5 Dumb SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid

SEO mistakes happen. The rules are always changing. There’s no bible for this task and you will get things wrong. But there are some SEO mistakes that are more serious than others. They can put your rankings and traffic in grave danger.

Today, I am going to put in some dumb SEO mistakes like those in this article. How do I know about them? I have worked with a company for over a year that offered SEO services to a plethora of clients. I have seen them doing good work and messing up. I have helped them clean up the mess. In fact, in my beginning days of doing SEO, I was able to get a website out from a Google manual penalty. I know what most people do wrong. Let me tell you about them.

1. Write Fluffy Articles With Just Keywords

Never forget the importance of keywords but ig you have a good SEO copywriter, you will never have to worry about this anyway. Your articles should have keywords but placed in the most natural manner. The actual tone of the post must be conversational and informational.

Think of whether the posts on the blog of your website are relevant to your target audience. Would they like it? Would they share it?

It doesn’t have to be sellable. You’re not selling anything through most of your posts. The motive of these is free useful information and if your articles on the blog or anywhere else for off page SEO do that, you’re safe. Now and forever.

2. Write In A Strict Format For Content

Honestly, this happens when you bring an SEO company onboard. These people don’t care about your branding and reputation. All they need to deliver to you is rankings. Moreover, they’re working with several clients and have limited resources for people.

As a result, they end up setting a fixed set of guidelines for their writers and all the articles become monotonous and almost, useless.

What you need to do is experiment with the format of your content – list posts, image dominated posts, video posts, short posts, extra long posts (2500+ words) etc. should be covered on a regular basis.

One has to experiment – every single time. You, as a professional or a business owner, may not like the format but let a good writer decide what he/she wants to write and how he/she wants to write it. That will be best for you.

I have seen clients requesting difficult language usage in articles else they call them ‘low-quality’. Like, what are you? Stupid? You just don’t care about your target audience (which by the way in this case were mostly high school graduates who never went to college). You don’t care whether your post is readable or not. All you want is ‘sophisticated language usage’ as if we’re still living in the world of Shakespeare and good English only means difficult English.

The truth is, the simpler the language is, the better it is.

3. Lack of Variety In The Content

While my last point is about the format of the content, this is about the variety. What are you going to write? Are you just going to write about industry trends? That would get so boring. And if your audience finds it boring, Google will find it boring too.

Most of the marketing  “experts” suggest that you shouldn’t write anything but what gets you conversions. It’s so dumb. I wonder whether they ever made some real conversions in their life.

While it’s true that your ultimate objective is to sell your product, it’s also true that you don’t have to do it everywhere; all the time. When you’re writing your company blog, bring some personality into it.

Make your content useful, funny, informative and sellable – you may not achieve all that in one post but it can be easily done in multiple posts. Aim for a good balance for all these.

4. Low Clicks But Good Impressions? More Content?

A lot of amateur SEOs see the search console data and figure out how they’re getting good impressions but very low clicks. What they end up doing is pushing their writing team to churn out more content. Will this fix the issue? Very unlikely.

When you’re already getting impressions but not getting any clicks, it’s the problem with your meta title and meta description. Nothing else. Experiment on that and leave your article writing team alone, for god’s sake.

5. Underestimating The Work With E-commerce SEO

Honestly, I have worked with different kinds of websites and the most difficult type of SEO to do is E-commerce SEO. It’s because of the size of the project. E-commerce SEO begins with writing product descriptions to meta descriptions, meta titles, picking right tags, doing category and tag descriptions and then blogging. But everything that has to be done before blogging never finishes. Because, there are always new products (there should be) to work on. It becomes a never ending project. And I just talked about some part of on-page E-commerce SEO. There’s a lot more on-page work still left and then, there’s off-page and technical SEO.

So, if you ever take an E-commerce SEO project, don’t boast. Understand that either you need massive resources for this or it’s going to be slow. Keep that in mind.

Those are the five dumb SEO mistakes you should definitely avoid. I hope this will be helpful for both SEOs and business owners who are looking for SEO services. Do let me know if you have questions or related things to discuss. Leave your comments below now!