10 shocking mistakes killing your SEO

Page performance pays. Big time. In fact, the results you get from a high-converting website are so critical that businesses and organisations, large and small, are willing to bring in outside help to ensure that their websites exceed user standards.

Sadly none of that will promise you a page that performs if you don’t address the 10 biggest SEO performance killers. That’s why it’s crucial to know the essentials and apply the right tools on a page-specific basis.

Some of these mistakes are so elementary, you’ll wonder why you never thought about them before. Others are definitely more technical and may be genuine eye-openers. The good news is that each item on this list is accompanied by a repair resource or tool so that you can start fixing them right away.

1. Bad landing pages

The fundamental mistake most businesses make is in not sending high-value traffic to a dedicated landing page.

If you happen to be paying for traffic through online advertising (e.g. AdWords or PPC), this mistake doesn’t only kill your on-page performance, it’s also a huge waste of money and ruins your ROI. If I click or tap your advertisement, I expect to see content directly related to the information in your ad. Simply dumping visitors on your homepage or a broad category page is the No. 1 page performance killer.

[Tweet “Most businesses don’t send high-value traffic to a dedicated landing page.”]

Remedy

• Start by dedicating a landing page for every single paid ad you produce.
• Ensure the advertising copy and the landing page copy overlap directly.
• The headline or offer on your advertisement (whether you’re using Google AdWords, Facebook, or even a banner ad) should match the headline and the offer on the landing page.
• Keep it specific and retain what experts call “scent.”
• Be sure your landing pages are mobile-friendly.
• When you’re selecting something like an email-marketing provider for lead generation and sales, choose one that includes a landing page generator that automatically creates responsive pages without any coding or heavy (technical) lifting on your end (e.g. GetResponse).

2. Poor content

There is a whole raft of reasons why your content may be poor. How do you know? Check Google Analytics. These are the main alarm triggers:

• A high bounce rate
• Under two minutes spent on the site for the average visitor
• Few to no comments
• A lack of social shares.

If your website or blog is dull or unengaging, or your page looks like any of these disasters, your website is going nowhere … fast.

Sustaining the attention of your audience should be your primary goal. Poor quality content isn’t only boring, it’s has virtually zero value.

The cornerstone of effective content marketing: provide value to your visitors in advance of their purchase.

[Tweet “Provide value to your visitors in advance of their purchase.”]

Remedy

• Start by creating epic cornerstone content (“lead magnets”) and build from there.
• Provide value to your readers through checklists, guides, whitepapers, webinars, top 10 lists, eBooks, reviews, videos, etc.
• Reverse engineer your cornerstone content by researching what’s already working for your market (try using SearchReddit).
• If you sell physical products, avoid poor content by reading negative reviews of popular products in your niche on Amazon. Reviews connect you directly to your target audience and guide you towards crafting engaging content.

3. Calls to action

Let’s assume you’ve created some amazing content to feature on your dedicated landing page. The next stage is to follow up with a call to action (CTA) that gets visitors clicking.

Rule of thumb: always ensure it’s really clear what action you want readers to take.

• Don’t make them think.
• Don’t leave it to chance.
• Don’t give them so many options that they are spoiled for choice.
• Cardinal sins of page-killing CTAs: abundance and ambiguity.

Remedy

• Use the “I want” formula by including “I want” at the beginning of your CTA copy or button: “I want … to book an appointment.”
• Only have one CTA. This doesn’t necessarily mean having only one button. High-performing pages often have multiple forms, opt-in options, or even “Buy Now” CTAs. What this does mean is all of those CTAs must be for the same request.

4. Pop-up problems

Here we have one or other of two extremes:

• Your page isn’t using popups (and therefore misses out on a huge performance boost)
• You’re using pop-ups that are fundamentally disconnected from the content of your page itself.

You may, like many website owners, believe that visitors find pop-ups annoying. The cold, hard facts speak for themselves, though, which is that when you use relevant popups with the right timing, they work like a dream.

Remedy

• Your page should have two pop-ups related to the content of the page: an end-of-page pop-up that’s activated when the user reaches the bottom and exit-intent pop-up that’s activated when the user moves their mouse to leave.
• Don’t add “site wide” popups with generic CTAs. Be specific and tailor them to your landing page.

