SEO is a complex strategy and if you do it right you will have great online success. However, there is a lot of information out there on the right and wrong ways of doing SEO, and a lot of the people that are writing the SEO content are not experts so they will steer you in the wrong direction unintentionally. This is why I wanted to make a list of the most common ways to kill your SEO so you can avoid them.

These SEO killing techniques are things that all SEO experts have come across and we had to clean up quickly before Google notices them and ranks your page down. Hopefully, this helps you look out for them so you can take action in case they happen to you and believe me they will.

Toxic Links:

If you are not an SEO expert it is hard to know what is a toxic link and what is a good link. This is where SEO software comes in handy. My personal favorite is SEMrush for checking toxic links on my website. All websites will get toxic links which is normal and is called natural link building. This is when someone you don’t know finds your website or article interesting and will add your website link to there website without asking you. This is very common and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. However, you will need to be alerted when someone does this and they have a toxic website but you can disavow the toxic link so it doesn’t affect your SEO negatively

If you set your website up in an SEO software to check for toxic links on a daily or weekly basis you can find them and disavow the. I will explain how to do this using SEMrush.

Set your website domain up in the SEMrush project
Now go to the backlink audit section and set it up to scan your website on a daily or weekly basis on your entire site
SEMrush will send you alerts if there is a spammy site linking to your site
Go to the SEMrush Backlink Audit section and click on the audit to review the ones that have high toxicity score
If they are truly spam then you can move them to the disavow section where you will keep a list of all the disavow websites
Export that list to a .txt excel file and add it to the Google Search Console Disavow Tool.
Submit it and save the .txt excel file and Google will manually remove that link from their site so it doesn’t hurt your website domain score within 30 days.
You are done congratulations on your first disavow lesson.

Slow Page Speed:

Slow page speed is a user experience killer and Google knows this and will decrease your rankings if it gets too out of control. Google has stated anything more than a 3-second page load speed is considered bad. This might seem fast but users will not stick around to see if your page loads. They have a threshold of 3 seconds and will bounce if it takes longer. Users have very short attention spans as you can see. Google made this algorithm update in 2018 where they added in page speed as a ranking factor and now is one of the most important SEO factors today.

In a report called Milliseconds Make Millions they found that a 0.1-second improvement of mobile site speed can increase your conversion rates by 8.4% in retail sites and 10.1% in travel sites.

Here are some steps you can take to make sure your site speed is fast and doesn’t affect your SEO efforts:

Compress your Javascript. You can do this by using the Terser Compression Tool.
Compress your HTML. You can do this by using the HTMLMinifier
Compress your CSS files. You can do this by using CSSNano.
Optimize your site images. You can do this by using Sleep Junkie
Optimize your site videos. You can do this by compressing the video file when it is in production.

Poor Content:

In the SEO world, we know that content is king. But adding content to your website with no strategy or uniqueness will have little to no effect on your SEO rankings. If users do not find your content interesting or it does not answer a burning question they are looking for they will bounce from your website within seconds. Google notices quick bounces and will decrease your rankings if the bounces continue. So here are some quick ways to make sure your content is good for the reader and the search engines.

Know the audience you are writing for.
Use the Inverted Pyramid Model. Structure your content like an upside-down pyramid or cone. The most important messages go at the top of the page. Then, gradually drill down to the more specific, supporting information. End with tangential details.
Write short and simple sentences and pretend your users know nothing about what you are writing about.
Have an active voice and not a passive voice. For example, rather than writing “A coffee was ordered,” write “The man ordered a coffee.” Instead of saying “Products can be ordered on our website,” say “You can order products on our website.”
Show your users images and video instead of explaining it in text.
Don’t use jargon and make sure information is understandable for the educated non-specialist. Spell out acronyms on first reference. Avoid insider language. Explain complex or niche terms. And provide hyperlinks to other articles where readers can get more background information on a particular topic.
Mix up your word choice. Make a list of terms that describe your company and group together any words you use to mean the same thing. Pick your top choice and stick to it everywhere on your website.
Make text easy to read and scannable. Use bullet points or numerical lists. Try and use as much white space as possible.
Include images and video as much as possible in each section.
Layer the website content. The great thing about a website is that it’s easy to direct readers from one page to another. Help readers find more great content by hyperlinking certain words or phrases to other relevant resources, especially those on your own website. This will help keep people engaged with your content and moving through your site.
Leave them wanting more with a call to action button.

