7 Mistakes Google Hates and How You Can Easily Fix Them – Part 1
Every website wants some love from Google. A high rank on Google’s SERP can mean the difference between getting organic traffic every day and never seeing a single visitor unless you go and pay to get visitors.
The catch?
Google’s playing hard to get – or it might be if you are making some common mistakes that send signals that your website isn’t the authoritative, worthwhile destination you want it to be.
The good news is that these mistakes are easy to correct. Here are 7 things that Google hates and some quick ways to stop doing them and start getting the organic traffic you need.
#1: Poor User Experience
When Google’s algorithms return a list of search results, the company’s goal is always to deliver an optimal experience for any user who clicks on your website. You have to remember. Google isn’t out to get you visitors. It’s out to get people connected with resources matching what it is they were searching to find. If your page is slow to load or difficult to navigate, Google hates that. It will likely relegate your site to oblivion on the second or third (or lower) page of search results.
Fortunately, there’s an easy fix. Start by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights and ensure your page has a speed of 80 or higher. You should access the Core Web Vitals Report on your Google Search Console to identify additional problems. Finally, make sure to optimize your images by using the smallest file size that delivers the results you want and minimize redirects both internally and in your outgoing links.
#2: Lack of Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your site from big, authoritative sites that lend their credibility to you. High-quality backlinks are an essential element of SEO. If authority domains are not linking back to your site, it can negatively impact your rank on Google.
Our recommendation is to focus on getting a few good links. That’s going to do a better job thatn a bunch of spam links. The best way to proceed is to identify high-authority sites where your content might be relevant to visitors. Then, you can find contacts for those websites and email them to see if they would be willing to link to your content. If they agree, make sure to have a conversation about anchor text. Anchor text that uses your company name or one of your priority keywords is preferable to anchor text that says, ‘click here’.
#3: Shallow or Irrelevant Content
Your content needs to be useful and in-depth on your chosen subjects if you want Google to reward you with a place on the first page of search results. It’s not enough to use keywords. You must include related terms and subtopics to build semantic relationships and rank for keyword clusters.
There are lots of tools you can use to find related subtopics to use in your content. For example, Surfer SEO and Market Muse both provide lists of keywords, related terms, subtopics, and more. They also score content, which means you can figure out how your content will perform against your competitors’ content.
As a final note, Google Passage Ranking is now live and allows Google to highlight passages that are relevant to a searcher’s query. Having a highlighted passage can do a lot to get a searcher to click on your site. You’re more likely to benefit if you focus on creating content that’s semantically rich and relevant.
Watch out for part 2 of this article and another 4 mistakes you absolutely must avoid.
