There are a lot of SEO mistakes I come across with WordPress websites (both those made by the business owner cutting costs and those professionally developed!) While WordPress itself is reasonably ok for SEO straight out of the box, there are many things you might be doing, or not doing, that’s preventing your website from getting to the higher rankings on search engines.
I’m putting my hand up right now and admitting that I have made most of these mistakes at some point in my career within the search engine optimization industry (and if anyone tells you they haven’t, they’re probably lying!).
That’s because Google changes its algorithms often and what used to work in the past (like keyword stuffing) is now very much frowned upon. Unfortunately, this makes it all too easy for you to fall into the trap of reading something online and believing it a good idea, implementing it on your own website and seeing your rankings drop.
Always make sure the advice you are taking is relevant, up to date and comes from a trusted source!
So, here are the 13 SEO mistakes I often fix to improve the optimisation of a WordPress website for my clients, and some tips and tricks on how to fix things for yourself.
1. You’re not optimising images
Top of the list for common SEO mistakes has to be the lack of image optimisation. Getting your images right for your website can be on the time-consuming side but is more than worth it in the long term, and by right I mean:
- they’re the right dimensions and format for their intended use
- have a relevant filename (long tail keyword use works well here)
- have an appropriate alt text tag to go along with it
Having images in the right dimensions for their use reduces website resources, you don’t need a 1200 x 1200 pixel image if it’s being used as a 400 x 300; your website has to do extra work to make it the right size and this can slow down your page loading time, and the difference between the file size of a .png and a .jpg can be considerable.
Page loading time might not seem like a big deal, but if your website has slow site speeds your visitors will click straight back to Google and choose a competitor instead. Google considers this such an important factor that they have their own tool to measure how fast your website is loading and images often crop up as a cause for a website or page that’s too slow.
Then there’s the keyword side of things to consider. Google scans the filename and alt text tags of images to understand why they’re there, this information is used to add context to the page and adjust where it ranks accordingly. So do consider the filenames you’re using and how you create the alt text tags to ensure they describe the image for disabled visitors but also to help Google understand why the image is important to your message.
Fix – optimise your images
Have a read of our 7 Easy Steps for Better Website Image SEO to solve any issues that pictures on your WordPress website might be causing for you.
2. You’re using the wrong WordPress theme
It can be difficult to figure out a good theme to use for your website, but a bad theme can really affect your WordPress SEO. That’s because some themes are top heavy in terms of code and this can make your pages slow to load.
Another issue can be caused when a theme has a major update, this can wipe out any custom code snippets on the website that reduces problems/fixes mistakes and can even break your website entirely (for that reason, it is always recommended that you use a child theme and backup your website before updating anything).
If you don’t keep your theme updated you may be leaving the door open for hackers and scammers. These folk try to find gaps in the theme coding that leave a back door open into websites, they then search for websites using those themes to add malicious code, advertising, spam bots, and viruses for your users. So do make sure you update your theme and that you use a reliable security plugin (and check if your host offers security/virus scanning too).
Some themes are extremely basic or designed for a purpose you’re not using it for (like using a blogger theme for a business website), this means you need to add a ton of plugins to get all the features you need. Plugins are adding additional resources to your website and putting strain on your server, but they can also conflict with each other causing problems.
Fix – carefully choose the right theme for your website
There are several perfectly good, free WordPress themes that are great for laying the best foundation for your SEO, I personally recommend Blocksy and OceanWP but if you do go for a paid theme, make sure it has the bulk of the features you want so you’re less reliant on plugins wherever possible and remember that you will have to renew the licence to get updates.
3. You’re using the wrong WordPress plugins
Choosing the right plugins for your WordPress website can be a bit of a headache and as I’ve just mentioned, plugins can conflict with each other and cause issues that way too. I’ve tried so many over the past few years but have settled on a handful that are my core choices for any website I work on.
What do I mean by the wrong plugin?
