When design­ing an effec­tive SEO strat­e­gy, you need to pay close atten­tion to on-page ele­ments. While off-page fac­tors such as back­links still have a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence in the world of search engine opti­miza­tion, the ele­ments on your web­site are cru­cial for Google­bot to under­stand what your con­tent is about. On-page SEO can eas­i­ly make or break your SEO rank­ing! Find out which are the top ten most fre­quent on-page mis­takes that could kill your SEO.

SEO ranking and the top 10 on-page SEO mistakes

#1 Choosing wrong keywords

Most key­word research­es are super­fi­cial and only seem­ing­ly pro­vide the researcher with action­able data. When decid­ing on focus key­words, many busi­ness own­ers use the Google Plan­ner tool. While Google Plan­ner can be a valu­able tool for paid adver­tis­ing, it’s prob­a­bly not the best idea to rely only on insights gath­ered there for on-page opti­miza­tion. The issue with Google Plan­ner lies in the fact that every­one is get­ting the same results. There is no actu­al ben­e­fit from Google’s rec­om­men­da­tions when thou­sands of oth­er busi­ness own­ers will opti­mize their con­tent for the same keywords.

The choice of key­words to opti­mize for is always a tough one; you can either go for pop­u­lar key­words with a lot of queries, but also a lot of com­pe­ti­tion, or aim at niche key­words with low search vol­ume but high­er con­ver­sion rates. You need to think about your posi­tion on the mar­ket for your spe­cif­ic ser­vice or prod­uct before choos­ing key­words and the abil­i­ty to pro­mote your con­tent and gain backlinks.

#2 Misunderstanding searcher intent

Pre­dict­ing searcher intent (what the per­son behind the query is inter­est­ed in) is a game that Google played the best in the ear­ly age of search engines. Google’s abil­i­ty to guess the out­come is what made it a dom­i­nat­ing pow­er in this field of ser­vices. The same applies for today’s SEO experts, who need to guess what exact­ly the searcher wants and needs. This is often a very dif­fi­cult job, since search terms can be very ambigu­ous. For exam­ple, if we see a query say­ing “piano music lessons”, we can’t actu­al­ly tell if the searcher is look­ing for a music teacher or an online course on how to play the piano.

#3 Low-quality content

Many believe that the key to high SEO rank­ing is to cre­ate a lot of con­tent, as Google likes con­tent-rich web­sites. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, short, poor­ly writ­ten or hasti­ly pro­duced con­tent, even copied from oth­er sources, can hurt your rank­ings more than help them. Instead of writ­ing ten 300–500 words arti­cles every week, you should con­cen­trate on a sin­gle, high­ly use­ful 2500-word arti­cle each month, as this will give you far bet­ter SEO results.

#4 Non-optimized content

Writ­ing great con­tent is not enough. To increase SEO rank­ing, you need to opti­mize your con­tent for users as well as search engines. When writ­ing an arti­cle, make sure that:

• the title tag includes the main keyword
• you have the key­word in your H1 Headline
• the URL includes the main keyword
• some of the sub­head­ings con­tain the keyword
• images have alt attributes
• inter­nal links link to rel­e­vant content
• over­all con­tent is opti­mized for your spe­cif­ic key­word or keyphrase

If you release a video, make sure it has a full, detailed descrip­tion, with prop­er key­words in its title and descrip­tion body. Cor­rect tags and oth­er video-rel­e­vant fea­tures help you stand out more amongst your com­pe­ti­tion. Sim­i­lar­ly for tweets, social media posts, info­graph­ics, etc. Essen­tial­ly, you need to opti­mize every piece of con­tent before pub­lish­ing, to achieve notice­able, pos­i­tive SEO effects.

#5 Not promoting your content

The most com­mon mis­take busi­ness own­ers make is cre­at­ing con­tent and fail­ing to pro­mote it. Some, in fact, are very uncom­fort­able about pro­mot­ing some­thing they cre­at­ed because they resent the “mar­ket­ing part”. Ignore that feel­ing and pro­mote your best con­tent every­where; through social media pages, both organ­ic and paid, newslet­ters, YouTube, what­ev­er chan­nels you can use.

#6 Low text to HTML ratio

Many web­sites have very lit­tle tex­tu­al con­tent on pages their own­ers wish to rank high in SERP (Search Engine Results Page). When that is the case, Google has a hard time fig­ur­ing out what the web­site is about. Remem­ber that the text is the “meat” for Google, the source of infor­ma­tion on what a spe­cif­ic page is about. Make sure to have enough text that quick­ly and pre­cise­ly explains the pur­pose of every page you have in the index.

#7 Poor internal linking

On every sig­nif­i­cant piece of con­tent you cre­ate, you must have inter­nal links that lead to oth­er rel­e­vant con­tent. This is your chance to pass on SEO rank­ing to pages you would like to see high­er in search engine result pages. Also, when cre­at­ing inter­nal links, try to avoid links with anchor text such as “click here” or “learn more”. This is an out­dat­ed prac­tice, from when site own­ers knew lit­tle about links and how they worked. Today, you need to make sure that your link has the spe­cif­ic key­word you want to rank for as the title.

#8 SEO ranking and slow loading speed

This is a sim­ple mat­ter with a huge impact on today’s web­sites. To test your load­ing speed, you can use a tool such as Page­Speed Insights from Google. Besides load­ing speed, the tool will also give you a list of pos­si­ble improve­ments and tips on how to achieve them.

One of the most com­mon caus­es of slow web­sites are heavy images, exces­sive JavaScript or slow serv­er response time. Read more about opti­miz­ing web­site’s speed and per­for­mance to enhance the user experience.

#9 No mobile-friendly pages

In the past cou­ple of years, Google has repeat­ed­ly stat­ed that a web­site with­out a mobile-friend­ly ver­sion of its pages will drop down in rank­ings. For this rea­son alone, you need to opti­mize your web­site for mobile views. You can either make sure all ele­ments on your web­site are respon­sive and opti­mized for mobile or use AMP. Accel­er­at­ed Mobile Pages are super light­weight pages designed to load very quick­ly, almost instant­ly on mobile devices.

#10 Poor technical performance

Final­ly, one often over­looked aspect of on-page SEO is the over­all tech­ni­cal per­for­mance of the web­site. This aspect gains more sig­nif­i­cance by the day as Google attempts to offer the best, most secure web brows­ing expe­ri­ence. Con­tent needs to be reg­u­lar­ly backed up, the CMS of the web­site test­ed for secu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, the serv­er itself test­ed for opti­mal per­for­mance and cor­rect con­fig­u­ra­tion. It is also impor­tant to know the uptime of the web­site, i.e. how often and for how long your web­site is not acces­si­ble, which indi­cates how sta­ble the servers are and if you lose poten­tial cus­tomers dur­ing downtime.

pur­ple­plan­et pro­vides Word­Press main­te­nance ser­vices, which include mon­i­tor­ing of all aspects of a web­site’s tech­ni­cal per­for­mance, and mak­ing sure your web­site per­forms as well as it can. Con­tact us for more infor­ma­tion about web­site main­te­nance and how we can help you improve your business.