Website SEO Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

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Introduction and Common Website Mistakes

Morning, happy Friday.

Today I want to talk about some common website mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Often, when I do website walkthroughs or talk to clients on a discovery call, there’s usually one thing that comes up, either a misconception or something they’ve been told that isn’t necessarily helping their website from a traffic or sales point of view.

I just wanted to address a few of them this morning. There are always other tips and tricks that can help you avoid common issues.

One of the things that came up was a question asked in the group yesterday, in the Facebook group. It really prompted me. With these Friday lives and the podcast, I don’t plan weeks and months in advance of what I’m going to talk about.

I was having this conversation with a friend the other day. She was saying, “Oh, I couldn’t do that. I’d have to have it all lined out. I’d have to spend a day planning it.” I really didn’t want that for the podcast. I want it to be very casual, very natural.

The episodes where I have tried to plan things a little bit more never sound as natural. I enjoy them more when I’m not doing the planning. It’s hard when you are creating content like that to not plan or not feel like you have to plan.

Sometimes when I think about a topic, I think, “Oh, I don’t know how I can just go on and talk about that.” But as long as I’ve got a few ideas of, okay, these are the points that I need to cover within that topic, it always sounds much better when it’s not too scripted.

The Dilemma Around Subdomains

The conversation that came up in the Facebook group was about subdomains. There is often a lot of confusion about this. This also came up on a discovery call this week when I was working with a client. Subdomains came up, so I’m going to dive into that one first.

That’s our first website mistake that people make, which is splitting their content across subdomains. When you hear people talking about subdomains, they are quite confusing sometimes. Think of it like a little offshoot from your main website that acts as its own separate space.

If your website was yourskinclinic.com, you could have a separate part of it, like blog.yourskinclinic.com or store.yourskinclinic.com. Subdomains can be really useful if you’ve got a big website or if there are specific things you need to keep separate, like a course login area you don’t want as part of your main site.

For big companies and big websites, it can be really good, but they also tend to make things a bit more complicated.

SEO Impact of Subdomains

The biggest concern is the SEO impact of subdomains. Google will often treat subdomains like separate websites. This means you end up having to do SEO on both your subdomain and your normal website.

That’s then really hard. You’re basically doubling your SEO workload.

If you haven’t got a team handling the SEO workload, realistically doing everything you can to keep all of that SEO juice together is really important.

For example, one of the questions that came up on a webinar last night, the question was, “If you build out sales pages on a different platform, so say you’ve got a website on WordPress and then you build out your sales pages on FEA Create, Kajabi, ClickFunnels or somewhere else, what’s the impact of that on your SEO?”

It does have an impact. I think the big thing is all those sales pages contain so much valuable information. People often put a lot of effort and thought into building out sales pages. All of those keywords scattered through those sales pages are doing nothing for your main website.

Whereas, if you build the sales pages on your own website and domain, then switch over to the checkout page when you need to switch to the funnel builder, at least you’re keeping all of that valuable SEO help and impact on your main domain.

Navigating Subdomains and User Experience

So that’s where subdomains can be an issue. People maybe don’t give it as much thought or don’t even realise the impact of having those separate spaces.

The other thing is user experience. If visitors are jumping between your main domain and your subdomain, it can feel like they’re visiting two different websites.

Often, if you haven’t set them up so the actual visual appearance is the same, it can be a real disconnect. That can have a conversion rate effect. It can be a real knock-on effect.

People go to the next page and don’t see what they’re expecting—maybe the branding is slightly different, the fonts are different, your logo looks different or isn’t there at all. It just loses some of that trust, which then affects the next step.

Any little blip or hump in the road to getting people to take the action you want is something we want to try to avoid if we can.

Subdirectories vs. Subdomains

So what’s the alternative? If everything is in one place—if you’re building a website and using blog.yourskinclinic.com but everything is in one website builder—it would actually be much better to, instead of using a subdomain, use what’s called a subdirectory.

Essentially, this is the simple part: all it means is the bit after the /. If your website was, rather than it being blog.yourskinclinic.com it’s blog.yourskinclinic.com/blog. and the subdirectory is the /blog part.

This is really good for helping Google understand the structure of your website, which is actually the next mistake I’m going to cover.

But that’s how you can do it: keep everything in one place, think about it, and when you’re thinking about building your website, ask yourself, “Am I going to use a separate funnel builder? How can I keep all of that valuable SEO juice and those valuable keywords on my main domain to really help me build up my SEO?”

Poor Navigation Structure

The next one is poor navigation structure. It’s something people don’t necessarily think about when they first plan their website. I think especially if you’re DIYing your website or have DIY'd your website and it’s just grown naturally, you can end up with a really messy website structure.

Essentially, what that does is when Google’s little robots come through and crawl your website, if everything’s nested in lots of different directories—if everything is within different menus and directories and isn’t clear—it’s not immediately clear to Google that these are the top pages for the site.

That’s probably your homepage, which is the very top, and then you’ve got your about page, services page, contact page, blog archive page—those are the main pages of the site. Think of that as your top-level navigation, what you would have in your navigation bar at the top of your website. If you get that right, it helps because we all only get a certain amount of crawl budget from Google.

