10 On-Page SEO Mistakes to Avoid in New Content

The most common on-page SEO mistakes are small and fixable: stuffing keywords, skipping basic tags, and writing without checking what people search for. Here are 10 to check before you publish.

Content marketing professionals routinely miss important website search optimization steps. These on-page SEO mistakes can make a big difference in a site’s search rankings.

Optimizing web content for SEO is a bit of a paradox. Writing content that shows up on the first search engine result page (aka the “SERP”) is complex. But at the same time, the basic approach is simple, obvious even: provide valuable content that gives the reader what they’re looking for.

Before joining FourFront, I worked on both the client side and at a more traditional marketing agency, so I have seen these mistakes from both sides. While big-picture SEO must take into account “off-site” metrics (like the website’s authority, brand trust, relevance, etc.), content writers can have a big impact on the on-page (or “on-site”) aspects of search optimization. This includes writing content that meets the needs of the audience, that is keyword targeted, and includes all the necessary back-end coding that many web writers can affect through CMS systems like WordPress or Squarespace.

With this in mind, I want to share some of the common SEO mistakes that content writers, webmasters and social media managers tend to make when writing for the web, because I used to make a lot of these mistakes, too.

The 10 Mistakes at a Glance

1. Keyword Stuffing

Use your target keyword where it fits naturally, not on a quota. Google’s spam policies list keyword stuffing as a way of trying to manipulate rankings.

Keyword stuffing, probably the most common on-page SEO mistake, is another spammy technique leftover from the earlier days of SEO. While using your target keyword in the text and the Title Tag is still important, you should only use it a limited number of times throughout the body of your page. Overusing it also makes your writing unnatural and harder to read.

Instead of using your keyword a million times, focus on making content that is super relevant to the topic. Write something that fully answers your target audience’s questions and includes relevant links to related information for further education, whether that be through external links, links to other pages on your site, or a call-to-action for inquiring about your business’s products or services.

Wondering how many mentions is too many? See our guide to keyword density and content optimization.

2. Missing Easy Wins

Five quick checks cover most of the basics: title tag, meta description, image alt text, video captions, and your sitemap. Run them every time you publish.

If you’re frequently creating and publishing new content, you might be missing some of the “low-hanging fruit” that can help Google and other search engines understand what your content is all about. (And getting Google to understand your web page is one of the first hurdles to appearing on page 1.)

Content writers need to include these easy on-page SEO wins in their publishing routine:

• Create a strong Title Tag – This is what shows up in the headline of a search result. The Title Tag should include your target keyword. Google sets no length limit, but it shortens long titles to fit the screen. Put the key words first and aim for about 50-60 characters as a working guide. See Google’s guidance on title links and our guide to writing titles and meta descriptions.

  

• Write a compelling Meta Description – This preview text is your chance to tell a searcher what the page offers. Google sets no length limit, and it builds most snippets from the page itself, but it may use your meta description when that describes the page better. Keep it short and specific, and lead with the benefit.

  

• Use alt tags for images – Alt tags are an important way for search engines to understand what the images in your new content actually show. This is especially important if your website wants to compete in Image search results, and the alt tags also help vision-impaired people understand your website through the use of screen readers. Describe what the image shows in plain words. Google advises against filling alt text with keywords.

   

• Add video captions – Like image alt tags, video captions give YouTube and Google a better understanding of the clip. On top of that, you need to include video captions so hearing-impaired users can watch and understand your video. Captions are relatively easy to implement through built-in features on YouTube and Facebook.

  

• Update your sitemap – Once you add a new web page, make sure your sitemap lists it, and submit the sitemap in Search Console.  Tools like Screaming Frog or XML-Sitemaps can help you out. To nudge Google toward one new or updated page, run it through the URL Inspection tool and select Request indexing. A sitemap is a hint, not a command, so Google may not crawl every URL right away. If your sitemap includes lastmod dates, keep them accurate, because Google only uses them when they are consistently and verifiably right. For a walkthrough, see our Google Search Console 101 guide.

  

3. Failing to Research a Keyword

Check that people actually search for a topic before you write about it. A clever idea with no search demand won’t bring in readers.

