It’s interesting to see common SEO mistakes they make. Even though they’re popular, they could be getting more search traffic than they currently do. And you can see how easy it would be to fix such mistakes.
Throughout this year, we analyzed 105 sites to reveal common SEO issues that impact a site’s performance in Google Search results.
The sites we chose for this analysis are popular, top-performing sites that have significant marketing budgets. They are all sites that people perceive as being successful and whose performance is well above the average.
Still, through this study, we were able to identify SEO mistakes for each one of the 105 sites and discover which are the issues that are most common among these sites.
We were curious to see just how many of the issues we uncovered for these sites are actually covered by Squirrly SEO.
More specifically, we were interested to know how many of those issues can be prevented and fixed by using Squirrly SEO features.
This article includes our key findings.
For this study, we analyzed 105 sites.
We picked sites that are popular among the people in our community (the first 25 sites that made it into our study were chosen based on who our users are following on Twitter).
The rest of the sites which we included in this analysis are a mix of popular sites in the digital marketing field and sites from Alexa lists.
Therefore, all 105 sites are popular sites that people view as being successful and trustworthy.
We mostly used ContentLook and Squirrly SPY to analyze the websites and acquire the data we were interested in.
For each SEO issue that we’ve identified as part of our study, we’ll provide an explanation to help you better understand what that issue refers to – and why it’s a problem.
Then, we’ll show how Squirrly SEO helps with each particular SEO error and issue included in this study.
You’ll walk away with a better understanding of common SEO issues, and you’ll know exactly how to fix or prevent them for your site.
Every site we analyzed had at least one SEO error. The majority of sites we looked at had over 8 issues each.
More specifically, out of the 105 sites analyzed:
All of the issues we identified are issues that impact a site’s performance and can influence rankings in a negative way.
All of the issues identified are issues that you can easily avoid and fix by using Squirrly SEO features.
Now, let’s go into every one of the issues that we discovered.
Let’s see what they are all about, how exactly they impact performance – and what you can do to fix or prevent such issues for your site.
URLs that have symbols like: -,!, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), [, ], ?, {, }, ;, :, “ are not SEO-friendly.
The average number of pages this error is on is 13.94.
You should only use words, numbers, and dashes in your URLs so that Google can easily read them.
You can see if you have this issue for pages that you are trying to rank on Google via the Focus Pages panel.
Google’s display titles max out (currently) at 600 pixels.
That is the equivalent of about 80 characters, depending on what characters you use.
Neil Patel recommends that you keep your title tag under 65 characters so it will be visible.
In one lesson by MOZ, we see that they recommend that you keep your title tag between 50-60 characters.
According to Orbit Media, the title length should be 55 characters.
The average number of pages that have this issue/site is 28.7.
Having very long titles won’t necessarily impact your SEO performance.
We saw that the best title length can mean different things from one site to the next.
For example, we’ve had a client for which long titles worked best.
However, as a best practice, you should try to keep your titles in the 10 to 75 characters range.
You will be advised in real-time to keep your titles under 75 characters when optimizing your articles using the Live Assistant feature.
When you have a title that is shorter than 10 characters, it will be hard for Google and other search engines to understand what your page is about.
The average number of pages that have this issue (across all sites) is 12.
That means that about 12 pages /site have a <title> tag length that is too short.
We recommend that you keep your title length within the 10 to 75 characters range.
You’ll be notified if your pages have this issue via the SEO Audit.
Plus, you will also be advised in real-time to make your titles longer than 10 characters when optimizing your articles using the Live Assistant feature.
According to impactbnd.com, the average content length of the top position Google article contains 2,416 words.
In order for Google or any other search engine to understand what is on your page/article, you need content.
If you have just a few words written on that page/article, then there is a big chance that Google will NOT understand exactly what you want to say or how your particular page can help others.
This is what we call thin content.
There is a purpose for it as well (meaning: there are times when you might choose to publish Thin Content), but NOT if you want to rank your pages and outrank your competition.
There is an eternal debate about how many words an article/page you want to get on the 1st page of Google should have.
Some say it should be around 1,500 words long, while others recommend a word count of over 2,200 words.
In 2016, Brian Dean and Eric Van Buskirk analyzed 1 million websites to find out how long an article should be to rank high on Google.
This is what the study revealed:
“We found that longer content tends to rank higher in Google’s search results. The average Google first page result contains 1,890 words.”
And in 2019, Dean and BuzzSumo reviewed 912 million blog posts to discover that long-form content gets more backlinks.
“Long-form content gets an average of 77.2% more links than short articles. Therefore, long-form content appears to be ideal for backlink acquisition.”
Neil Patel also recommends you write more than 2,200 words in your articles.
Our own study showed that the average number of words the articles have for all sites is: 2,159.
If we are to take a look at the SEO score and the number of words per article, we can see that the sites that have an SEO score between 40 and 49 write an average of 2,998 words.
The average number of pages that have this issue per site is 14.
If you are not new to Squirrly, then you already know that we recommend you write at least 1,500 words on an article/page you want to rank on Google.
We help you keep track of this aspect for the pages you want to rank via our Focus Pages feature.
According to Google:
“Good meta descriptions are short blurbs that describe accurately the content of the page. They are like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.”
If you don’t customize your meta description, Google will usually display the first sentence of the post/page as your meta description.
The average number of such pages is 32.6.
It’s simple, go through the pages you want to rank and customize your meta descriptions to get more clicks.
You will always be up to date with all the errors your site has with Squirrly’s SEO Audit.
You can also see if you have this issue on a page you are working on in the Focus Pages panel.
