5 common SEO mistakes that kill your website traffic (and how to fix them)

Ensuring stable traffic is the key to a successful business, but not everyone understands how to achieve the desired result. Website owners and beginners in the SEO industry often face a website traffic drop, i.e., a decrease in the number of visitors, and do not understand why this happened. To remedy the situation, you need to understand what went wrong and make the necessary changes as soon as possible. We will discuss the most common mistakes that lead to a decrease in performance and provide recommendations on how to get out of a critical period.

What are the most common mistakes?

SEO mistakes are errors that, in a certain way, cause the target audience to stop visiting the site, which negatively affects the number of orders and the profitability of the business. They can occur immediately after the launch of the site or after some time, in particular, after a change in the SEO team. Let’s look at the most common ones:

1. Insufficient or missing optimization for modern gadgets, which reduces the position in the Google Mobile-First Index ranking and worsens the user experience.
2. Slow loading of the home page and other pages, which leads to an increase in bounce rates and a deterioration in search engine rankings.
3. Duplicate content. Having pages with identical content on a website not only worsens the ranking of each of them in Google, but also causes distrust among users.
4. Insufficient or excessive number of keywords or their incorrect use, due to which the search engine “does not see” the pages and cannot add them to receive requests from users.
5. Ignoring internal linking. If the structure is not sufficiently developed, then indexing automatically deteriorates.

When there is a suspicion that something is wrong with SEO, it is worth using special tools (Ahrefs, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, GTMetrix) that will conduct a thorough diagnosis, or contacting promotion experts. Other problems that may arise include: incorrect header structure, unclear URLs, refusal to use specialized services such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics.

Ways to fix the situation and improve SEO

It is always possible to fix SEO errors, but it is better to do it as quickly as possible to avoid financial losses. What to do depends on the cause of the problem:

• identify the real goals of users who visit your site to form a semantic core and high-quality integration of keywords, as well as the use of LSI in texts;
• embed links to internal pages of the site in the structure – product cards, service descriptions, prices, etc.;
• diversify tags and page descriptions using classic tags that are understandable to everyone;
• use CDN, caching, and image optimization;
• switch to responsive design with prior testing through Lighthouse or other professional tools.

We hope we have provided enough information to optimize the promotion of your business, although in reality there are many more mistakes, and in some cases it is best to consult a professional.