5. Dodgy links

Dodgy links affect your on-page performance in two ways:

• They’re responsible for generating ice-cold traffic: visitors arriving at your site for misleading reasons damage your conversion rates.
• They affect your SEO negatively. (Google penalties from dodgy links can ruin your search ranking.)

This can be fixed and once remedied, you can obtain tremendous results.

Remedy

A good SEO company will provide comprehensive link auditing tools to prevent your website from being penalised. The backlink analysis and unnatural link detection tools keep them abreast of what’s going on with your site links and helps in fixing any issues before they become problematic. They also provide tested guidance to help you recover from penalties of all kinds.

6. Cheap hosting

Hosting is one of the most overlooked problems damaging page performance.

A number of the mistakes below hinge on finding a hosting company that meets the needs and goals of your website.

• Includes things like ensuring your pages load quickly enough, minimising downtime, and providing enough capacity to handle inbound traffic.

[Tweet “Hosting is one of the most overlooked problems damaging page performance.”]

Remedy

Replacing a poor hosting company is a relatively simple fix. You just need to find the right host for you.

When looking for a hosting company, you need to bear three factors in mind:

• storage space available
• bandwidth allocation
• uptime/downtime (i.e. how often your site will be down due to server maintenance and other factors)

Just be sure to do your research.

7. Too Many HTTP Requests

A webpage is made up of many elements, which come together to make it function, e.g. text, images, videos, scripts, fonts, styling.

A separate “HTTP request” is required for every single on-page element.

The more elements on a page, the longer it will take to load.

The longer it takes to load, the more quickly your visitors will leave.

This does not mean you can’t have aesthetically amazing pages that feature multiple elements and top-notch web apps. They just need to be optimised.

Remedy

• Reduce the number of on-page elements to the absolute essentials, especially on landing pages.
• Prioritise CSS (styling) over the use of images and combine multiple stylesheets into one.
• Various plugins (e.g. BJ Lazy Load) can simplify this process if you’re running WordPress.

You can opt to host files locally on your server instead of using third party tools such as Flickr to host images. You should also consider using a content delivery network and caching (see below).

8. No Content Delivery Network

Peep Laja of ConversionXL identifies using a content delivery network (CDN) as the first “low hanging fruit” to improve site performance.

A CDN is a system of distributed servers (i.e. a network) delivering webpages and other content to a user based on geographic location, the origin of the webpage, and a content delivery server. A CDN eases the load on your server and makes your visitors happier by providing them with a faster and more responsive page.

Remedy

If you’re looking for a CDN, find out whether they are fully automated, what process they use to divert traffic and minimise files (some will zip files for you) and what additional security features they offer in terms of blocking spam or attempted attacks. There are lots of CDN providers available and it shouldn’t be difficult to implement on your site.

9. No compression or cache

Uncompressed and uncached page elements kill SEO performance.

• Compression reduces the bandwidth used by your pages
• Caching allows for temporary storage of website elements by the visitor

Both techniques permit web pages to load more quickly, particularly for returning visits.

Remedy

• Some CDNs will compress files for you automatically, so check if this feature is available there first.
• Cache plugins are available for content management platforms such as WordPress, which offer configuration options such as compression.

10. Not responsive

Google’s latest #mobilegeddon update made it tempting to place this mistake at the very top of the list.

I’ve saved the best for last.

Google now factors mobile-friendliness into their search-rank algorithm. This is partly cause and partly effect. Mobile digital media usage is now significantly higher at 51% vis-à-vis desktop at 42%. 54% of consumers also believe it’s easier to find information on mobile-optimised websites.

• Optimise your website (especially your high traffic pages) for mobile viewing. This is non-negotiable.
• Make web pages responsive: i.e. larger text, easy CTAs for touchscreen interfaces, smaller images, compressed navigation, and streamlined, scrollable viewing.

Remedy

• Google looks for things such as page loading time and compression of page elements, as well as the size of fonts and buttons to ensure that they are viewable and clickable on any device.
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and PageSpeed Insights will not only tell you how well your website is performing, they also provide details on how you can fix the issues to improve your score.

Conclusion

Removing all of these costly mistakes can feel overwhelming.

You don’t have to bite everything off in one go. Start with the most obvious performance killers and progress from there.

The good news: once you start implementing these changes, you’ll be able to track your performance improvements immediately and adapt as needed.