A new blog idea might seem brilliant on paper, but a good idea doesn’t mean people are searching for it.

Here’s just one example of how failing to research a keyword is one of those SEO mistakes that can really harm your content marketing strategy:

Say you’re a marketer working for a coffee shop located close to a hospital, and you decide to create a new web page targeting the keyword “Coffee for Doctors.” You spend a bunch of time coming up with the perfect content that describes why coffee makes life better for MDs and why your coffee shop is proud to service the medical industry. Once it’s published, you share it on all your social media pages, but then, after the first few clicks from Facebook have fizzled out, no one shows up to the party. “Why is no one reading my perfect material?!”

Unfortunately, no one is reading it because no one can find it. More importantly, no one is looking for it. While your idea to target “coffee for doctors” was a nice starting point, a quick search for the phrase would reveal no ads, which is usually a good indicator that it’s not a high-volume term. Google trends and Keyword Planner are two places to check demand before you commit. When this post was first written, both showed no data for the term:

In this case, I think you’d be better off focusing your new content efforts on the trendy “cold brew” topic, instead:

Targeting the medical institution down the street through optimizing your site for “near me” searches might also be a strategy worth pursuing.

4. Focusing on Link-Building

Publish content worth linking to, and let links follow. Buying, trading, or automating links can run against Google’s link spam policies.

Link-building isn’t really considered an on-page SEO tactic, but it’s still worth mentioning because a lot of writers get caught up in this practice for the wrong reasons.

The practice of “link-building”, which means getting important websites to link to your site in order to boost your rankings, was one of the most common strategies in the earlier days of SEO. This was spurred on by Google rules and led to some of the most annoying spam practices on the Internet. (If you’ve ever gotten a weird comment on an article that includes a link back to their website, chances are that someone is employing a link-building strategy.)

Backlinks still matter, but at FourFront we don’t do traditional link-building. That’s partly because of the spamminess, but it’s also a better strategy to focus on earning links. Additionally, focusing your SEO efforts on link-building is a risky strategy because you’re trusting your SEO to other websites that you have no control over. If those links are removed or those websites go down, your rankings can drop along with them. You can build a better foundation by building useful content and letting the link-building happen naturally over time.

For more on how links fit into a modern strategy, read our guide to external link strategy.

5. Creating New (Pointless) Content Just to Fill an Editorial Calendar

Publish fewer posts if that’s what it takes to keep each one useful. Google’s helpful content guidance lists publishing many articles on unrelated topics, in hopes that some will rank, as a warning sign.

An editorial calendar is a common and really useful tool for planning and executing a content marketing strategy. However, the artificial deadlines these schedules create can sometimes motivate a team to write content that is misaligned with your brand’s overall strategy.

Consider this: If you could choose between 12 blog posts that no one reads or 1 blog post that ranks #1 for the next three years, would that even be a choice?

That’s not to say that you should trash your editorial calendar altogether. Keeping your site updated regularly matters, but make sure you have the resources in place to create meaningful content for each of your deadlines. If you’re struggling to keep up, you should adjust your schedule or add resources. You don’t need to publish on a fixed schedule for it to count. Publish when you have something worth reading, and start from a plan like our content-first SEO strategy.

6. Internal Linking Mistakes

After you publish, link to the new page from older pages where it fits naturally. Use short, descriptive anchor text, and don’t overdo it.

After you publish your new content, do a site search and find relevant pages and text that should now link to the new page. For example, if you just wrote a post about coffee mugs, your old post about coffee filters might mention “coffee mugs” in the body. If so, turn that phrase into an in-text link to the new post.

This can be a tedious task, especially just after you’ve finally finished a new post and want to move on to your next task. But forgetting to do it is missing another easy win, so I urge you to work this easy search optimization step into your routine.

That said, be careful not to do it too much. No one wants to read a blog where every other word is a blue link to some internal page. Providing a valuable user experience should be a top priority in your optimization strategy, so be sensitive about how many links you’re adding.