Bad User Experience

You might be asking yourself “What is user experience?” User experiences are those that revolve around what we expect from the environment that we're in. You will have needs and expectations if you're looking at a web site. You will want the website to answer some of the questions you have, gain information regarding the business, their job, or take a look at the available options to purchase out of etc..

Designing User Experience for sites means designing UX for these respective ecosystems. Starting with understanding the consumers' expectations and needs in that environment is important. If the companies communicate and market their offerings in the language they can flourish on it and understand, it's known as UX design that was great.

Here is how you fix UX on a site:

Understand the reasons behind UX that is bad
Employ user centric design methodology to understand the stakeholders' vision. Derive design goals from the above data.
Help the consumers understand the concept of users owning a particular model that is mental. E.g.- A hospital according to their goals and ambitions will have a different set of customers on their site.
Know user goals. Their expectations from a website like this. Mediators between the business requirements and the user needs.
Examine the designs. Make adjustments.

Get the most out of the procedure, occasionally. Many occasions the vision of the business remains the exact same however, the market conditions vary, as it happens. This strategy is in keeping up with the changing variables, crucial and deliver a good user experience.

No On-Page SEO Optimization

On-Page SEO optimization is made up of a lot of things but you want to make sure you hit all of them or Google will have trouble crawling your website and deciding what is the topic or keyword you are trying to target. If Google doesn’t know the keyword you are trying to target then it will also have trouble trying to rank you for that keyword as well. This is why On-Page SEO Optimization is so important.

Here some areas that can improve your On-page SEO Optimization

Make sure you have identified a target keyword for that specific page and it has good search volume and low competitiveness
Add this keyword into all aspects of the On-page SEO optimization process
Have the targeted keyword be the most dense keyword on the page
Make sure you have a title tag with the keyword
Add H1, H2, and H3 tags on your page with the keyword
URL should be the title of the page with the keyword included
Meta description has been completed an is around 250 character length with the keyword
All images have alt text describing them with the keyword
The image files should have the keyword added to them along with geo-tagging if possible.
Add the structure data to the site
Include the canonical tag is in the code
Make sure the page is not being redirected to another page

To Many Redirects

While doing 301 redirects is a great solution that ensures you wouldn’t lose PageRank, there are times when it could actually cause a negative SEO impact. Here’s what you need to know about the possible negative effects of redirection.

The slow the page load speed down
Redirect chains can cause the GoogleBot to crawl latter pages and in some cases will not crawl the page at all.
You lose link juice when you have too many redirect chains
With a long redirect chain, there is a higher chance of redirects to break in the future which can hurt your user experience.

Spammy Schema Markup

Schema markup (also known as structured data markup) can be a great way to improve search engine content discovery, indexation, and organic search visibility. Some structured data markups feed into Google’s Knowledge Graph, appear in local results, and generate Rich Snippets — all of which is great for improving organic search visibility and click-through rate.

But now, structured data can potentially hurt your site if not used correctly, due to recent “spammy structured markup” penalties from Google. Here is an example of a penalty message from Google: “Markup on some pages on this site appears to use techniques such as marketing up content that is invisible to users, marking up irrelevant or misleading content, and/or other manipulative behavior that violates Google’s Rich Snippet Quality guidelines.”

Obviously, this is something that you do not want to happen to your site. Webmasters should now audit their schema markup implementation on an ongoing basis to avoid this penalty.

How to Avoid Spammy Schema Markup/Structured Data

Ensure Structured Data implementation aligns with Google's most recent guidelines.
Test markup in the Structured Data Testing Tool.
Monitor the Structured Data Report in your Google Search Console account
Monitor Google’s Webmaster Blog for the latest Structured Data updates and news.

Conclusion

Doing SEO is hard work and the last thing you want is your SEO efforts to be killed by Google because you were doing something wrong or someone was doing something bad to your website that was hurting your overall rankings. This quick guide should help you find the most common SEO issues that experts experience. If these issues are to complex for you let us review your website for an SEO audit and we will find the errors for you.