So Google’s robots come through, crawl your website, and that costs Google money—money to come and read our websites. They try to ensure they only read what they need to on your site.

If you make it easier for Google to see your site, and you don’t have everything buried two, three, or four layers deep, then the robots are much more likely to go through your site, crawl through it properly, and index it properly as well.

If the structure isn’t right from a back-end point of view, that will come across to your users as well. Simple navigation should be intuitive and logical, with proper organisation of your pages. Make sure the links work and go to logical places because that helps with user experience too.

We don’t want people burning mental calories trying to figure out how to navigate our website, do business with us, or find what we’re selling. So keeping the structure simple is key.

One thing that helps is using something like Canva. You can use a Canva whiteboard to plan out your website. There are specific apps that will do this for you, but I think from a visual point of view, seeing just some boxes with your pages and how they link together is really helpful.

Mobile Friendliness

The next mistake is making your website not mobile-friendly. The majority of people use websites on their phone. Even if you’re corporate and most people come to your website on a desktop, Google has a mobile-first policy. If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, it will harm your rankings, even if most of your users are on desktop.

Google likes mobile-friendly websites that look good on mobile, are responsive, and work well on different screen sizes. The text automatically resizes, images are in the right place, and the website isn’t slow to load.

That’s the big thing with mobile friendliness—the website must not be slow to load, which brings us to the next mistake people make. One mistake I see is making fonts too small on mobile. People often think, “It’s a smaller screen, so I need to make the fonts smaller,” but actually, they often need to be slightly bigger.

If you’re using fonts that are small on your website, making them smaller for mobile is a bad user experience. Make sure it’s easy for people to use and navigate your website. Don’t make them get their glasses out to read what’s on your site.

Google doesn’t like font sizes below 16. I don’t often use below 18, though it depends on the font. Some fonts look larger, but it’s important to keep your font size at least 16 pixels.

Another key to making your website mobile-friendly is ensuring buttons and tappable elements are far enough apart. People with fatter fingers should be able to tap without accidentally hitting the wrong thing. That’s an accessibility feature, so ensure there’s enough space around anything that needs to be clicked.

Slow Page Load Times

The next mistake is slow page load times. This is sometimes within our control and sometimes not. I always tell people to focus on what they can control. You can control whether the images you upload to your website are the right size. Ideally, images should be under 100 kilobytes in size.

This is a big mistake I often see. Most websites have at least one image that’s five megabytes or something ridiculous. A megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes, and we want images under 100 kilobytes. You can see the difference that can make in how long it takes for a page to load.

Because you’ve visited your website many times, you might think, “It loads okay.” But it’s the first time you visit that it can be an issue. This is one of the issues with Squarespace websites. Squarespace is easy to use and looks beautiful, but page load speed is often an issue. The code behind it is often the problem.

This used to be an issue with FEA Create, but they did a big update last year to fix it. Their websites tend to load faster, though there are still a few blips. Even with WordPress, if your site isn’t optimised, it may not load fast. With WordPress, you have more control over the code behind it.

But don’t worry about the code—focus on what you can control. That’s ensuring the images on your site are optimised to under 100 kilobytes. There are tools to help with this, like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. People often go there, see a score, and get confused by the mention of JavaScript and code.

But what you want to look at is whether it mentions images.

If you’re unsure what it means, pop it into ChatGPT and ask, “What does this mean? How can I fix it?” It might give you tips on what you can do. There are also great Google Chrome plugins that tell you the size of your images on each page, which can be really helpful.

If you’ve never thought about optimising your images, check their size and see if it’s affecting your page speed. Ideally, you want all pages of your website loading in under three seconds. That’s the goal.

You might still get a score in the orange using Google PageSpeed Insights, but if it’s loading within three seconds, that’s the most important thing. Even if not everything on the page loads instantly, focus on getting your most important elements loading within three seconds.

Importance of Clear Call to Actions

The next mistake is having a lack of clear calls to action. Again, this is one I see time and time again when doing website walkthroughs—when we’re not guiding our visitors. We’re not making clear what we do, how we improve their lives, and, most importantly, what they need to do to get it.

It’s about deciding what action you want people to take on each page. Ideally, each page should have just one call to action. Your homepage might be different as it’s often more of a signposting page. But even then, think about where you want visitors to go depending on how familiar they are with your business.

If someone comes to your homepage and knows about you, where should they go? If someone comes in with no idea who you are but knows they have a problem and you might be the solution, where should they go? And if they have no idea they have a problem and just stumbled across your website from a Google search, where should they go?

If you think through these scenarios, it helps determine what action you want people to take from each page. Then, make sure the call to action is compelling. It should be very visible, with a button or form, and align with the action you want them to take.

Using action words like “book now” or “get your free consultation today” is good. Make sure the button is big enough. I often see big buttons with tiny text, which isn’t helpful.

For mobile optimisation, make sure buttons are tappable and easy to use on both mobile and desktop. Sometimes buttons can look too big on mobile and too small on desktop, so balance is important. Ensure the text on the button is as large as possible.

