The most common mistakes that website owners make

Many website owners make common mistakes when creating and optimizing content for their websites. I will reveal those mistakes in this post.

Probably, you’re also making at least one or more of them.

Let’s see them one by one.

Common mistakes for website content creation and SEO optimization

In this context, content creation means writing for your blog posts & pages, and inserting/creating images/videos and other digital assets. SEO optimization refers to the acts that most people do for ranking high on search results.

Some of these are honest mistakes (not intentional) but time-wasting, and some of them are intentional and trying to game the system of ranking.

If any of the mistakes fall into the first category, your website will not receive any negative impact but you’ll lose your time. But if any of the mistakes fall into the second category, they will negatively impact your website in the long run.

Really?

Yep! Let’s see why & what are the reasons.

Using AI tools to generate text content

Artificial intelligence or AI tools are great for different tasks such as fixing bugs in your code, refactoring code, etc.

But if you use any of these tools to write content, you are just destroying your own website. Here are some of the tools in the table below:

I know many SEO gurus will disagree with me. Most of them produced hundreds of videos & tutorials to prove their point. Also, they showed how to make tons of money using AI tools like ChatGPT, Surfer, etc.

However, I never felt any necessity to try any of their “get-rich-quick schemes” because of two main reasons:

1. Personal work ethics
2. I don’t trust them even though many of them are established in the SEO industry

If you don’t want to accept my take, let me ask you a few questions:

• If AI-generated content would work, why there are billions of poor people exist around the globe?
• Why millionaires are not hiring people from the least-development countries to use AI prompts and insert them into blog posts?

I could ask a lot more questions but these are enough for the sake of proving my point.

However, AI content may work to a certain extent but they will not perform well in the long run. Otherwise, people like us would not exist anymore.

At least, AI tools don’t have the ability to write content themselves or include their own opinions. It means that they are generating content from the internet that already exists.

So using AI tools to create content for your website is a big mistake. You should avoid them at any cost for writing-related tasks.

Keyword stuffing in the content

Keyword stuffing is the writing of the same phrase excessively to the content. This makes the content boring and unhelpful for humans. The purpose of keyword stuffing is to rank higher on search results. It’s actually gaming the system.

Luckily, keyword stuffing does not work anymore. Instead, it will push the content away from the search results.

To give you an example of keyword stuffing, I created the following screenshot.

A few SEO gurus will teach and inspire you to follow bad technics like keyword stuffing. So make sure you are not doing them when writing for your website. On the other hand, many copywriters out there who do this kind of stuff. So if you hire writers, be sure to proofread the delivered content and ask for revisions when it’s necessary.

Keyword stuffing is not only a bad idea but also enough to destroy your website ranking & reputation. A few keyword-stuffed articles may cause other good articles not to rank well. So be aware of this too.

Fake testimonials & reviews

Customers’ feedback is important for any business. Good reviews motivate and inspire other people to buy products or services or get in touch.

But the problem is that you may not have any testimonials when you’re just starting. Or you may have not noticed the importance and collected them yet.

As a result, many website owners use fake testimonials & photos of their clients. Even many of them keep the placeholder testimonials that come with a template.

By adding this type of testimonials to your website, you’re losing trust and credibility. So if you don’t have customers’ feedback yet, I would suggest waiting until you get some.

SEO score hell

If you are using any SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math, etc., or if you check your SEO score on any third-party website like seobility, you’ll see that you have lots of lacking. They will suggest a huge task that you need to perform.

Some of the suggestions might be helpful such as reducing passive voices, long sentences, etc. However, many of the suggestions are useless and have no impact on making your content outstanding. Perhaps, if you follow them step by step, you may end up making your actual content below average.

This is a mistake that I made in the past and wasted my time to achieve a higher SEO score. After a certain period, I felt the necessity of experimenting the the impact of SEO score. And I found many of my posts that have (so-called) low SEO scores but they rank higher on the actual search results.

So if you want to attract your target audience and rank higher, write only for humans and don’t try to satisfy the machine-generated scores. This way, you’ll save tons of your time and the content will be super engaging.

Excessive use of stock photos

Stock photos are great if you do not violate copyright rules. However, using stock photos excessively will make your website pretty generic. Also, your website will look very similar to hundreds of other websites.

But if you want to stand out from the crowd, you have to try hard to become unique as much as you can.

Please note that I am not telling you to stop using them completely. Instead, use them to a certain extent or the lowest amount you can. I also use stock photos when it makes sense and when I can’t demonstrate the context by creating a unique infographic, screenshot, etc.

There is so much competition on the internet and it is harder to get some momentum & traction, especially at the early stage of your online business. So if you take your website/business seriously and want to keep going with it in the long run, you have to utilize all the valid & useful tactics as much as you can. Using unique photos, making infographics, screenshots, etc. are some of them.

But if you always use stock photos like others, it will be just another website on the internet.

Building unnatural links

Backlinks are one of the many important ranking signals. Search engines like Google have using them for many years to rank pages.

But all the links are not equal as you may heard many times.

If you rely heavily on link building, this might cause issues and even a manual penalty. Many people excessively buy links, exchange with other bloggers, and even build hundreds of PBN links in a single day. All these are bad tactics and manipulating ranking algorithms.

Doing these bad technics may give you exposure initially. But once the algorithm understands the links, the site will not only lose its ranking but also it will be very hard to rank the site again in the future (even if you remove those unnatural links).

Now you may think whether you should build links or not. My answer is yes but not probably the way you were doing in the past. Instead, you should reverse the techniques. It means creating some types of content that attract links. Such as statistics, charts, graphs, infographics, tools, and all sorts of helpful assets that you can cover in your niche.

Need help optimizing your site? See my SEO service

Not having a blog archive

You can promote your website with paid ads on Google, YouTube, and social media platforms. But once you stop paying for ads, you will not get so much traffic to your website.

To get around this and to get consistent traffic to your website, you can create & publish blog posts regularly. Blogging is a way to put your business in front of your target customers.

Blogging also costs money especially if you hire people to write and create digital assets. But it opens the door for a long time. Also, the expense of blogging is much lower compared to the advertisement.

So if you’re not blogging regularly, you’re missing a lot of opportunities.

Conclusion

I pointed out the most common mistakes that website owners make. Also, I explained them in detail.

I wrote this post based on my practical experience while working for myself and for my clients. And I think it will help most of you.

Lastly, if your content helps the readers, you don’t have to look for the SEO side of things too much. This is the last piece of information I can give you.