You enthusiastically embark on an SEO optimization project for your website. You’ve carefully mapped it out yourself. Naturally, you hope to see results quickly. But the results aren’t coming. You don’t know where things are going wrong. SEO is complex. It’s not just about link building or content alone.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss ten common SEO mistakes made by beginners that can have a major impact on your ranking.
A common mistake in an SEO project is not putting the visitor first.
Search engine optimization is definitely not just about optimizing for Google.
If you don’t put the visitor first, you’ll see it reflected in your website’s ranking.
Google wants to show relevant search results to users, but it also wants every visitor to have the best experience on your website.
Do visitors leave your website immediately after arriving from Google? If so, that means they didn’t find the answer to their search query. In other words, the website isn’t relevant to them.
Google recognizes this and therefore assigns the website a lower ranking. After all, the search query was not fulfilled.
Our advice: see things through the visitor’s eyes. Put visitors first and think about their search queries. Create landing pages that are relevant to a search query.
When you make sure they get an answer to their question, visitors will stay on your site. This has a positive effect on your ranking.
No one likes waiting for pages that load slowly.
And Google knows this, too. Google puts the visitor first and therefore wants you to have a fast website.
In fact, it’s one of the factors that determine your ranking in search results and is therefore an important part of technical SEO.
A fast website has another major advantage. The faster the website loads, the more pages Google can crawl.
This means that Google will visit more of your pages and index them faster. This is a major advantage for your ranking in search results.
A slow website is often caused by large CSS or JavaScript files, images that are too large, or the server.
There are various reasons why your website is slow.
Want to know exactly what’s going on? Then use Google Speed Insights. This tool analyzes why your website is slow.
You’ll also see right away what you need to improve to make your website faster. This makes it easy to fix this common SEO mistake.
We just mentioned that images can slow down your website. An image that’s 2MB, for example, is extremely large and will slow down your website.
Of course, you don’t want a page that’s just text. Images make text easier to read and improve the user experience.
But you don’t want an image to slow down your website unnecessarily. Fortunately, this is easy to fix.
You can compress images on your website so they load faster.
Are you adding new images? If so, choose a GIF, JPG, or (even better) one of the new web formats, such as WebP or JPEG 2000.
This way, your website won’t be slowed down by images that are too large.
During the development of your website, a conscious decision is often made not to appear in Google search results.
After all, you don’t want visitors to end up on a website that isn’t finished.
Blocking search engines prevents the website from being indexed. You can block search engines, for example, in your robots.txt file or in the page’s source code.
But don’t forget to fix this when you go live. Otherwise, people will never be able to find you.
First, check your robots.txt file.
Does the robots.txt file contain “User-agent: *”? If so, you’re all set, and you’re granting access to all search engines.
Read all about robots.txt here.
Also check your source code. Does the source code of a page contain the following: ? If so, the search engine will not index that page.
Change this to: . This will prevent you from blocking any more search engines.
Writing content takes time. Sometimes you run out of inspiration for a unique piece of writing. It’s tempting to copy a text.
For example, if you have two similar landing pages, it’s easy to be tempted to use identical text on both pages.
Or maybe you see a well-written piece of content from a competitor that ranks highly in search results. In that case, it might seem easy to just copy and paste that text onto your landing page.
You might think that visitors don’t notice this right away, but the opposite is true. What’s more, Google will penalize you for it.
Google likes to see unique content on your website. They want you to establish your own brand, but they also want to ensure that visitors don’t come across duplicate content.
Because no visitor likes to read the same text twice.
The solution is obvious. Always create unique content.
It’s okay to take a peek at the competition every now and then, but always create unique content that fits your brand.
Write in a way that reflects your brand, and write for your visitors as well.
This does take more work, but you’ll be richly rewarded with a good ranking in the search results.
Ideally, you should have a landing page with unique content for each keyword. That’s great, but don’t forget to update the content.
Content becomes outdated and, at some point, is no longer current. Visitors then come across incorrect information.
Of course, you don’t want that, but neither does Google.
Google prefers that your content be up to date. Updated content is given priority in search results.
