One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen over the years is people over-optimising or optimising for too many keywords on one page.
For example, if you have a health website and a single service page describing all your services together, it’s hard for search engines to rank any of these individual services as the page is not optimised for a single one.
Instead, a better approach is to publish individual service pages per service, and ensure each service page is well optimised for a single target keyword. Something like “chiropractor Sydney,” “physiotherapy Sydney,” and “stretch clinics Sydney” each have their own page.
The second most common mistake is related to misunderstanding search intent.
Keywords can be informational, navigational, transactional, or commercial. If you don’t know what someone is looking for, it’s hard to make your content better.
To see if you have the right intent for a keyword, do a Google search with that keyword and look at the top 10 results. Are the results showing service or product pages? These are commercial and transactional keywords. Are the results showing articles and blogs? There are informational and navigational keywords.