5 Common SEO Mistakes Online Business Owners Make - And How to Fix Them

Are you putting in the effort to create great content, optimize your website, and attract more visitors—only to see little to no growth in your traffic? You might be making some common SEO mistakes that are holding your website back.

SEO isn’t just about stuffing keywords into your content and hoping for the best. It’s about strategy, consistency, and avoiding the pitfalls that could be pushing your site down in search rankings.

In today’s episode, I’m uncovering the 5 most common SEO mistakes that could be killing your website traffic. Plus, I’ll walk you through how to fix them so you can start climbing the rankings and getting the visitors (and conversions) you deserve!

Mentioned Resources:

Mastering SEO

-> EP 024: Breaking Down SEO

-> Ep 033: Unlocking the Potential of Keyword Research to Skyrocket Your E-Commerce Success

-> EP 067: SEO for Long-Term Online Business Success

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro to Common SEO Mistakes
• 5:05 Importance of Technical SEO
• 12:33 Keyword Research: Why It Matters
• 23:04 Creating Quality Content: Avoiding Thin Content
• 32:50 The Power of Internal Linking
• 42:15 Tracking SEO Performance: Must

Transcript

Carrie Saunders: 0:01

Are you putting in the effort to create great content, optimize your website and attract more visitors, only to see little to no growth in your traffic? You might be making some common SEO mistakes that are holding your website back that are pretty easy to fix. Seo, or search engine optimization, isn't just about stuffing keywords into your content and hoping for the best. It's about strategy and consistency and avoiding the pitfalls that could be pushing your site and hoping for the best. It's about strategy and consistency and avoiding the pitfalls that could be pushing your site down in search engine rankings. In today's episode, I'm covering the five most common SEO mistakes that could be killing your website traffic. Plus, I'll walk you through how to fix them so that you can start climbing the rankings and getting the visitors and conversions you deserve.

Carrie Saunders: 0:50

Welcome to the e-commerce made easy podcast. I'm your host, k Saunders. When we started this business, all I had was a couch, a laptop and a nine month old. My main goal to help others. Now, with over 20 years in the e-commerce building industry and even more than that in web development, I have seen a lot. I love breaking down the hard tech and to easily understandable bits to help others be successful in their online business. Whether you're a seasoned e-commerce veteran or just starting out, you've come to the right place, so sit back, relax and let's dive into the world of e-commerce together. Welcome back to the show.

Carrie Saunders: 1:20

Today we're talking about the five most common SEO mistakes you may be making on your website and how to fix them. So the first one is ignoring technical SEO. Now, that might sound a little techie, but it's actually not too bad, and we have quite a few podcast episodes that can help you through these different things I'm going to talk about in this section. So the main issue here is that business owners focus on their content and don't worry about the technical SEO part, which is simply things like low site speed, broken links, poor mobile optimization and missing alt text. Those all can dramatically impact your rankings. And we have some other podcast episodes around many of these topics and we will link to those in the show notes around many of these topics and we will link to those in the show notes.

Carrie Saunders: 2:07

But monitoring and making sure that your website speed is fast is actually a pretty easy task. Sometimes fixing it is a little bit harder. Sometimes it's not that hard and we actually have a free download on how to make sure your images are appropriate size for the web too, for mobile optimization. That's something very easy for you to test With many new modern software out there. It's a bit easier to fix too, if your software has the ability for you to adjust that pretty well. Otherwise, you can simply get a developer to help you with your mobile look and feel.

Carrie Saunders: 2:37

But we want to make sure it's super important, because Google will penalize you if your site is not mobile optimized. So you can check your speed with Google PageSpeed Insights. It gives a great perspective of what Google perceives your website as to being, as far as how fast it goes, and you can use that to make improvements. And we want to make sure that your website is mobile friendly and responsive, so it works on many different types of devices. And we want to fix broken links. So we want to make sure that there aren't links that are broken, and you can realize a good bit of this. And if you connect to Google search console and this is an area of Google that I find most business owners neglect to look at and it's really a lot less, honestly, overwhelming than Google Analytics Look at. There's a lot less options in there and it's pretty clear cut. When you have issues, it will actually tell you that you have issues in there. So that's something I want you to pay attention to and, if you don't understand how to fix, and get a trusted web developer like us to help you out there.

