Most SEO problems aren't dramatic — nobody gets penalized overnight for one bad decision. Instead, small, unglamorous mistakes pile up until a site that should be ranking simply isn't. Here are five of the most common ones I see, in order of how often they actually matter.
1. Targeting keywords nobody actually searches
It's tempting to optimize for the terms that sound impressive internally — but if nobody types "bespoke synergistic solutions" into Google, ranking #1 for it is worthless. Real keyword research starts with what your customers actually type when they're trying to solve a problem, not the language your industry uses about itself.
2. Ignoring page speed on mobile
Google has been mobile-first for years, and Core Web Vitals are a documented ranking factor — but more importantly, slow sites lose visitors before Google even gets a chance to rank them. If your homepage takes more than a few seconds to load on a phone over 4G, you're losing people who will never see the rest of your SEO efforts.
3. Thin or duplicate content across pages
Ten pages with 150 words of generic content each will almost always underperform one genuinely useful page with 1,200 words that actually answers the searcher's question. Search engines are increasingly good at recognizing content that exists purely to fill a URL versus content written for an actual human.
4. Missing or broken technical basics
Broken internal links, missing alt text, no XML sitemap, duplicate title tags — none of these are glamorous, but they're the foundation everything else sits on. A brilliant content strategy built on a technically broken site is like painting a house with a cracked foundation.
5. Treating SEO as a one-time project
SEO isn't something you do once and forget — search algorithms change, competitors publish new content, and your own site evolves. The sites that keep ranking well are the ones that keep improving, not the ones that did one audit two years ago and stopped.
If any of these sound familiar, a technical and content audit will usually show you exactly where you're losing visibility — and it's often less work to fix than people expect.