A website must meet the needs of visitors as well as Google robots. However, you cannot successfully meet these expectations without making changes and improvements to your website from time to time. However, there are pitfalls in redesigning and redeveloping a website. Below we look at some common SEO mistakes that are better avoided!
It’s important to stress that redesigning a website should only be started with the right expertise. Without knowledge of common SEO mistakes, it’s a waste of time and money and will most certainly not be successful. Two categories of pitfalls can be distinguished:
- technical
- and content errors.
Common SEO mistakes from a technical point of view
Failure to optimise for mobile
Today, almost everyone browses websites from a mobile phone. A site that does not display properly on a mobile screen will start at a significant disadvantage. Today, Google views all websites as if they were being viewed from a mobile device, so creating responsiveness is an important step. In other words: making sure that a website runs equally well on all operating systems, screen sizes and platforms. Responsiveness can be easily checked using a dedicated analytics software.
Slow website
Website speed is of paramount importance, as a delay of even 1 second can reduce conversions and hurt Google rankings. Speed is affected by the size and properties of the content elements, as well as the underlying code structure. Speed can also be monitored through analytics software. Fortunately, however, a slow website can easily be sped up with a few small changes.
Improper handling of redirects
The last of the technical errors is directly related to the content settings, but can still be classified as technical settings. Duplication of content is not only inconvenient for users, but also penalised by Google. It is therefore a priority to ensure that content only appears on one page.
If you delete a product or change the URL of an article, redirecting to the correct URL is an important task in addition to deleting the page.
Content errors
Low text content or duplication of text
Rankings in search engines are affected if too much image and video content is accompanied by too little text. This usually happens when you redesign a website with the needs of the user in mind, but forget about the needs of the algorithms. They need textual content to crawl the website.
Avoiding dedicated subpages
Web page designers like to design the structure of a web page to minimize the number of clicks within it. However, this is unfortunate for Google as the algorithms prefer concentrated content and only display dedicated subpages in the results list. It is therefore important that all important pages and blog posts are listed in a separate URL!
No metadata
Missing metadata is a common SEO mistake that almost everyone makes. Metadata is all the information that Google sees. Examples include the meta title, meta description and alternative text. These sections should always be filled in by the website owner. If this is not done, Google will fill it in at best or leave it blank at worst.
If the metadata is missing, search engines will not have enough data available to them and your site could be ranked lower in the search results or even be left out. So it’s always a good idea to include meta data so that you don’t prevent Google’s robots from finding the information that’s relevant to them.
A number of common SEO mistakes can cause a website redesign to fail. All of these technical and content pitfalls may seem minor at first glance, but they can cause huge problems.