Carrie Saunders: 3:41

And then you also want to make sure you have alt text on your images. So this is actually a really super important thing for a couple reasons. It helps your accessibility as well. It helps Google understand what the image is about and what the intention of the image is. Now, with current AI, it's a lot easier for Google to figure out what's in the image, but with this alt text, it helps Google understand what you think is important about the image and it's a great another tool that they Google uses and the main search engines uses to make sure that the content on your website is important. So make sure you're describing your images appropriately with that alt text.

Carrie Saunders: 4:21

So for this section, we want to recap a little bit this technical SEO. While it's called technical SEO, it isn't really that technical most of the time, unless you actually need to dig down and fix some of these things. But search engines do prioritize a lot of these elements actually most, if not all, of these elements. All search engines do to make sure that your site is up to par for their visitors to deliver your site to them, because if your website structure is not good, they're not going to deliver your website to them, because they're going to be serving their customers poor user experience. That's one of the main reasons that we want to make sure we have these elements proper and right. Also, not using the right keywords this, I know this is kind of like black magic and many times think people think it is black magic, but again, it's better to not guess here.

Carrie Saunders: 5:09

It's better to start learning how to do keyword research and figure out what the good keywords are for you. Many businesses don't do any keyword research at all. You can just simply do some basic keyword research and you're going to be better off than many business owners. You want to make sure that you're not focusing on broad, highly competitive words, so a simple way to do that is to search the keywords. You might think that people search to find your website in Google, and then there's this little more information link and you can use it to see how many competitors there are on that. How many pages are there returning for that result. That can kind of give you an idea of how busy the result is, how many people are competing for you on that result. There's also great tools like Ubersuggest, google Keyword Planner and also Answer the Public. Those can help you find keywords too, and many of them will tell you how competitive it is, which means how many other people are vying for that keyword and how popular the search is. So you want to find the right balance between popular enough but without too much competition, and you're going to be able to rank faster for those keywords.

Carrie Saunders: 6:23

So using long tail keywords is usually the key here, especially for newer or less established businesses, and we want to make sure that we're using these when we're doing our keyword research and our keyword in our content. And what a long tail keyword means is it's multiple words. It's generally three or more. Many times people are looking at four or five words together. So it's basically a phrase, not really a keyword. So think of it like that is a short phrase. You know how to improve your search engine optimization would be a really a keyword. So think of it like that is a short phrase. You know how to improve your search engine optimization would be a long tail keyword and that's probably a bit too competitive out there. But that's just kind of an example of a long keyword, a long tail keyword, right there, and you can also.

Carrie Saunders: 7:08

What we want to do is we want to make sure we are naturally placing these keywords on our page and we want to focus on one keyword set per page, ideally, so when we're putting them throughout our page, we want to put them in the title, we want to put them in our any headers we have and throughout your content in a natural manner. And another thing you can do is you can take your keyword phrase or your long tail keyword and reorder the words a little bit, kind of make it be a bit more natural on reading too for the consumer, and so you can find some more creative ways to add it into that page's content when you're thinking more of like you know, if I were writing this as a report to my English teacher, how would I reemphasize this point? But with maybe a different arrangement of words or some synonyms. Many times synonyms can actually help us too with our keyword research and our keyword content for our articles. So make sure that you know you're looking at different ways to put it in there. Obviously we don't want to overstuff. We don't want something super crazy and a whole bunch of your keywords in there. Otherwise you'll get penalized for that as well, because that's old SEO tactics from like the 2000s. So we don't want to be doing that because the search engines are much smarter to that now. But making sure we have them sprinkled naturally throughout our pages.

