Typical SEO Mistakes: Why your website ranks low

SEO is a complex strategy, and no strategy comes without risks. When improving a website’s position, it’s easy to make mistakes that can negatively impact its ranking. And we know that no project is successful unless it ranks high. On-page and off-page errors—every wrong step leads to money and traffic losses.

Here’s Already Media’s guide to the most typical SEO mistakes. Avoiding or correcting them immediately will help your website climb up in search results.

Before you start digging into the core of SEO mistakes, let’s take a quick test. Here are some questions to ask yourself to make sure your SEO strategy is on track:

1. Is your content high-quality?
2. Have you optimized your meta tags? 
3. Is your website speed up to par? 
4. Do you have a proper number of keywords?
5. Do you have a strategy for internal links?

Memorize or write down your answers to see if you have already avoided the most common SEO mistakes.

Understanding where SEO strategies often go wrong is the first step to improvement. Each of the typical SEO errors can affect your website’s performance, whether these are technical missteps or content-related issues. However, we are here to describe problems and point out practical solutions to address them.

If you’ll get interested to know about tools we offer for SEO errors correction, read our post: “Top SEO Tools to Use in 2025“

AI came into our lives, and no human writers are needed now. If you tend to believe it, you make a huge mistake. AI-generated content usually means:

1. Lack of Creativity: AI-generated text often lacks creativity, resulting in shallow content without individual style. This impacts user engagement and can trigger negative feedback.
2. Low Ranking: AI content might seem cost-effective, but in the long run, it leads to SEO mistakes and harms search engine rankings.
3. Troubles with Search Engine Recognition: Platforms like Google can quickly identify AI-generated content, leading to lower website positions.
4. Weak User Trust: Users tend to prefer human-written content that includes personal experiences or expertise, aligning with EEAT principles.

Error Correction: Use tools like Originality.AI, Copyleaks AI Content Detector or Grammarly Premium to evaluate the amount of AI generated text. From our experience, Grammarly Premium is the best one. Remember that for a proper ranking, your text must contain no more than 20% AI patterns.

Do you think content doesn’t matter? Think twice. Non-optimized content is a key reason why even high-quality materials fail to produce results.

Pages that Google’s algorithms will love should include:

1. Meta-title and Meta-description;
2. Main and additional keywords (high, low, and zero frequency);
3. LSI Keywords.

Error Correction: Use Yoast SEO or Ahrefs to ensure that your content includes optimized meta tags, keywords, and proper LSI keywords that enhance visibility and rankings.

Content duplication across multiple pages of your website can lead to:

• Search Engine Confusion: When search engines encounter identical content on different pages, they can’t decide which one to prioritize. This can result in poor rankings or even de-indexing.
• SEO Penalties: Duplicate content can trigger penalties that harm your search engine visibility.

Always make sure that each page has unique and original content, and avoid copying content from other sources.

Error Correction: use Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Duplicate Content) to analyze the content on your website and Copyscape to check your content for plagiarism across the Internet.

Excessive SEO tactics often trigger the opposite effect.

• Keyword stuffing: Сontent stuffed with keywords makes search engines flag your site as spam.
• Overuse of external links: Excessive linking triggers penalties from search engine algorithms.

Balance your optimization to maintain the natural flow of the text.

Error Correction: Use tools like Surfer SEO to analyze keyword density and maintain a natural content flow.

The proper length of meta tags:

• Meta title: up to 60-70 characters and include keywords;
• Meta descriptions: 120-170 characters and include keywords.

No meta tags or wrong tag lengths are basic mistakes. Remember, Search engines rely on meta tags to understand and show a page’s content in the search results. The right format of meta tags will help increase click rates.

Error Correction: Descriptions must be well-composed, within the estimated length, include target keywords, and reflect the content and page intent.

Are you giving enough attention to your website’s speed? A slow-loading page can have several negative impacts, including:

• Higher Bounce Rates: Users will leave if your page takes too long to load, resulting in a higher bounce rate.
• Lower Rankings: Google uses page load time as a ranking factor. If your site is slow, it’s less likely to rank well.
• Reduced Engagement: Slow load times lead to shorter user sessions and less engagement with your content.

Error Correction: Improve page load speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Lighthouse by optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, and reducing unnecessary scripts.

We identified one of the most neglected elements – Alternative text or Alt text. Alternative text is essential for every image you put on the website. Without it, search engines won’t notice your media content, and you will miss out on traffic through image search.

Error Correction: Use tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider to identify missing alt text on images.

Internal linking is an SEO element that helps search engines index your site and evaluate page weight. Internal linking mistakes may result in a lack of weight on high-priority pages and remaining wholly ignored in the search rankings.

Error Correction: Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to analyze your internal linking structure and ensure that high-priority pages are well-linked within your content

Backlinks are one of the main signals search engines use to determine your site’s authority. 

Missing, irrelevant, or low-quality backlinks ruin your SEO strategy, resulting in low site visibility and organic traffic loss.

Search engines evaluate:

• number of backlinks;
• quality;
• relevance of the resources;
• the anchor text.

Error Correction: Use tools like Ahrefs to analyze and disavow toxic backlinks and focus on building high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant sites using guest posting or digital PR.

To win over the competitors in 2025, you need a deep understanding of every SEO strategy. Both on-page SEO mistakes and off-page SEO mistakes cause significant troubles for projects in every niche.

However, the error correction will improve your project’s visibility right away. Success belongs to those who learn from their mistakes, not those who never make them!