We SEO audit a lot of websites. A lot of websites.
Businesses come to us when they’re not showing up on search engine results, they aren’t getting any queries, or their traffic has fallen off.
As digital marketing experts, we want to share our knowledge of search engine optimisation (SEO) to help you make more informed decisions about your website.
Here are the top 10 mistakes that negatively impact your website’s online presence and why they matter.
1. Targeting the wrong keywords
Everything in your SEO builds on keyword choices.
It doesn’t matter how good your content is or how fast your page speed loads. Targeting the wrong terms wastes time and money.
You’ll either rank for things nobody searches for or compete against websites you have no realistic chance of beating.
The classic version of this mistake is going after broad, high search volume, single-word terms. For example, “bakery”. This puts your site up against the hundreds of thousands of bakeries in your country,
The fix is to get more specific. “French bakery Glasgow”, “Gluten free bakery Glasgow”, or “Bakery Southside Glasgow”.
These searches are more specific and have clearer intent, meaning the conversion rates for people finding your website will be higher.
But it is important to match your site with search intent.
If your bakery doesn’t actually provide gluten-free products, or if you go after a keyword like “chocolate cake recipe” trying to sell your cakes instead of providing a recipe, Google won’t rank you on search engine result pages (also known as SERPs).
Make sure to find the right keywords for the right page.
There are plenty of online SEO tools that can help you find good, relevant keywords.
2. Slow website speed for poor technical SEO
Google measures your site speed through a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals, and they’re a confirmed ranking factor.
But it’s not just about rankings.
Google won’t be patient either. Page speed is hugely important for crawlability.
The usual culprits are oversized images, too many plugins or scripts, and cheap hosting.
You can check your own site for free using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Enter your URL, look at the mobile score (that’s the one Google cares about most), and you’ll get a specific list of what’s slowing things down.
If the fixes look too technical, hand the report to your web developer or agency. They usually can find a solution that will make a big impact on your Google ranking.
3. Ignoring mobile users
Google completed its migration to mobile-first indexing in July 2024. The shift follows people’s browsing habits changing.
More people than ever are using their mobiles to search, and user engagement on phones has never been higher.
If your site looks brilliant on a laptop but breaks on a phone, Google sees the broken version.
People searching for services on their phone are often ready to buy right now, so a poor mobile experience doesn’t just hurt your rankings. It sends your keenest leads elsewhere.
Check your site on your own phone.
Can you read everything without zooming? Do buttons work properly? Does the contact form fit on the screen? If the answer to any of these is no, that’s a problem worth fixing urgently.
4. Missing or generic title tags and meta descriptions
Title tags and meta descriptions are the snippets Google shows in search results. They’re the first thing a potential customer sees, and they determine your organic traffic.
We regularly see business websites where every page has the same title tag (usually just the company name) or where meta descriptions are blank.
That massively affects your click-through rate (whether people click on your website),
Every page on your site should have:
- A unique title tag that includes your main keyword for that page (keep it under 60 characters)
- A meta description that summarises what the page offers and gives people a reason to click (under 155 characters)
This is one of the quickest SEO wins available to any business.
5. No internal linking strategy
Internal links are the links between pages on your own website, and they’re one of the most underused tools in SEO.
When you link from one page to another on your site, you’re doing two things.
First, you’re helping Google discover and understand the relationship between your pages. Second, you’re guiding visitors to other relevant content, which keeps them on your site longer and moves them closer to making an enquiry.
A blog post about what SEO is should link to your digital marketing services page. This current page just linked back to “what is SEO”. Links help send clear signals to Google about your site’s structure and topical authority.
The fix is straightforward: whenever you publish a new page or post, look for two or three opportunities to link to other relevant pages on your site. And go back through your existing content to add links where they make sense.
6. Thin, low-quality content, keyword stuffing, or duplicate content
Google’s job is to show searchers the best answer to their question. If your page has two paragraphs of vague copy and a phone number, Google has no reason to rank it above a competitor’s page that covers the same topic in genuine depth.
This problem is everywhere.
Service pages with only 100 words of generic text. Blog posts that say nothing a reader couldn’t have guessed. “About” pages that have no heart.
