15 Common SEO Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

Here are the top 15 mistakes organized from most to least major:

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Don’t buy links.

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you’ll see >1 million potential keywords you can target. Look through the list and pick out keywords that are relevant and have traffic potential (look at the TP column.)

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant result for every query.

So, if you want to rank high on Google, you need to be the most relevant result. This means matching search intent, the why behind a query.

For example, we previously created a landing page to target the keyword “backlink checker.” But it didn’t rank well because searchers wanted a free tool. So, we added it.

The result: 516% more traffic in less than six months.

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Both lines of code tell Googlebot it’s not allowed to crawl any pages on your site. To fix the issue, remove them.

If you’ve accidentally blocked Google from indexing your site or its pages, it's impossible to rank. For example, that can happen if you accidentally added a noindex tag on any of your pages.

Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, then run a crawl on your site using Site Audit. If you have pages that are noindexed, that will pop up as an issue:

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you’ll see >1 million potential keywords you can target. Look through the list and pick out keywords that are relevant and have traffic potential (look at the TP column.)

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant result for every query.

So, if you want to rank high on Google, you need to be the most relevant result. This means matching search intent, the why behind a query.

For example, we previously created a landing page to target the keyword “backlink checker.” But it didn’t rank well because searchers wanted a free tool. So, we added it.

The result: 516% more traffic in less than six months.

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources:

Make sure you’re not blocking Googlebot.

Do this check by going to your robots.txt (yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and looking for these two snippets of code:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Both lines of code tell Googlebot it’s not allowed to crawl any pages on your site. To fix the issue, remove them.

If you’ve accidentally blocked Google from indexing your site or its pages, it's impossible to rank. For example, that can happen if you accidentally added a noindex tag on any of your pages.

Sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools account, then run a crawl on your site using Site Audit. If you have pages that are noindexed, that will pop up as an issue:

Fix the issue by removing the noindex tag.

Many people randomly create content and expect to get search traffic. But if no one’s searching for those topics, then no one’s clicking through to any pages.

That’s likely one of the reasons why 96.55% of pages get no traffic from Google, according to our study.

If you want search traffic, you need to target topics people are searching for.

For example, if you sell coffee equipment, you’ll see >1 million potential keywords you can target. Look through the list and pick out keywords that are relevant and have traffic potential (look at the TP column.)

Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant result for every query.

So, if you want to rank high on Google, you need to be the most relevant result. This means matching search intent, the why behind a query.

For example, we previously created a landing page to target the keyword “backlink checker.” But it didn’t rank well because searchers wanted a free tool. So, we added it.

The result: 516% more traffic in less than six months.

Links are an important Google ranking factor.

So, if your pages are not ranking well, a key reason might be you don’t have enough links.

For example, we would like to rank for the keyword “seo.” But if you look at the top-ranking pages for that keyword, they have tons of backlinks.

As of right now, our page simply doesn’t have enough:

There are many ways to build links, but one good way to start is to see how your competitors have gotten their links. From there, you can attempt to “replicate” their links.

Bear in mind that it’s impossible to replicate all their backlinks, and replicate them like-for-like. But there are a few ways you can attempt to reproduce similar links.

For example, if you’re in an industry with many interviews and podcasts, you can find out where they’ve appeared and see if you can pitch to be on the same podcasts.

Here’s how to find their podcast appearances:

You just need to pitch the same interviews and podcasts.

Buying backlinks is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If they suspect you of doing this, they might slap you with an unnatural links manual action and demote or remove your site from their search results.

Even if you don't get a manual action, you might get demoted algorithmically.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller says:

Don’t buy links.

SEO is not simply a matter of fixing all of these mistakes and calling it a day.

Even if you’re ranking in pole position today, there is no guarantee you’ll be number one tomorrow. Ranking high on search engines is a competition. Your competitors will invest plenty of resources to knock you off the perch.

The recommendations in this post aren’t just for fixing a one-time mistake. They’re strategies you should be consistently doing to rank high on Google:

Case studies like this are seductive:

But what these case studies don’t tell you is how the turntables:

AI content may work for a short while (in this case, just a month), before Google catches up and punishes the website. In fact, during the March 2024 update, Google officially declared “scaled content” as against their spam policies.

So, if you’re thinking of auto-generating massive amounts of content using AI, think again.

