hurts your SEO.
- Having pages that have nothing to do with your business
- Going after high-competition keywords; where you have no chance.
- Not having any internal links to other pages of your site
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- This is known as “sticky factor” and helps people stay on your site by visiting other pages. An example of this would be for you to check out our monthly video newsletters by signing up at the bottom of the page.
- Not having any calls to action; you are a business after all!
- Having links that don’t work
- Having your phone numbers not clickable or direct to the wrong phone number
- Neglecting what your customers are searching for
- Not answering customer questions on your website; this one saves you time and headaches
- Having an old, dated website
- Not talking about your services or what you do on your website
- Having a website that is constantly down or having problems
- Having outdated coupons or content on your website
- Not listing your hours on your website
- Having only one way to contact you or no phone number or no email form
- Having a broken email form
- Having annoying popups that break your website
- Having small images that don’t look right
- Poor sentence structure
- Website pages that just don’t make sense
- Not notifying Google when you make changes to your website
- Having an overly complex mobile menu structure
- Not tracking your performance with Google Analytics
- Not creating goals within Google Analytics
- Not performing even a basic SEO audit (it’s free for crying out loud!)
- Not performing a listings citation audit (again, it’s free here)
- Having outdated listings out there on the web for your address or NAP-W
- Not being listed on Siri or voice searches
- Not listing your website address on Bing places
- Not taking advantage of Bing Webmaster tools; one of the best tools out there.
- Many businesses do not have a formal marketing plan
- Not upgrading old content on your pages
- Not having a backlink plan or building backlinks
- Buying backlinks, yikes!
- Having no review generation strategy
- Not having a Youtube strategy
- Not having Youtube videos for small business at all
- Expecting to have a number 1 ranking and no patience
- Trying to trick Google using black-hat SEO techniques
- Not blogging or writing; this includes not promoting your posts
- Your images are not SEO optimized
- Not using h1 tags or heading tags correctly
- Only using HTML and not a CMS like WordPress
- If you are using WordPress, not using plugins to optimize your website
- Not optimizing for local searches and local customers!
- Not having an SEO plan in place
- Not having an emergency posting and website updates plan
- Not updating your main image slider on your homepage
- Having broken pages or 404 errors
- Having broken links or images
- Having annoying chat dialogues or poorly optimized plugins
- Over-optimizing with way too many site plugins or addons
- Having videos on your site that don’t work or are more than 8 years old and don’t look good anymore
- Not taking advantage of structured data, schema, or rich snippets; Google loves this stuff.
- Poor mobile design; we have said already this but wow this one is important, especially with Google’s mobile-first indexing. It just breaks our SEO-hearts seeing poorly optimized mobile small business pages.
- Focusing too much on social media and not on SEO
- Not using Google analytics to know where your converters are online: what really drives your business!
- Not checking the Google My Business insights for your maps listing
- Not having services, products, and business description in your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
- Your website is too general and not tailored to your niche audience
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If You’re Everything to Everyone, You’re Nothing to Anyone
- The inverse is true when small businesses have no social media presence
- Not listing your business on local directories or chamber of commerce or similar sites
- Being afraid to blog or make videos; these are some of the greatest link builders you can do for your small business
- Seeing errors or Google warnings and not fixing them ASAP; the major item here is when a site is potentially hacked causing problems and spreading it to others.
- Duplicate page errors and warnings; get these fixed soon
- Having unreasonable SEO expectations. SEO takes time and setting basic marketing goals help
- Leaving long-tail keywords out of your SEO strategy on your page content
- Not diversifying your SEO strategy; include video, audio podcasts, social content updates, and website presence and blog posts.
- Sometimes you should focus on Google Ads as part of your SEO strategy, let me explain.
- There are some small businesses that simply can’t beat the SEO competition. Some competitors spend millions of dollars and decades on their SEO. In this case, it can be a wise strategy to make Google ads or even Bing ads and social media posts part of your overall SEO strategy.
- Not gettings links back from your partners, distributors, or other local businesses; this includes not getting reviews!
For help with you SEO, contact a Columbus SEO company like us today.