Carrie Saunders: 8:33

Content is super important. Another mistake people make is pushing low quality or thin content. So websites with short, unhelpful or outdated content often get penalized. Google and other major search engines prioritize useful, in-depth content that answers users' questions. So we're going back here to what is most important for Google and Bing and the major search engines to do, and that's to serve you content that's useful to you. So they want to make sure that the content they are showing in their results is going to be useful to the consumer. So if your content's really thin, it's kind of is vague and it doesn't really nail down to a point and be very helpful, they're not going to use that content and, you know, show it to the users.

Carrie Saunders: 9:25

So one of the ways you can fix this is to write more long form content we're talking. Some people recommend a thousand words. I think you can, you know, generate a good amount of information in about 500 words, if a thousand words sounds not doable to you, because we also need to balance. You know how long is the user actually going to read something too, and you don't want to just stuff it with a bunch of words that are unnecessary. So if you can provide helpful, useful content in less than a thousand words, I think that's also fine as well.

Carrie Saunders: 9:57

We also want to make it skimmable, so use bullet points, use headers and visuals to make your content very easy to read. We tend to not read when it's a wall of text, so when we create bullet points and headers and visuals, that helps support our information for that and helps the user read our information and read our full blog article or whatever the content might be. And another thing you can do is refresh and update old blog posts to help keep them relevant. I like to keep a spreadsheet of what we have written and what we've done on our podcast so we know what topics are out there. So then we can go back and look at that list of topics and know which ones we might want to refresh. So do that as you're creating this content to make it easier and feel less overwhelming than clicking around and digging on your website to figure out what content to update and refresh, and also answer real customer questions and pain points in your content. Use the questions that your consumers and users are already asking. You Could be an FAQ question that you really want to dig a bit more deeper on. It could be a pain point that they're having and something that you have a solution for. So really answer these consumer questions and customer questions in your blog and in your articles. So I want to recap on this little point again. So we're coming home again to where Google wants to serve its users useful content. So make sure that your content is useful and then Google will pick that up and start showing it to more users if you do that.

Carrie Saunders: 11:34

So the next common mistake that many business owners do with their website is they forget about internal linking. Many business owners do with their website is they forget about internal linking. So many websites and many business owners focus on getting those backlinks which are external links to your website, but they ignore their internal linking structure and this means that it's hard for Google and major search engines to navigate. They really struggle to understand the site structure. Just the other week I was helping a client trying to figure out why she had a large number of pages that Google knew about but they hadn't indexed them, they hadn't put them in their search results, and she was wondering why. Well, when I started digging into her website, it became pretty obvious that most of her blog posts are buried under pages of pages of pages of linking structure, rather than having a column on the right. That either is by category and or you can have both by archive date. That made it hard, since she didn't have that, for Google to find those other pages they were having to click. You can think about Google clicking through your site if you want to get a visual of it, but Google would have had to click 10, 15, 20 times even more for some of her pages for it to get to it. So since Google can't get there quickly and fast through your internal site linking, then Google feels like those pages are not that important to you, which means they're not that important to the consumer. So a simple fix for her would be to have a category tag structure on the right that she could, that she's already probably categorizing her blog posts and then that would make it so that you can link to that category and so a blog post would be two to three clicks away instead of 10 or more clicks away. Or she could also do an archive structure where it has you know, say, august 2025, april 2023. It has you know the different months and years of her blog information, and then that's still a very quick way to get to that blog post.

Carrie Saunders: 13:41

So we want to make sure we're linking to related blog posts and or product pages within your content. This is super important for Google. It also is a great way to boost keywords for that page, because if you're linking, using keywords in the link to that next page, that also helps Google realize those keywords are important to you. We want to use descriptive anchor text when we're doing that, which is what I just alluded to here. Instead of having words like click here we want to have the actual keywords in that link text and we want to make sure that important pages are easy to find within clear navigation. So again, think of Google and major search engines like a user. A user is not going to be clicking page after page after page after page to get your content. So Google and Bing and the major search engines also think, well, those pages aren't important, so they're not going to index them and show them to consumers. So make sure you're doing a good job with internal linking structure here.