There are a few reasons why a plugin might be wrong for your website
- It’s doing a job that’s already available in your theme/another plugin and is adding unnecessary weight
- Is a security risk as it hasn’t been updated for several weeks
- Isn’t compatible with your current version of WordPress
- Is causing a conflict with another plugin
Conflicts can make your website slow to load or break it completely (and you might not even realise it’s happened until you get a message from someone trying to use it!). There’s also the security risk present with old plugins – hackers will try to get into these and spam your website which Google doesn’t look favourably on.
This is definitely one SEO mistake you want to avoid!
Fix – check your plugins
- Know what each plugin does for your website and make sure it’s kept up to date by the developers
- Remove any duplicate plugins – you don’t need two caching plugins, two ways to save backups, etc
- Don’t update your plugins until you see the “this is compatible with your version of WordPress” message
- Always backup your website before updating your plugins
- If you’re having problems, disable all plugins and activate one at a time until you figure out the culprit
- Check to see if a plugin is causing site speed issues using Google’s pagespeed tool
4. You’ve added too many features to your WordPress website
We all want a beautiful website but that doesn’t always mean user friendly.
Google wants to send its users to websites that provide the best user experience, so the best way to get good SEO for your website is to focus on usability first and attractiveness second.
Features that are resource heavy can slow down your website (yes, we’re back to poor loading times!) but can also be a distraction for your visitors who are simply wanting to get to the information they were looking for.
Google using Mobile-First Indexing as part of it’s ranking algorithm, essentially it tests how well your website perfoms on mobile devices. Mobile traffic accounts for 53.3% of all website traffic and this has grown by 222% over the past 7 years!
A mobile responsive website is often the most basic form of your website without the bells and whistles that need a full size monitor to display, so consider if you really need them on your website at all if most of your visitors won’t be seeing them.
Use features sparingly and if they’re appropriate to the page. We’ve all seen those pages with a video and a carousel image gallery and several pop ups and a FaceBook bot popping up a message box…it’s too much!
Fix – choose your features carefully
- Use videos sparingly and host them elsewhere (ideally on YouTube which Google owns so it may help with SEO) so they’re not draining your website resources
- Do you really need a carousel of images? Make sure the images are optimised if you do.
- Be careful with pop-ups – make them easy to click out of and unobtrusive
5. Your WordPress website hasn’t been optimised for speed
Sorry, you’ve got a bit more work to do on page speed yet.
Where is the server for your website located?
Don’t know? Ask your hosting provider. The further away your website visitor’s computer is from where your website is hosted adds speed to the page loading times. We’re talking milliseconds here but added to other page speed factors can make a difference.
There’s also the potential issue of your web host not being GDPR compliant if they’re outside the UK/EU.
It’s important to check your website regularly for speed issues, one image can drastically increase page load time if it hasn’t been optimised, a recent update to a theme can throw everything out of balance, etc. It’s a good idea to have an SEO audit template that you use every month for a quick review of how your website is going to ensure it’s staying on top of things, and put page loading times at the top of the list!
Fix – improve your website speed
- Have your website hosted on a UK server (or the country your target audience are based)
- Install a caching plugin to keep your website clear of old data
6. You haven’t installed an SSL certificate on your WordPress website
I’m still coming across a lot of websites without an SSL certificate.
It doesn’t matter if your website doesn’t sell things online, you need to make it as secure as possible to protect your website visitors and any data they may submit in the form of cookies or contact form submissions.
It’s a requirement under GDPR and you can do it for free with most hosting providers. There’s really no reason to avoid it any longer and keep making this SEO mistake.
And Google are using it as a ranking factor, so not having an SSL certificate can cause you to lose a key position in search results pages even if your website is better than the rest.
Fix – install an SSL certificate
- Check your web hosting and see if they have the function to add a free SSL
- Use LetsEncrypt to create a free SSL and install it manually if your web host won’t do it for you
- Install ReallySimpleSSL plugin to convert your website from http to https if you’re getting “insecure content” warnings
- Change your website properties from http to https in Google Analytics and Google Search Console
7. You’re relying too much on Yoast for SEO
I used to use Yoast for my website. I’m no longer impressed by what it has to offer ( I recommend RankMath instead but believe that relying on any SEO plugin is bad for your website because they don’t give you all the information you need to get things right, although I have to say that RankMath does a good job for what it can offer.