URLs that are too long may affect your chances of ranking.
How come?
Google will start to think that your page targets a specific long-tail phrase instead of a broad phrase.
According to a study made by Quicksprout:
“In regards to URL length, there’s no better place to look than Google itself.
The average URL length for Gmail is 59 characters.
The average URL length for Webmaster Tools is 90 characters.
The average URL length for the Google blog is 76 characters.”
They also analyzed the length of the URLs according to the results on each page and found some interesting results.
“URLs ranked in the top 10 results on average contained 37 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 20 results on average contained 35 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 30 results on average contained 39 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 40 results on average contained 41 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 50 results on average contained 36 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 60 results on average contained 32 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 70 results on average contained 48 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 80 results on average contained 45 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 90 results on average contained 41 characters.
URLs ranked in the top 100 results on average contained 38 characters.”
Try to keep your URLs between 37 to 76 characters.
Squirrly will let you know how to make your Links SEO-friendly for pages you are trying to rank via Focus Pages.
No need to worry about this; with Squirrly, you’ll know if your pages have this issue – and how to fix it.
Meta descriptions are short snippets meant to describe the content on the page.
Meta descriptions are featured on search engine results and influence whether a user will click on a listing or not.
Google doesn’t like it when it sees the same description on multiple pages that you own, so you shouldn’t have the same meta description on more than one page if you expect great SEO results.
Make sure that every page has a unique meta description.
Squirrly SEO makes it easy to ensure that every page has a unique meta description with its Bulk SEO feature.
Plus, Squirrly will always let you know about all the errors your site has, including duplicate descriptions, via the SEO audit.
You can also see if you have this issue on the page you are working on in the Focus Pages panel.
When you have the duplicate < title > tags error, it means that two or more pages in your site have the SAME < title > tag.
< Title > tags should be unique for each and every page on your site.
If you have the same < title >tag on more than one page, Google will only index one of them. That’s because it is difficult for the search engine to understand which is more important than the other.
Squirrly PRO helps you with this in a number of ways:
Having more than one < title > tag on a page makes it difficult for Google or any other search engine to know what the content is about, or if it’s a good match for what their users are searching for.
Make sure you only have one <title> tag per page.
You can always count on Squirrly to let you know what is wrong with your site and how to fix it via the site Audit and the Focus Pages feature.
Loading time refers to the time it takes a site to fully render in your browser.
According to a study made by Hosting Tribunal:
“1 second delay reduces page views by 11%.
1 second delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%.
1 second delay eats away 7% of the coveted conversion rate.
1-3 seconds in loading time see a very low bounce rate probability – only 32%.
Add 1 second more to that and the chance for users to bounce triples, reaching 90%.
On annual basis, 1 second delay can lead to $2.5 million in missed revenue if your shop generates $100,000 per day.”
And according to Neil Patel:
“47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.”
Here’s another stat from Unbounce:
“Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%”
Remove any plugin that you are not using, clean your HTML code, compress your images and caching, and consider upgrading your server if that’s the reason why your site loads slowly.
You can see if you have this error yourself via the SEO Audit.
What’s more, if pages you are trying to rank take too long to load, you will also receive a task to take care of fixing this issue within the Focus Pages panel.
Having a sitemap.xml helps Google crawl your site more easily and more accurately, as it gives the search engine crawlers a list of all your content in a machine-readable format.
According to a study made by MOZ:
“When a Sitemap was submitted the average time it took for the bot to visit the new post was 14 minutes for Google and 245 minutes for Yahoo.
When no Sitemap was submitted and the bot had to crawl to the post, it took 1375 minutes for Google and 1773 for Yahoo.
The averages were calculated on 12 different posts, 6 with Sitemaps being submitted, and 6 with the Sitemaps not being submitted.”
Build a sitemap in an XML format and make it available to Google.
To fix this issue, activate the sitemap.xml setting in the Squirrly SEO plugin.
You can always check if your site has this issue in our Focus Pages feature, as well as in our SEO Audit feature.
The < title > tag is an HTML tag that provides useful information about the context or the subject of the page, as it is the title of that page.
It’s a critical element that significantly impacts a page’s success, as the title appears in search engine results where relevant and descriptive results have more chances of being clicked on.
If you don’t have a <title> tag, then Google will think twice about ranking your page, as search engines make a priority out of offering content that is relevant to the search made by their users.
Taking all that into consideration, it’s no surprise that:
The no <title> tag issue is not as common as some of the other issues mentioned in this study, but it can still occur.
That means that each site of those 5 has about 4 pages with no <title> tag.
All you have to do is make sure that you created a <title> tag for your articles/pages.
You can easily make sure that you created a <title> tag for your articles/pages using the All Snippets feature.
Go to METAs –> Title to find this option.
If you are using the Squirrly SEO plugin, then the probability of having this issue is minimal.
With the help of meta automation, you can rest assured knowing that all your pages have titles.
You can also check to see if everything is ok in the Audit section. Squirrly is always analyzing your site to help reveal possible issues and help you rank.
Furthermore, you can see if you have a <title> tag for the page you are working hard to rank using the Focus Pages feature (more specifically, the snippet tasks).
As you can see, Squirrly SEO provides tremendous oversight and guidance to help you prevent and overcome common SEO issues that impact your performance.
No need to worry about overlooking critical SEO aspects that ruin your chances of ranking.
Simply use the incredible features from Squirrly SEO and ensure your site will NEVER make it into a study on common SEO errors like this one.
It’s the easiest way to have an SEO error-free website that is healthy and ready to rank.
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