What Are the Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2020? 13 Ways that You Can Sabotage Your Own Website’s SEO Performance- Part 2

Ready to dig up some more (all too) common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2020?

As promised, in this post I'll be exposing to you another 6 bad habits that are costing you your website's ranking and traffic.

They range from neglecting serious issues, that you consider "minor", to highly damaging practices that you're probably still doing.

So, let's dive right in:

8. You're Ignoring Site Structure Issues That Are Affecting the UX

And this is one of the biggest SEO mistakes that you could make.

Here's how you can identify a poor website structure:
 

• users don't get directed to your homepage once they click on the logo
• your service pages don't automatically load in new tabs
• your website feels cramped and cluttered; users need to work hard to navigate through
   

And since user experience is a huge SEO factor, you might want to consider scheduling a declutter and reorganizing process for your site.

Aim for a clean, fluid, and intuitive navigation on your website.

9. You're Not Optimizing Your Web Presence for Local Search

A bad practice that you'll find in any "top 10 SEO mistakes". 

And which seems to be still so "popular" in 2020, as well (but you'll be bucking this trend, won't you?).

Here are the opportunities that you miss when you don't optimize your website for local search:
 

• you could have stepped ahead of your competitors, who may not have a region-specific strategy set in place
• you could have turned it into a huge advantage when competing against larger, national brands (with huge budgets to invest in SEO), that might be targetting broader keywords
• you could have turned all those potential local visitors into more traffic and... loyal customers
   

Source: moz.com  

10. You've Updated Your Website But... Kept the Old URLs

Another rookie and still so common SEO mistakes to avoid in 2020.

So, you've updated your website. It's optimized for the best-fitting keywords, it has well written, SEO-friendly meta descriptions... but all these efforts are pointless if your URLs:
 

• include underscores
• open HTTP pages and you've just enabled HTTPS on your website   
   

See my point? 

Updating your website, but forgetting to update the URLs, as well, is like... changing your oil, but forgetting to fill up your gas tank.

It won't get you too far.

11. You're Using H1 Tags the Wrong Way: One of the Most Common SEO Mistakes to Avoid in 2020

Are you "guilty" of any of these 2 bad habits when it comes to using H1 tags?
 

• there are no H1 tags, at all, on your web pages
• you're using multiple H1 tags on the same page (for aesthetic purposes)
• you're turning all the headings on a page into H1 tags

It's the H1 tags that let the search engines know what the topic of a page is.

By using none or multiple H1 tags, you're just confusing them and lowering your website's chances to rank high on the results page.

12. You Have No Link Building Strategy 

Or you have a totally ineffective one, based on:
 

• a too low number of backlinks
• low-quality backlinks
   

Start building more backlinks to your website, from relevant authority websites.

13. You've Overlooked to Add Your Sitemap to Your Robots.txt File

And so you've left search engines with no clue on what URLs you have on your website.

This is the surest way of sabotaging their own work — indexing your website's pages — and, implicitly, your website's SEO performance.

Source: semrush.com

But you can still fix it: just go ahead and add a sitemap.xml file to your robots.txt file.

Key Takeaway

The common mistakes to avoid in 2020 are the... basic ones. Those issues that you might find too trivial to fix or to avoid.

And these apparently insignificant SEO mistakes fall into 3 major categories that you should focus on:
 

• content: too thin or duplicate content (stuffed with keywords) won't add any value to the user experience delivered on your website
• internal links: let your common sense tell you how many is enough; make sure they're relevant and useful to the readers
• website architecture: avoid poorly written, unoptimized descriptions and title tags, use H1 and H2 tags the proper way, add ALT tags to your images, look for broken or unoptimized URLs...
   

In short: don't underestimate the basic stuff, that's still being ignored or considered "acceptable" on too many websites.

Now, have you decided to break your bad SEO habits, but you just don't know how to fix the mistakes? 

We're ready to help you with that. 

Just drop us a line! Let's identify all the SEO errors lowering your website's potential and get them fixed.


Image by xiaoxinghai from Pixabay