SEO plugins won’t tell you that your image file sizes are too big or that you haven’t got a keyword in the file name (it might remind you to include a keyword in the alt text description though).
Your SEO plugin won’t tell you that your page is too slow to load.
Yoast will tell you to add keywords to your meta description even though Google does not use this as a ranking factor. Your meta description is there to entice your visitors choosing which website to click on from a page of search results, that’s all but it can’t guide you in using the right search phrases or if you’re using competitive keywords or not (or even if you should be for that particular page or post).
Yoast will tell you that your content is too difficult to read. Please don’t listen to it. Readability is important but Yoast (and all SEO plugins) don’t understand your particular target audience and assume that your page should be able to be read by 12 year olds (yes, really).
Do try to vary your sentence lengths, add whitespace and avoid using unnecessary jargon where possible, but if your audience are professionals used to complicated text, then you should write with them in mind.
Fix – stop relying on WordPress SEO plugins
Take what they say with a pinch of salt and review your website and content yourself or ask a professional to audit things for you. An SEO professional will help you establish what needs to be on each page or post and can even create a checklist or template for you that you can use instead of relying on Yoast or any other SEO plugin.
8. You haven’t created a sitemap for the WordPress website
One thing that WordPress SEO plugins can be useful for are creating sitemaps for your website.
A common SEO mistake I find with many websites (not just WordPress) is that no sitemap has been created, or it’s stopped working.
Google uses your sitemap as a guide to which pages to index. Indexing of your pages is how Google determines your search rankings so it’s important that things are kept up to date and relevant.
Another SEO mistake I find many WordPress users are doing is wanting Google to index everything. The more pages to index the longer it takes and not every page on your website will contribute to your SEO – you can tell Google to ignore your GDPR policies, category and tag pages, checkout, basket, pages, etc.
But I do suggest that you enable the images on your main pages, posts (and products if you’re ecommerce) to be indexed. Google image search is a thing and you may find that where a page doesn’t get a high ranking the image might, and it can send some additional traffic through to your website.
Fix – create a sitemap and noindex pages
You can do this through your SEO plugin (it does have some uses!) There will be an option to create a sitemap so make sure this is ticked to do so.
To noindex a page, go into that page editing screen and select “noindex” in the SEO plugin options. Google doesn’t always pay attention to this, but it’s a good way to tell Google that a page isn’t relevant to your website content.
9. You’re not optimising your website permalinks
A permalink is the web address that appears at the top of the page and all too often I’ll see something like company/co.uk/blog/25546568956596.
Wouldn’t it be better if it was relevant to the content and gives some extra clues to Google to help with your ranking? Something like company/top-seo-mistakes, maybe?
This is a common issue with ecommerce and dropshipping websites, particularly if you use a plugin that imports into woocommerce for you. If you don’t change the permalink you not only have something confusing for search engines and your customers, but chances are you’ll have the same string as your competitors (and it’s an easy way for people to tell you might be dropshipping or search for the product cheaper from elsewhere).
Fix – change your permalink structure
It’s really easy to change your permalink structure – just go into WordPress settings, permalinks. Select post name.
Edit your permalinks on each page and post by editing the page and hitting edit next to the permalink directly under the title box.
Make sure you set up redirects from your old permalinks to your new ones!
10. You haven’t created any redirects for broken links
How many pages have you created and then deleted?
How many permalinks have you changed?
If you haven’t set up redirects from the old pages to the new (or old permalinks to the new) then this will show as broken links to Google.
Worse than that, if you’ve shared those links on social media and someone attempts to click on one, they’re faced with a nice 404 error. Not a good impression!
Impressions matter when it comes to a good search ranking with Google. If your users can’t access the information they need they will go elsewhere, and Google will take this as a sign that your website is low quality. So avoid this SEO mistake to attract quality traffic to your website.
Fix – install a redirection plugin
Honestly, it’s pretty easy to copy and paste the old link and the new one into a redirection plugin that’ll do the hard work for you, I suggest Redirection.
The best way is to create redirects in the htaccess file but this takes some coding knowhow, there are guides online if you want to do this but please back everything up first!