Create useful content that isn’t copied and pasted across your whole site. And if you find a good keyword, make sure to use it naturally and don’t “stuff” it into your page, hoping it will help you rank. It won’t.
Google’s E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) means they’re specifically looking for content written by people who know what they’re talking about. As a business owner, you already have that expertise. The biggest challenge is getting it onto the page in a way that’s clear, specific, and genuinely helpful to the reader.
7. Forgetting to optimise images
Images are often the biggest files on a webpage, which means they’re often the main reason a site loads slowly.
But speed isn’t the only issue.
Unoptimised images are a missed SEO opportunity in their own right.
Every image on your site should have:
- Alt text: a short description of what the image shows.
- Compressed file size
- Descriptive filenames: “IMG_4782.jpg” tells Google nothing. “glasgow-bakery-cupcakes.jpg” tells it a lot more.
If your site has dozens or hundreds of images without alt text, fixing this in bulk can feel tedious. But it’s worth the effort, both for SEO performance and accessibility.
8. Ignoring local SEO strategies
If your business serves a specific area, local SEO is where some of your biggest wins are hiding.
Create a Google Business Profile if you don’t have one already.
This is what shows up in the map results when someone searches for a business like yours nearby. It’s often the first thing potential customers see, and if your profile has no photos, outdated opening hours, or zero reviews, it’s not making a great first impression.
There is another common mistake small businesses can make in their SEO efforts. This is not making sure your business name, address, and phone number (often called NAP) are consistent in every listing you appear in.
Inconsistent NAP makes it harder for Google to trust your website content and service, which directly affects your search rankings.
9. Buying backlinks or using link schemes
Backlinks (links from other websites to yours) are still one of Google’s top ranking factors. That makes them tempting to shortcut. Services that sell hundreds of backlinks for a flat fee are everywhere, and the promise of quick results is hard to resist.
Don’t do it.
Google’s spam detection gives strict penalties for buying links and can even remove websites completely from search results. Private blog networks (PBNs), link exchanges, and paid placements on low-quality sites are all things Google actively looks for and punishes.
The businesses that build strong backlink profiles do it the hard way: creating content worth referencing, building genuine relationships in their industry, getting listed in reputable directories, and occasionally writing guest posts for relevant publications.
It takes longer, but the results are sustainable and penalty-free.
10. Treating SEO as a one-off project
This might be the most damaging mistake on the list, because it undoes all the good work you might have done on everything else.
SEO isn’t a box you tick once.
It’s an ongoing process, and treating it as anything else means your results will peak and then slowly decline.
Google’s algorithm updates regularly. Your competitors are improving their sites. The way people search is changing, especially with AI-powered search features becoming more prominent. A page that ranked well six months ago might have been overtaken by three competitors who’ve published better, more up-to-date content since then.
The businesses that get the most out of SEO are the ones that keep up with it, create great content, fix technical issues whenever they appear, and continue to build their site’s authority over time.
How to check if your site has these SEO mistakes
There are plenty of cheap and easy ways to see if your website is suffering from any of these issues:
- Google Search Console: completely free, and it flags crawl errors, indexing issues, and mobile usability problems directly from Google.
- PageSpeed Insights: enter your URL and check your Core Web Vitals scores on both mobile and desktop.
- Search your business: look at your title tags and meta descriptions in the results, make sure they stand out on the page.
- Check your phone: open your website on mobile and try to complete a task.
- Google Business Profile: search your business name and check your profile. Is it claimed, complete, consistent, and up to date?
If you find an issue, don’t panic. Problems are more common that your realise. Just try your best to fix the problem and you should hopefully rank higher soon.
Getting your website ranking with Soapbox Digital Media
Every website has room for improvement. But significant improvements can take a lot of time, patience, consistency and strategies to successfully pull them off.
Whether you run a bakery, construction company, law firm, or ecommerce business, we understand you may not have the time or training to manage SEO alongside everything else.
If you’d like a professional team to monitor your site, spot opportunities, and build a strategy that improves rankings and drives more enquiries, Soapbox is here for you. Give our friendly team a call today on 0141 429 1356 to learn more!