The solution is simple. Make a list of your current content, as well as the content you plan to post in the future.
Also keep track of when you’ve posted or plan to post this content. That way, you’ll have a clear overview of whether your content is still up to date.
It’s a good idea to update your content regularly. This way, you can better serve your visitors, and Google takes notice, too. You’ll also be rewarded with a higher ranking.
Keywords are important for your search engine visibility; Google needs to know what a page on your website is about.
But don’t think that keyword stuffing will help your search rankings—this is a common mistake.
Don’t stuff your content, meta description, and page title with the main keyword. This makes for a poor reading experience for visitors, and Google penalizes keyword stuffing.
Place your keywords logically within the text, HTML headings, as well as in meta descriptions and page titles. The rule is simple: include the most important keyword only once in your heading, meta description, and page title.
Tip: Use these tools to find relevant keywords.
Headings help visitors scan the text. This allows them to quickly see if the answer they’re looking for is on the page.
You can create headings by increasing the font size, but that’s not a smart move.
If you don’t use HTML headings, you aren’t helping Google understand your page better.
Because just as a visitor scans the text, Google scans it too. In doing so, Google looks at your HTML headings, among other things.
You use HTML headings to create subheadings. You’re probably familiar with the H1 and H2 headings. There are six levels in total, from H1 through H6.
You can think of the hierarchy of H1 through H6 headings as a book.
The H1 heading is the most important one and serves as the title of your book. So you should use it only once on your page.
The H2 heading is the title of a section. You can use it multiple times on your page to introduce each new paragraph.
You can think of the H3 heading as a subheading, and this makes each HTML heading less important.
Google reads every heading and quickly and easily scans your text to determine what it’s about. This helps Google determine where to rank your content in the search results.
Always include your most important keywords in the HTML headings.
Read all about headings here.
Having a lot of unique content is great. Google recognizes you as an authority because of all that unique content.
You’re doing a great job, but don’t forget to include internal links.
Internal linking benefits visitors. It allows them to easily find relevant content while they’re reading.
Google also appreciates this. This way, Google can see that you’re definitely an authority on this topic—and that you’re eager to inform your visitors.
Therefore, always make a list of all the content you’ve posted. See which pieces of content are linked to one another and include internal links in the content.
Sometimes you might delete a page from your website. The page is no longer relevant, so you delete it.
Of course, this approach is smart. You’re thinking about your visitors. But simply deleting a page can negatively impact your ranking in search results.
The chance that a visitor will still land on the deleted page may be small, but Google can still find it.
The crawler will then see a 404 page and know that visitors will also see this 404 error message.
This has a negative impact on your ranking. Google doesn’t want visitors to encounter a 404 error.
In addition, every website builds up a certain value—also known as link value. You build up this value over the years, and it indicates how trustworthy Google considers your website to be.
In this context, the higher the value, the more reliable it is.
In this way, Google assigns a value to every page on your website. If you delete a page, you’ll lose that value as well.
And you don’t want that to happen, because if you lose value, you’ll also drop in the search results. So be sure to set up a 301 redirect whenever you delete a page.
By setting up a 301 redirect from the deleted page to a similar page, you redirect both the visitor and Google.
That way, you won’t lose value, no one will encounter a 404 error, and you won’t drop in the search results.
Because SEO is complex, it’s easy to make a mistake.
With these 10 tips, you can avoid making major SEO mistakes, which will help you climb the search results.
Jarik Oosting is one of the Netherlands’ best-known SEO and GEO specialists and is the founder of SmartRanking. With more than 15 years of experience, he has worked on over 150 SEO and GEO projects for Dutch and international companies. His expertise ranges from technical SEO and complex migrations to strategies and visibility in AI models.
In January 2025, Jarik introduced GEO (also called AEO) to the Netherlands. He wrote the Dutch book “GEO – Zichtbaar zijn in de antwoorden van AI” about AEO, is an author and editor at Frankwatching, and a contributor to Marketingfacts. As a speaker at events, he shares his knowledge about SEO, GEO, and the search landscape.