Most businesses don’t lose search rankings to some exotic, advanced problem. They lose them to basic, fixable mistakes they don’t even know they’re making.
That’s good news. It means the fastest way to improve your SEO usually isn’t chasing the latest tactic. It’s cleaning up the quiet own goals that are already holding you back. Here are some of the most common ones we run into.
Your text is trapped inside images
I recently came across a website that had its customer testimonials saved as screenshots. They looked fine. But from an SEO standpoint, they were throwing away some of the most valuable content on the page.
Real text on a page gets reliably crawled, read, and indexed by Google. Text baked into an image does not. Google has gotten better at reading text inside images, but it’s inconsistent and not something you’d ever want to count on. Google’s own advice is to put important text on the page as real text, not locked inside a picture.
Testimonials are the perfect example of what you lose. When a real customer describes what you did for them, they use natural, specific language, the same words real people type into Google. “They fixed our slow website” or “great wedding DJ in Red Deer” is exactly the phrasing you want appearing on your page. Turn that into a screenshot and all of it becomes invisible content, doing little or nothing for your rankings.
There’s an accessibility cost too. Screen readers can’t read text inside an image, so you’ve shut out visitors who rely on them. The fix is simple: use real text. You can still style it to look just as nice, and now it works for you instead of against you.
Your alt text is missing, or stuffed with keywords
While we’re on the subject of images, there’s a related mistake worth its own mention: alt text.
Alt text is the written description attached to an image. Screen readers read it aloud for visitors who can’t see the picture, and because Google can’t truly see images either, it leans on that description to understand what the image is. It does two jobs at once, accessibility and SEO, which is exactly why it’s worth getting right.
Two things commonly go wrong. The first is not having any. Plenty of sites, especially older ones or images that got uploaded in a hurry, have no alt text at all. A visitor using a screen reader just hears “image,” or a useless filename like “IMG_4821,” and Google gets no help understanding the picture. Adding alt text is free, quick, and one of the easier accessibility and SEO wins available to you.
The second is worse, because it’s well-intentioned and still wrong: cramming the alt text full of keywords. Instead of describing the image, people treat the field as a place to stuff “Red Deer web design affordable SEO company Alberta cheap website designer.” It fails everyone. The screen reader user hears nonsense, and Google’s own guidance is explicit that stuffing keywords into alt attributes hurts the experience and can get your site flagged as spam.
The rule is simple: describe the image honestly, the way you would to someone over the phone. “Testimonial from the owner of a Red Deer bakery” beats both a blank field and a keyword salad. If a relevant keyword happens to fit that description naturally, fine. If it doesn’t, leave it out. Accuracy first, every time.
Your content is thin, generic, or copied
A lot of sites have pages that technically exist but say almost nothing. A service page with two sentences. Product descriptions copied straight from the manufacturer. The same boilerplate paragraph reworded across ten pages.
Search engines have nothing to grab onto there, and neither do your customers. The pages that perform are the ones that answer real questions in specific, useful detail. Write like you’re explaining the thing to an actual customer who asked, and you’ll naturally produce the kind of content that ranks.
Every page has the same vague title, or no title at all
Your page title, the text that shows up as the clickable headline in search results, is one of the strongest on-page signals you have. And it’s astonishing how many sites waste it. Every page titled “Home.” Or “Untitled.” Or the business name repeated identically across the entire site.
Each page should have its own clear, descriptive title that says what the page is about and, for local businesses, where you are. “Emergency Plumber in Red Deer” tells Google and the customer exactly what they’re looking at. “Home” tells them nothing.
You’re writing for Google instead of for people
Somewhere along the way, people got the idea that SEO means stuffing a keyword into a page as many times as possible. “Red Deer web design” jammed into every other sentence until it reads like a robot wrote it.
Google figured that trick out years ago, and now it mostly just makes you look like spam. Write naturally, for the human being who’s actually going to read the page. Use the words your customers use, in sentences that make sense. The keywords take care of themselves when the writing is genuinely about the topic.
You’re invisible in local search
For a local business, this one is often the single biggest lever, and it’s frequently ignored. If your Google Business Profile is unclaimed, half-filled-out, or has an old address, you’re handing the “near me” searches straight to your competitors.
Claim your profile and fill it out completely. Make sure your business name, address, and phone number are identical everywhere they appear online, because inconsistencies confuse both Google and customers. And encourage happy clients to leave reviews. Those local signals are some of the most powerful tools a small business has.
Your site is slow or a pain to use on a phone
Most of your visitors are on their phones, and Google evaluates your site primarily as it appears on mobile. If your pages take five seconds to load or are awkward to use on a small screen, people leave, and the rankings follow them out the door.
Oversized images and bloated, plugin-heavy builds are the usual culprits. Compress your images, keep the build lean, and pull your own site up on your phone now and then to see what your customers actually experience.
Nothing links to anything
Internal links, the links from one page of your site to another, do real work. They help Google understand how your site fits together, they pass authority around to your important pages, and they help visitors find what they came for.
Plenty of sites have valuable pages that nothing else links to, quietly stranded where neither Google nor a customer will stumble across them. Link related pages to each other, and make sure every page that matters is reachable in a click or two. We’ve written before about not making your website a scavenger hunt, and this is part of the same idea.
You set it up once and never looked again
A website isn’t a slow cooker. You don’t set it and walk away.
Two things go wrong when you do. First, the site goes stale, old prices, outdated services, a copyright year from three redesigns ago, all of which signal neglect to visitors and search engines alike. Second, you never find out what’s working, because you’re not looking. Free tools like Google Search Console will tell you what people are searching to find you and where you’re slipping. Check in, keep things current, and treat your site like the living asset it is.
You can over-optimize, too
Every mistake on this list so far has been about doing too little. This last one is the opposite: doing too much.
I’ve had clients fixate on load speed to the point of absurdity. One site became usable in about seven tenths of a second, and that was still too slow for them. Here’s the thing, though: that’s already excellent. Google treats anything under roughly two and a half seconds as good, and no human can perceive the difference between 0.7 seconds and 0.5. Shaving off those last fractions changed nothing for visitors or rankings, but chasing them ate up real time and money, and sometimes meant stripping out perfectly good features just to move a number that didn’t matter.
The same applies to most of SEO. You can pour endless hours into micro-tweaking a title tag, hunting for the “perfect” keyword density, or trying to drag a tool’s score from 92 to 100 on a page that already ranks fine. Past a certain point, the returns flatten right out. That same effort would do far more good spent on something that’s broken, a new piece of content, or your neglected local listing.
Optimization has diminishing returns, and there’s a point where chasing the metric starts working against you. Tune a page too hard for the algorithm and you can end up with something that serves the score instead of the customer, which is the exact trap we keep warning about. The goal was never a perfect number. It’s a site that’s fast enough, sound enough, and genuinely useful. Good enough, done consistently, beats perfect on a single metric every time.
Fix the boring stuff first
None of this is magic, and that’s the whole point.
Before you go hunting for some clever SEO edge, walk through this list and fix the unglamorous things you’re getting wrong. Use real text. Write for people. Claim your local listing. Speed up your pages. Keep it current. It isn’t exciting, but it’s the work that actually moves the needle, and most of it costs nothing but a little attention.
The businesses that win at search usually aren’t doing anything brilliant. They’re just not making the mistakes everyone else is.