Carrie Saunders: 14:44

And then the final point is not tracking your SEO performance. I know this can sound really boring and really mundane and, honestly, if you really don't want to do this, then I highly encourage you. You hire a trusted service provider like us or somebody else to do this for you. But many businesses don't track their search engine optimization performance and this could even be just a super simple thing that you need to do. That. You can just generally and I'll talk about which reports you could do if you really want to make this very minimal but we want to make sure that we're not setting and forgetting our website. We want to make sure that we're not setting and forgetting our website. We want to make sure that we're tracking our performance of our website. You can use Google Analytics to track your organic traffic and see which pages perform best.

Carrie Saunders: 15:29

Now, if Google Analytics makes your eyes glass over because there's so many options in there and so many things to do, then just take that first basic report of your monthly traffic and keep an eye on it. We want to make sure it's not going down, we want to make sure it's staying steady and, especially, we want to make sure it's going up. So if you do only one thing, I recommend that you, maybe once or twice a month, look at the main Google Analytics report that shows your visitors for a time period, and usually it's defaulted by a month on that report unless you change it. So just keep an eye on that and promise me that you'll at least do that, or pay a VA or somebody like us to do that for you. And then I want to make sure that you're setting up Google search console and looking at this once or twice a month.

Carrie Saunders: 16:18

It is there to help you. It monitors your site errors. It monitors your keyword rankings and click through rates. It is there to help you. It monitors your site errors. It monitors your keyword rankings and click-through rates. It really does a good job of giving you a very much simpler dashboard than Google Analytics and tells you what's wrong as soon as you see problems in there. If you don't know how to fix them, then get somebody trusted again, like us or your trusted provider, to fix those errors pretty quickly. Because when people don't fix the errors in our Google search console quickly, that's when a snowball effect of bad things can happen sometimes, because then you might start getting deranked by Google and major search engines because there are actual structural problems with your website. So promise me you'll at least do those two looks the main analytics report in Google Analytics and then looking at your Google search console. You can even be signed up in that one for alerts and it'll email you whenever there is an issue. So pay attention to those emails. They actually do mean something and that way we can mitigate any problems before they become a big problem. So it's really important, easy, you know, quick check. Make it a Friday task, maybe when you're brain dead at the end of the day on a Friday, but make sure you're regularly checking those two things. That's going to help you not run into major problems later. So let's do a quick recap.

Carrie Saunders: 17:38

So there are five common SEO mistakes that many business owners make that we see. We want to make sure we're always checking our site speed and fix any issues there and any other technical issues that might come up, like images are too big, etc. We want to do some good keyword research and many times. You can do this once if you really need to be minimal about it, and do it once and then just stick with those keywords and make sure that they're long tail keywords and they are being searched as well. We also want to create high quality, valuable content. We want to create content that Google and the major search engines want to deliver to their consumers, so it's important that we are creating high quality content. We want to use internal linking so that Google and the major search engines can actually find those great articles that you created, like four or five years ago, because they might still be important, might still be relevant. So make sure your internal linking is really good and then track your SEO performance. Do it monthly, if that's all you can do. Twice a month would be the best, maybe the first and the 15th but track your search engine performance monthly or bi-monthly if you can.

Carrie Saunders: 18:48

Search engine optimization isn't a one and done task. It is an ongoing process. So, whether you're handling it yourself or having a professional handle, the search engine optimization for you is something that does need to be done regularly. So keep an eye on these five top mistakes, make sure that you're handling them well and not making the mistakes, so that you will start to get more traffic, more engagement and, ultimately, more sales. That's all we have for this week's episode of the e-commerce made easy podcast. I hope you found it super helpful and, if you'd be so kind, share it with a business friend. That's a great way to get the word out for us so that we can help more business owners just like you. And if you haven't already, make sure to rate us on Apple podcasts or your favorite podcast app. We would be so grateful for that, and you can always find our show notes at e-commerce made easy podcastcom, and we will see you next week.