After years of supporting businesses with their search strategy, there are mistakes we would expect to no longer see. And yet, they persist, sometimes at companies investing significant budgets in their digital presence.
The first mistake, and the most widespread, is the absence of a keyword strategy. Many businesses create content on instinct, without having analysed the actual search queries of their target audience. The result: pages that address no identified search intent, and therefore generate no organic traffic. Content without strategy is noise in a void.
The second mistake concerns site architecture. Non-descriptive URLs, orphan pages, an incoherent navigation structure, no internal links. Google crawls your site like a robot: if the structure is confusing, it cannot understand the hierarchy of your content or determine which pages to prioritise.
The third mistake is duplicate content. Near-identical service pages, product listings copied and pasted with a minor variation, title and meta description tags identical across multiple pages. Every page on your site must target a specific query with unique and substantive content.
The most common technical error remains performance. Uncompressed images, unoptimised JavaScript, fonts loaded from external servers. On mobile, where the majority of traffic now occurs, every additional second of loading time translates into lost visitors and lost rankings.
Finally, the strategic mistake that costs the most: treating SEO as a one-off project rather than an ongoing process. Search rankings are built over time. Businesses that publish a site, optimise it once and leave it untouched for two years are systematically overtaken by competitors who invest regularly. Our SEO and digital performance team works on both one-off audits and ongoing support. If you have any doubt about your situation, start with a digital audit.