Common SEO Mistakes & How To Avoid Them

Even if you have the best SEO strategy in your industry, strong content and solid backlinks, technical SEO issues can quietly hold your site back. They often get overlooked due to not being immediately visible, but send signals to search engines about confusion, inefficiency or poor maintenance of your website, and that can be enough to stop you climbing higher in the search results.

At Seven Hills Search, we specialise in uncovering these hidden barriers through detailed technical SEO audits. Below, we’ve outlined some of the most common technical SEO mistakes we see when analysing websites, how they affect performance and what you can do to fix them.

1. Crawlability and Indexing Issues

Crawlability is the foundation of SEO. If search engines can’t access or properly interpret your pages, even the best content won’t rank. Common problems include blocked URLs in robots.txt, misused noindex tags, orphaned pages and overcomplicated URL structures.

Audit insight: In recent audits, we've seen businesses inadvertently no-index product collection pages throughout their site.One misplaced line can prevent Google from seeing hundreds of valuable pages.

To fix crawlability problems, regularly check your robots.txt file, ensure your sitemap includes all relevant URLs and verify coverage reports in Google Search Console (GSC). For larger sites, tools like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb can help identify crawl anomalies quickly.

2. Cookie Consent and Data Tracking Misconfigurations

While this isn’t a traditional SEO factor, poor cookie consent or analytics setup can indirectly harm performance. Consent Mode v2 has made tracking more complex, and when it’s misconfigured, vital user data disappears.

Without the correct tracking and reporting in place, you lose sight of user engagement and conversions, alongside audience behavior, meaning you aren't making data-driven decisions in your SEO strategy.

Audit insight: We've seen businesses using third-party cookie banners that never fire consent signals correctly, meaning GA4 records almost no data from real users. This led to campaign performance looking poor even though SEO growth was happening.

To resolve these issues, check that Consent Mode is implemented properly through Google Tag Manager. Test events and conversions with DebugView in GA4 and make sure your cookie banner passes the correct consent states before any tracking tags load.

3. Duplicate and Cannibalised Content



Duplicate or overlapping content can confuse Google about which page to rank. Sometimes it’s caused by technical duplication, such as URL parameters, HTTP/HTTPS variations or inconsistent trailing slashes. Other times, it’s caused by content teams creating near-identical pages targeting the same keywords.

These issues dilute ranking potential, waste crawl budget and can even lead to the wrong page showing in search results.

Run regular crawls to identify duplicate titles, meta descriptions or thin pages. Check for canonical tags that are missing or inconsistent, and use GSC’s Performance and Pages reports to find where multiple URLs compete for the same search terms.

4. Poor Internal Linking and Site Structure

Internal linking is one of the most underrated aspects of technical SEO. It helps search engines understand your hierarchy, distribute authority and prioritise important pages. When it’s inconsistent, shallow or overly reliant on menus, valuable pages end up buried.

Strong internal linking is built on logic. Related pages should point to each other naturally and important service or category pages should receive links from across your site. Use descriptive anchor text rather than vague phrases like click here or read more.

In content audits, we often uncover deep content with no internal links pointing to it, making it effectively invisible to Google. Fixing that alone can unlock fast improvements in crawl efficiency and visibility.

5. Misuse of Free Tools (GA4, GSC and Tag Manager)

Many businesses overlook how much technical insight is available in free tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Tag Manager. The problem isn’t lack of access, it’s how they’re used.

Audit insight: We frequently see teams using GA4 but ignoring referral exclusions or missing event tracking altogether. They think traffic is dropping or not converting when in reality, the data is incomplete due to an incorrect setup.

Google Search Console, meanwhile, is full of diagnostic information such as index coverage, Core Web Vitals and structured data issues, yet many brands check only top queries. Misreading or neglecting this data leads to poor SEO decisions.

At the technical level, GSC can reveal crawling issues, soft 404s or canonical conflicts that would otherwise go unnoticed. If you’re not analysing those reports regularly, you’re missing one of the easiest opportunities to improve your site’s health.

6. Broken Links and Redirect Chains

Every broken link wastes crawl budget and damages user experience. Redirect chains and loops create unnecessary steps for both users and search engines, slowing down crawling and potentially wasting authority flow.

To stay on top of these issues, run regular crawls with tools like Screaming Frog or ContentKing. Focus on fixing 404s, minimising redirect chains and ensuring all canonical pages resolve with a single, clean URL.

7. Missing or Misused Structured Data



Structured data helps search engines understand the context of your content. When implemented correctly, it can lead to enhanced search features such as rich results, reviews or business information panels.

Yet many sites either forget to use it or apply it incorrectly. For example, adding multiple schema types on one page that conflict with each other or failing to validate code in Google’s Rich Results Test.

For local businesses, the LocalBusiness schema supports visibility in Maps and local results. For publishers and service providers, Article and Service schemas can improve how content appears in search results.

If you’re wondering which schema types may be best suited for the pages across your site, get in touch with us today to set up a discovery call.

Conclusion

Technical SEO isn’t about chasing algorithms. It’s about giving search engines a clean, structured environment to understand and trust your site.

From crawlability to cookie consent, these are all fixable issues. The challenge is spotting them before they cost you visibility.

That’s where a proper audit makes all the difference. At Seven Hills Search, our Technical SEO Audit process combines advanced crawling, analytics and data diagnostics to uncover exactly what’s holding your site back. We’re an SEO agency based in Sheffield

 working with businesses across the UK to strengthen their technical foundations and drive measurable growth.

If you suspect technical issues might be limiting your performance, get in touch and we’ll show you what’s really happening under the hood.