7 SEO Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Website Authority Score

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the fundamental concepts of the digital era. A well-optimized website guarantees exposure and visibility, but low-quality SEO strategies almost always lead to oblivion.

According to the report, more than 90% of all traffic comes from a search engine. Another study shows that Google receives over 63 thousand search inquiries every second. These two stats alone are more than enough to prove how difficult it is to get the foot in the door and earn your place among the top 10 search engine results.

Successful webmasters know how to deal with this, but lots of website administrators are still struggling to build relevant sites. In this article, we will discuss seven major SEO mistakes that could be hurting the authority score of your website.

1. Content Is Too Short and Too Vague

Why users visit websites? If you don’t know the answer to this question, chances are you will make SEO mistakes. The answer is simple: they do it because they want to consume quality content. However, a surprisingly large portion of online posts is either too short or too vague to be considered relevant.

A study conducted by Backlinko shows that the average Google first page result contains 1,890 words. This is not the general rule of thumb, but it’s a clear signal that users prefer long and highly informative articles over short and non-educational content.

For instance, a job seeker would rather look for the best resume writing services than VelvetJobs because of the huge quality gap. The same goes for Internet searchers because they want to see value in your posts. If you can’t fulfill this demand, search engines will not consider you relevant.

2. Underperforming Keyword Strategy

A webmaster should know everything about keywords in 2019, but way too many of them still make serious keyword-related errors. SEO-rich terms and search phrases require an article of its own but we do have to point out the critical factors here:

• Domain: The very name of your site should contain keywords. For instance, a coat seller should come up with a domain name such as bestcoats.com.
• Title tags: Headlines also deserve keywords because it helps search engines to classify posts.
• Text: Of course, article copies must contain enough keywords and their synonyms to grab the attention of search engine algorithms.
• Image tags: Users conduct photo searches, too, so you must use image tags as well.

3. No Backlink Authority

Inbound links are one of the major aspects of a website authority score, which is exactly why the average number one page in search results has over 35 thousand external backlinks. Keep in mind, however, that Google and other engines don’t just appreciate quantity.

As a matter of fact, backlink quality is even more important – only one inbound link from a fully credible website is worth more than dozens of links coming from newly-established and irrelevant sites.

If you want to know where your backlinks come from, we recommend you to use tools like SEMRush and analyze your domain. It will show you whether your backlinking strategy needs to change and how to do it most appropriately.

4. You Forget Internal Linking

Internal linking is not as powerful as the number and quality of external links, but it still remains a relevant SEO factor. If you are not redirecting visitors to other pages on your website, you are wasting the opportunity to drive additional traffic and increase time spent on page. As long as you keep internal links relevant, you should use them in all of your posts.

5. Website Takes Too Much Time to Load

Have you ever waited for a website to load so long that you eventually lost patience and left to another site? If yes, then you know how other users feel about website load speed. A typical visitor wants a webpage to open in two to three seconds max, so you have to make it possible.

A platform such as Pingdom enables you to test a website and determine how much time it takes to open it. It will also give you useful suggestions on how to improve it, thus helping you to boost the SEO authority of your site.

6. Bad User Experience

User experience is the greatest battlefield of our business era. Everybody is trying to attract more customers by providing excellent services and this includes website experience as well. Search engines understand it and so they take into account how visitors behave upon landing.

Jake Gardner, a web designer at Nerdy Writers explains what it means to create a bad user experience: “Sites with complex structures are hard to navigate, which chases users away. The same goes for websites not optimized for mobile usage and pages with constant popup interruptions. If you want to give customers a reason to spend more time browsing your site, you absolutely have to eliminate these errors.”

7. No Social Sharing

There is no official confirmation that social media affect search engine ranking, but the logic is clear: social engagement brings you more traffic and makes your site more relevant. Therefore, you have to enable social sharing through your website and allow users to spread the word about the content they like. If you are running a WordPress-powered website, the solution is simple – just install one of the social sharing plugins and you’re good to go.

Conclusion

Creating a website has never been easier, but growing it and earning a respectable search engine ranking has never been more difficult than today. With billions of site currently active online, it takes a lot of knowledge and skills to outdo competitors and reach the top 10 results in Google searches.

The task is particularly hard if you keep repeating some of the biggest SEO blunders. In this post, we showed you seven major SEO mistakes that could be hurting the authority score of your website. Keep them in mind and make sure to avoid them – it will drastically improve the credibility of your site.