Google’s link guidance asks for link text that is descriptive and reasonably concise, so “click here” and “read more” make weak anchors. It also recommends that every page you care about is linked from at least one other page on your site. For a deeper look, see our guide to internal linking for SEO and UX.

7. Forsaking UX in the Name of Google

Write for the reader first. Pages that are easy to read and navigate serve both people and search engines.

Your readers aren’t going to become your customers if you’re serving them up to the Google gods like sacrificial lambs. Remember that Google (or Bing, etc.) wants their users to find useful content that satisfies their search requests and keeps them using Google in the future. That means providing high-quality, easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate information should be one of your top priorities. Do this and some (not all, but some) of the other optimization steps will naturally take care of themselves.

Google’s own guidance frames it the same way: create content primarily for people, not to manipulate rankings.

8. Omitting Social Optimization

Set Open Graph tags so your links preview well when shared, then check the preview before you post.

Social media can be a powerful force for attracting an audience to your new content early in its lifecycle and for extending its reach in the future, too.

One way to help your content marketing assets perform well on social is through Open Graph tagging. The Open Graph protocol allows you to control how your content appears when it becomes a “rich object” on a platform like Facebook or LinkedIn. For example, by implementing the proper OG tags on your blog post, you will be able to control which image pulls into the link preview when someone shares your post on Facebook. This Facebook resource goes over OG markup more extensively.  There are WordPress plugins that can help you implement this language on WordPress sites.

To test a new web page, I recommend using Facebook’s free Sharing Debugger tool to get a quick preview of how your content will appear on social. If you see anything that doesn’t look right, adjust accordingly. You’ll need to log in to Facebook to use it.

Remember to include social buttons for easy sharing, too. There are a ton of WordPress plugins for adding social icons to your web pages.

9. Ignoring Data Insights

Let your own data tell you what to write next. Search Console and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) show which pages and queries already bring people to your site.

The data you gain from SEO can change the way you do business. One example is Google Analytics (GA4). If you’ve never paid any attention to it before, the data about where your website’s readers come from, what they’re reading and how they progress through your site could change your marketing plans. New to it? Start with our guide to navigating GA4.

Another example is search trends. Understanding the questions people are asking on search gives you a pretty clear picture of the entire market. Hypothetically, let’s say you saw on Google Trends that the search volume for “organic coffee beans” was way up over last year, but search volume for “donuts and coffee” was starting to trend down. Note: it’s not—but by hypothetically providing this hypothetical insight to your C-suite, you might just see your company’s product line switch course.

10. Missing the Forest for the Trees

No single page decides your Organic Search results. Don’t spend hours on one post’s details while ignoring site-wide basics like trust, mobile experience and speed.

There are a lot of factors that go into determining a page’s search ranking. (Emphasis: a lot.) So, the way any single piece of your content marketing is optimized isn’t going to make-or-break your website’s search engine optimization success. While that doesn’t mean you should get lazy with optimizing your newest blog entries, it does mean that you don’t need to sweat every detail for hours on end.

Remember: Good content is only one factor in how a search engine ranks a website. Trust, mobile experience and load times matter too.

Google’s helpful content guidance calls trust the most important part of E-E-A-T, its shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. E-E-A-T is a way to think about content quality, not a single ranking factor. Things like that need to be addressed and maintained regularly if you want your site to consistently rank highly.

Bonus SEO Mistake: The Unknown

The biggest mistake may be the one you don’t know you’re making. Search keeps changing, and no one can watch every part of it alongside everything else on their plate.

The Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known discusses, among other things, some of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous turns of phrase. Two of them come to mind. The first is “unknown unknowns.” These are the things you don’t know that you don’t know. But there are also “unknown knowns,” or, as Rumsfeld put it, “the things you think you know, that it turns out you did not.”

This comes to mind when I think about SEO mistakes because search keeps changing. A digital marketer needs to have their thumb on the pulse of dozens of things all at once, from Paid Ads campaigns to social pages, partnerships and information security, so search marketing often doesn’t get the full attention it needs.

With so much to keep track of, what a digital marketer doesn’t realize they’re missing might make the difference between success and failure. So, an “unknown unknown” might be the biggest SEO mistake of all.

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