What are common SEO mistakes?

After auditing a lot of small business websites, the same mistakes appear again and again. These are the ones that cost enquiries, listed in order of damage.

One page trying to do everything. A single 'Services' page listing ten services across twenty areas ranks for none of them. Google matches specific pages to specific searches: 'boiler repair in Croydon' deserves its own page, not a bullet point. This is the most common and most fixable mistake in local SEO.

Thin, duplicated location pages. The opposite failure: generating fifty 'we serve {town}' pages that are identical except the place name. Google's spam policies name this directly (doorway pages and scaled content abuse), and it can drag the whole site down. Location pages work when each one carries real local content: the areas, the housing stock, the specific work you've done there.

Buying links and other shortcuts. Cheap link packages, comment spam, and 'guaranteed page one' schemes are the classic self-inflicted wounds: at best wasted money, at worst a manual penalty that takes months to recover from. Nothing bought for £50 improves your authority.

Neglecting the free stuff: an unclaimed or half-empty Google Business Profile, no reviews strategy, inconsistent business details across directories. For local searches, especially the map results, these signals often matter more than the website itself.

Technical own-goals: blocking crawlers in robots.txt by mistake, noindexing important pages during a redesign and forgetting to remove it, or letting a plugin slow the site to a crawl. These are rare but catastrophic, which is why monitoring matters.

Finally, flying blind. No Search Console, no analytics, no idea which pages bring enquiries. You can't fix what you can't see, and worse, you can't tell whether anyone you're paying is delivering. Measurement comes before everything else in SEO.