Another tip is to use directional cues. Every button should point people in the direction you want them to go. Whether it’s chevrons, arrows, or even an emoji, something should guide them toward the next action.

Avoiding Information Overload

The next issue is more of a copy problem—where there’s too much information on your website. If you’ve got walls of text, even though you need lots of information on your website, it needs to be broken down in a way that’s simple, engaging, and not overwhelming.

Anything with more than a couple of paragraphs, and a paragraph really shouldn’t be more than a couple of sentences, should be broken up with images, icons, bullet lists, or headings. Whether it’s a blog post, sales page, or about page, large blocks of text are hard for people to read.

Ideally, people should be able to skim your headings, read what’s in bold, and see the call to action below. They should be able to understand what the section is about and whether they need to take action.

We don’t realise how fast we skim through a page, but it’s important. People skim, then come back and read if they find something relevant. Avoid unnecessary fluff or technical jargon—simplify it.

Icons and visuals help convey messages quickly and clearly. Our brains process visuals much faster than written text, so they help people decide if they need to read more.

This is a common mistake I see, and it’s one of the most frequent issues with many businesses. But it gives us hope for SEO. As I said to a client yesterday, you only need to do slightly more than your competition to make a big difference.

SEO Basics You Can’t Ignore

One big mistake people make is ignoring SEO completely, especially the basics. Many websites miss out on so much potential for Google to understand them because they haven’t thought about SEO.

Even if you’re not doing anything with SEO right now, starting to gather SEO in the background is key. Google is making decisions about your site whether you’re aware of it or not. If you don’t submit a sitemap or monitor the basics, you can have a website that’s 12 years old but gets no traffic from Google, which is just criminal.

I see it often—people with old websites who’ve been blogging forever but haven’t done the basics. Things like ensuring page titles and descriptions are in place, having a sitemap submitted to Google, and knowing which pages are most important for your main business keywords are essential. Without these basics, you’re missing out on huge potential.

Fixing Broken Links and Outdated Content

The next mistake is broken links or outdated content. Broken links and outdated content are signals to Google—and to users—that your website, and maybe your business, isn’t relevant anymore.

Regularly auditing your site for broken links and keeping your content up-to-date is crucial. We often feel the pressure to create more and more content, but sometimes we ignore the valuable content we already have on our website. I’ll link to an episode about not feeding the algorithm constantly but instead focusing on updating existing content.

Content that’s already out there may have some SEO authority. By updating it, you can start getting quick results and traffic through those pages. It’s an easy fix.

This is something I help clients with during audits, and it’s quick and easy to do. Fixing broken links can make a big difference in how Google sees your site.

Leveraging Free Google Tools

Next, I want to mention using free tools from Google. Google Search Console and Google Analytics are fabulous free tools.

Out of the two, I recommend starting with Google Search Console. It’s easier to set up and use. It shows you how Google sees your website, what search terms you’re appearing for, and your average position in search results.

I’ll link to an episode on Google Search Console where you can learn more. Setting these tools up now, even if you don’t fully understand them, allows them to gather data so you’ll have something to work with when you’re ready to dive in.

The Power of a Strong About Page

The last mistake is one that came up on a client call this week. They had been advised to remove their about page. When I look at client analytics, the about page is often the second most-visited page on a website. People want to know whose site they’re on. They want to learn more about the business and who they’re thinking about doing business with.

Especially for service providers, a strong about page can make a massive difference. It’s also one of the pages Google looks for as a sign of trust. Google looks for a homepage, about page, and contact page in your top-level navigation as a sign that you’re a legitimate business.

People expect to see an about page in your navigation. But your about page needs to strike a balance between telling your story and explaining why you’re the best person to help your audience.

It should be about why you’re the trusted guide to lead them to success or help them overcome their problems. If you can connect with them, show you understand their struggles, and add a bit of personality, you’ll build trust.

Think of your about page as more than just a bio. You can add testimonials, but scatter them throughout the page. If you’ve won awards, include them, but discreetly—people don’t really care about big banners announcing awards.

What FAQs could you include on your about page? You could also add a quiz or a content upgrade to encourage people to join your email list.

There’s so much potential for expanding on what we’re doing with all our website pages. But if you’re wondering which pages to optimise first, start with your homepage, about page, and services page. That’s phase one of the pathway to website success.

Final Tips for Website Success

Getting those key pages optimised makes a massive difference. I hope this episode has been helpful in highlighting some of the common website mistakes people make.

If you feel like you’re making any of these mistakes—or if you’ve nailed some of them—I’d love to hear from you. Remember, you don’t have to fix everything all at once. Just start chipping away at these issues one page at a time, one section at a time.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but even small fixes can make a big difference. If you feel like your website has some of these issues and you need help, I’d love to take a closer look.

Book a 20-minute Website Success Discovery Call with me, and let’s chat about how we can get your website working better for your business. What are the key steps for you to take first?

I hope you have a lovely weekend, and I’ll see you soon. Bye.