Google is not fundamentally opposed to AI content. It doesn’t care how you create it; it just cares about helpfulness for users.

The problem, however, is that AI cannot create valuable content that users want to see. It cannot conduct research, share personal experiences, defend an opinion, or provide nuanced discussions.

So, while you may use AI to help with your content creation, don’t generate content and publish it as-is. Make sure you’re adding value where AI cannot.

My colleague Ryan Law has identified three areas where humans can generate unique value:

Internal links are important:

Yet, internal links are usually not prioritized. Big mistake.

Run a crawl using Ahrefs' Site Audit (via AWT). Once the crawl is complete, go to the Internal link opportunities report.

This report will show you relevant internal link opportunities. Go through the list and add internal links where relevant.

Core Web Vitals are metrics that are part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience. They’re also a Google ranking factor.

Not only will a slow site affect your Google rankings, but it will also impact your sales. According to Unbounce, nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Run a website crawl using Site Audit and you’ll be able to see your Core Web Vitals performance:

Some ways to improve your Core Web Vitals:

Schema markup is code that helps search engines understand the information on a page. Google can use it to show rich results (also known as rich snippets), which can earn a page more clicks.

Unfortunately, some SEOs have taken it to mean that they can add all sorts of irrelevant schema to their pages, in hopes of ranking higher.

It can’t be further from the truth: Not only can schema markup spam lead to a Google penalty, it rarely works because Google can spot it.

Here are instructions directly from Google’s structured data guidelines:

Keyword stuffing is the process of cramming a page full of keywords, in an attempt to rank higher for those keywords.

Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:

Finding the top mirrorless camera can be a daunting task. Yet, with our comprehensive best mirrorless camera guide, we simplify the process by ranking the best mirrorless camera models and the most reliable mirrorless camera brands.

Not only does keyword stuffing make your content look unnatural, it is also against Google’s spam policies.

Instead of trying to shoehorn related keywords into your content, focus on creating content that’s comprehensive instead. In fact, Google encourages this in their Helpful Content guidelines:

To create comprehensive content, you need to cover important subtopics searchers expect to see. Here’s how to find these subtopics:

This will open the Content gap report, which shows you the common keywords these three pages are ranking for. Many of them will be important subtopics you should cover.

For example, if we were targeting the keyword “inbound marketing”, these would make great H2s:

There is a myth in SEO that longer content performs better. This ends up in an arms race: SEOs fighting to make their blog posts as long as possible.

But nobody is clamoring to read longer posts. When Medium studied the correlation between post length and average reading time, they noticed that engagement started to drop for posts with a reading time longer than seven minutes.

Our own study has also found that there was only a moderate correlation between content length and organic traffic up to 2,000 words. For posts longer than 2,000 words, there is a moderate negative correlation between word count and organic traffic.

If your article is long because the topic you’re tackling is deep, so be it. If your article is short because the topic is simple, then let it be. Don’t make it longer than necessary. 

In short: Focus on being comprehensive, not being lengthy. Nobody wants to read Dostoyevsky just to cook a simple fried rice.

Title tags and meta descriptions are the first things a searcher sees when they enter a query. It can be the difference behind whether a searcher clicks through.

However, many websites neglect these two tags. When we looked at >1 million domains to find the most common technical SEO issues, meta tag issues like:

Were in the top 15 most common.

Run a crawl with Site Audit (free with AWT). You’ll see all the meta tag issues, along with the affected URLs.

Fix them.

If you’re stuck, you can ask ChatGPT to brainstorm title tag ideas for you and get inspiration.

Alt text describes an image on a web page.

Not only can it help improve topical relevance on a page, it can also help you rank in Google images. And while you may not think it, Google Images is the second largest search engine in the world.

However, I want to point out that this is likely a minor issue. If you’re making any of the mistakes in this post, focus on fixing them first. As the saying goes, “don’t major in minor things.”

Run a crawl with Site Audit. This will tell you if you have any images with missing alt text.

Click the number to see the affected URLs. All that’s left is to fill in the missing ones. If you’re struggling, you can use our free AI image alt text generator.

Upload your image, select a tone, and you’re off to the races.

You now have an understanding of what common SEO mistakes you could be making and how to avoid and fix them. If you want to dig deeper and continue learning, check out these resources: