Welcome back, this month we are looking at the most common SEO mistakers made on UK business websites. Each week I get a whole host of new websites to work with.
Some of them are getting an SEO overhaul for the first time – however the majority are websites where poor SEO practices have been implemented for short-term “highs” in the data. The result? The website eventually tanks, and the business owner is very confused.
Here’s what I see most commonly, so you can avoid the same mistakes.
AI generated content
If you follow me on social media you will have already heard me bore on about AI content. Search engines prioritise helpful, original, people-first content. If your web designer has provided web copy as part of the design brief, ask them how it was created. If you’re not sure. Here are some tell-tale signs it was cultivated artificially.
- Generic claims and buzzwords: “unlock your potential”, “Skyrocket your success” or “drive innovation” are some classics. In plain English they mean sweet FA.
- Overuse of the em dash —. Most people don’t use one, or instead opt for a hyphen.
- Every paragraph is very smooth, but doesn’t really mean anything. It comes across as waffle from a Politician. “By leveraging data-driven insights and customer-centric approaches, businesses can enhance brand awareness.”
- Starting sentence with connective words – “whether”, “with”, “but” etc.
- Sounding like an advert – if you read it aloud each paragraph sounds like a script for radio and echoes that familiar Steve Wright celeb-drawl: “whether you need a spot of dusting or a mega-deep-clean, The Sparkle-barkle company is here for you!”
- Americanised spelling (words with a Z instead of an S).
In 2024 I watched 100s of my colleagues work (people behind multi-million-pound company websites) tank overnight because they had focused solely on AI generated content. AI used to be acceptable to the algorithm, and they were doing what anyone would (trying to get the best result for the client). However, that wave of AI corner-cutting was short-lived and a massive core update from Google made for websites who usually got millions of hits per month dropping to zero. Ouch.
Randomly deleted pages
Search engines crawl and rank all of your web pages. If you randomly delete a page, or blog, the search engine don’t see the change. They continually crawl and index your pages to find the url leads to nowhere. This is called a soft 404 or a crawling error. If you’ve ever visited a website, clicked on a page and this error has come up, that’s what is behind it.
Why is it a problem? Well, search engines prioritise user experience. Clicking a button that leads to nowhere falls under the category of making the user’s experience worse (noone likes stuff that doesn’t work properly).
404 errors can be fixed. It takes a bit of background digging and redirecting with a 301. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s time to get someone like me in to give your website an MOT.
Poor quality backlinks
A backlink is a website that hosts a url link to your website. On my website, one way I provide backlinks to clients by linking their logo on my client’s page, to their website. This is what’s known as a high-quality backlink. My site is credible, secure and relevant so that link is considered notable. It’s good to have as many of these as possible.
There is however, such a thing as “poor quality backlinks” to websites that are primarily used and known for backlinks and nothing else. Think of it a bit like paying for social media followers. It makes you look popular for a hot-minute and then the effect drops off a cliff. It’s fallacy.
When it was acceptable to use AI to create content, it was also widely considered okay to connect as many spammy backlinks as possible to a website. Search engines were rewarding this practice, until they twigged that the links were becoming more and more unscrupulous. That’s when they excluded this practice from the algorithm.
High quality backlinks are easy – talk to your biz mates who have a relevant site. For example, let’s say you’re a therapist and your mate is homeopath, publishing guest blogs about alternative therapies on both your sites can be one backlink that gives you both a boost. If you can do this 10-15 times you’ll have made a huge difference to your site.
Duplicate content
Another out-dated SEO technique was to create pages with duplicate content (the same text and pictures in multiple places). This gave the site more crawled/indexed pages and urls, but without much increase to design effort/cost. These pages would be seen more, and ranked higher for being relevant in more url destinations.
For example – local services like a mechanic would have pages such as:
- “Mechanic in Ashford”
- “Mechanic in Canterbury”
- Mechanic in Dover”
Google realised that this isn’t beneficial to the user, and clamped down on it – understandably.
As of 2026, search engines value totally different pages with real thought and skill behind them.
You might be thinking “Catherine, AI is really coming along now, surely it can sort all of this out for me?” To that I propose a theory – if all websites can be mended and made perfect, how do search engines decide which rank #1? We can’t all be at the top spot. Unless they start to charge everyone for the luxury of being visible at all, we are on this hamster wheel for the foreseeable. That is why (to my mind) the SEO merry-go-round will continue.
Missing Alt Text
Alt text is the little box under an image in your media section that allows you to write a detailed description of images. These descriptions benefit users who are using screen-reading software that reads text and images aloud. For example someone with a sight impairment might use this software to access your website. The more of a description in the alt text, the better the experience is for the user.
In an attempt to make websites more user-friendly and inclusive, Google prioritised websites that had filled this information in. If yours is blank, it could be holding both your website and your users back.
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About the Author
Catherine Jarvis Clothier is a digital marketer and online presence specialist living and working in Kent, UK. She has worked in unusual UK businesses for over 10 years across the South of England, particularly in automotive and therapy-based enterprises. Catherine specialises in social media, SEO and web design. She can be contacted here for online business consultations.
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