11. Your meta description is overloaded with keywords
There’s some debate over the use of Meta Descriptions for SEO. Google say they’re not a ranking factor yet SEO plugins insist you have your focus keyword inserted in there anyway.
I’m in the “meta descriptions are part of user experience” camp. It’s this snippet of information that appears in the search results page and the searcher makes a decision on which to website to click on based on what they read from the meta description.
So yes, having a focus keyword in there does help in that it ensures your brief description is relevant and to the point.
There are some cases where Google has replaced a custom meta description with some other content from the page (often the first line or two). This is usually where they feel the meta description written isn’t relevant to what the page is about – and it does show that Google pay attention to them!
Either way, don’t just list a ton of keywords in your meta description, they just make it look spammy and Google will ignore or replace anyway.
Fix – put your keywords to better use elsewhere
Do your keyword research but use those keywords where they count – your titles, images, permalinks, headings and content.
When writing your meta description, imagine that you’re describing your blog directly to the intended reader and explaining what they’ll get from reading it, in two sentences or less.
12. You’ve not using an internal linking strategy
Google needs to understand what your website is about and how it answers the search phrases its users are looking for.
When you don’t link pages and posts together, you’re missing out on the opportunity of giving Google more information to establish context and relevance. This is the information Google needs to determine where to rank your website. Like in this blog, I’ve talked about the mistake of poorly optimised images and linked to our post about image based SEO – so you the reader can have the additional information you need and Google can understand how the two blogs work with each other.
You might have written 20 blogs around the topic, but if you’re not linking them together, Google can’t see the bigger picture of how they work together to demonstrate your expertise. Using internal links where it’s relevant to do so can see your website recognised as an authority on the topic being searched and boost your rankings.
And let’s talk for a moment here about outbound links. Yes, they are important to add authority and credibility to what you’re talking about (like providing statistics to back up a claim you’ve made) and that’s the best way to use them, as a form of proof/reference.
If you link out to websites with irrelevant content that doesn’tt add anything more to what you’re saying are seen as spammy, even as a cheat to get around Google search algorithms. So be careful when considering guest posts for your site and when people email you asking for their link to be inserted into your content – make sure the link goes to awesome content that’s relevant to you, what you do, and what your audience want to see.
Fix – link your pages together
Link your pages and posts together often, but only when it’s relevant to do so.
Use keyword-rich anchor texts rather than the usual “click here”, something like “to learn more about the benefits of SEO”.
13. You’re using cheap web hosting for your WordPress website
By cheap I mean not cost effective.
None of us want to pay more than we have to for web hosting. There’s a ton of web hosting providers out there offering bargain prices, but they can bring a range of problems to your website.
Most web hosting packages that businesses use are shared hosting. That means your website is hosted on the same IP address as many other websites.
Google links these websites together.
That’s not a problem if all the websites are of high quality in Google’s eyes but add in a few low-quality, spam, or even illegal websites into the mix and your website could be associated with them, which is the last thing you want.
Unfortunately, the only way to prevent this entirely is by paying more for hosting that isn’t shared, and in many cases that isn’t affordable for small business owners.
You’ll also find with shared hosting is that it’s not uncommon for the servers to get overloaded. This means at peak times, there may not be enough resources available for your website and so it slows down as a result.
Fix – do your research when renewing your hosting
Don’t go for the cheapest web hosting you can find, especially the big names that you see advertised everywhere.
Choose a UK based web host if you can and make sure they’re using a UK server/data centre (or the country you live in/your target audience are based).
I recommend Eco Web Hosting as they actually provide your website with more resources at peak times rather than throttling resources when the server gets too busy, and they have a good focus on security too!
Don’t let a common SEO mistake ruin your WordPress website
I love WordPress because it is so quick and easy to get a website up and running for your business, but there are so many SEO mistakes it can create if you don’t know what to look out for.
I hope this blog has opened your eyes a little to some of the potential problems your website might be experiencing right now.
If you need some help to figure out which SEO mistakes you’re making and how to correct them for your business and target audience, get in touch with us today.
