Matt Diggity
Most small businesses shoot themselves in the foot with SEO. Fix these 5 mistakes, and you’ll be ahead of 90% of the competition:
1️⃣ Index Management Not every page on your site deserves to be indexed. Pages like tag archives, duplicate content, or thin pages dilute your site’s authority. Worse, they waste Google’s crawl budget, meaning your money pages won’t get ranked.
✅ Fix: – Block low-value pages using robots.txt or noindex tags. – Optimize your sitemap to control what Google sees.
2️⃣ The Three Kings – Meta Title, H1, and URL These are the first things Google looks at to understand your page. Most businesses stuff them with keywords or make them generic as heck.
✅ Fix: – Title: Include the top keywords naturally. Keep it clear and under 65 characters. (e.g., 12 Best Web Hosting Services to Try Out in 2025) – H1: Match it to your title tag to prevent Google from rewriting it (which can hurt CTR). – URL: Keep it short, clean, and keyword-focused—3-4 words max (e.g., yourdomain(dot)com/best-web-hosting)
3️⃣ Unoptimized Content (Entities) Google’s AI understands topics and relationships, not just keywords. Most sites fail because they don’t build topical depth—no related entities, no supporting content, just isolated pages.
✅ Fix: – Structure content around key entities and related topics. If you’re writing about “dog training,” mention positive reinforcement, behavior correction, and obedience training. Match content that’s already ranking on page 1. – Use internal links to connect relevant and supporting pages. (e.g., link from dog training to best treats for training sessions).
4️⃣ Poor Links (Two Categories) Two types of terrible links: Useless ones (random low-quality directories, no relevance, no authority). Dangerous ones (toxic links, spammy domains).
✅ Fix: – Focus on contextual, relevant, high-authority links. A single strong backlink from a niche-relevant site beats 100 garbage ones. – Use Ahrefs or Google Search Console’s Disavow Tool to clean up toxic links.
5️⃣ Slow Speed (> 2s Load Time) Over 58% of global search traffic comes from mobile, so speed matters. If your site takes more than 2 seconds to load, you’re losing rankings, conversions, and user engagement
✅ Fix: – Test your speed with Pingdom—aim for under 2 seconds (4+ seconds is a major issue). – Optimize images, remove unnecessary JavaScript, and set up a content delivery network (CDN) to serve content faster. – Check Core Web Vitals using Chrome’s Lighthouse Tool:
✔️ First Contentful Paint < 2.5s
✔️ Time to Interactive < 100ms
✔️ Cumulative Layout Shift < 0.1
