SEO Mistakes hurt a lot of websites. Watch this video from AHREFs to see if you’re website is guilty of the top 2.

From the AHREFS YouTube Channel

We studied ~1 billion pages of content and found two common SEO mistakes holding 91% of pages from ranking on Google.

In addition, we found that 4.5% of pages get less than 10 search visitors each month.

While the stats may seem alarming, our data points to two common SEO mistakes to avoid to be in the top 5% of web pages across the entire internet!

The first SEO mistake we discovered is that pages with no traffic do not have any or many quality backlinks.

In fact, we found that 55.24% of pages have zero referring domains pointing at them. And 29.79% of pages have backlinks from less than three websites.

Some marketers believe that link building is useless. However we found a clear positive correlation between the number of referring domains pointing at a page and its organic search traffic.

And the same goes for the total number of keywords a page ranks for.

Bottomline: if you want to get organic traffic to your pages, then you need to build links as it is foundational and an SEO best practice.

This tutorial covers a couple link building strategies to get backlinks to existing content.

If you’re relatively new to link building, then we strongly recommended you watch the tutorials in this playlist to sharpen your skills. [LINK]

The second SEO mistake that we saw in pages with no search traffic is that they are not targeting a topic with enough search traffic potential.

Even if you have all the links in the world, but you’re not targeting a meaningful keyword with search traffic potential, then you may not be able to reap the passive SEO traffic that’s possible with Google.

This is one of the biggest mistakes that you’ll see news sites doing.

For example, we found that nearly 30,000 pages had over 200 unique websites linking to them, but had no monthly search traffic whatsoever.

This was most commonly found in two scenarios.

The first were pages that went overboard with black hat SEO techniques. And the second type were news websites.

Since news articles are often focused on “click-worthy” headlines, it can be challenging to ground them behind meaningful keywords. Also, journalists are trained to write, but not necessarily for SEO copywriting.

If you happen to have pages with a lot of links, but are not gaining search traffic, you’ll learn a couple ways to use these pages to increase your organic traffic.

Want an in-depth SEO strategy example that would work for anyone looking to improve targeted traffic? Then follow our 3 month SEO strategy template.