What was your SEO mistake when you first started out?

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james.johna

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I guess everyone must have committed at least one wrong step when learning about SEO.
What is the mistake you committed in the beginning which either wasted your time or even money? It would be interesting to hear some practical experience from people who have done this for long.
 
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Thinking that all of the tiny stuff like <h1>, <h2> etc really matters to the point where spending weeks on it mattered. It doesn't, get it 80% right then immediately move onto link building.
 
james.johna said:
I guess everyone must have committed at least one wrong step when learning about SEO.
What is the mistake you committed in the beginning which either wasted your time or even money? It would be interesting to hear some practical experience from people who have done this for long.
Click to expand...
this is becuz I wasted a lot of time in looking for tools nd techniques rather than performing tests. I came to learn about SEO only after creating websites.
 
My biggest mistake was expecting quick results. But it takes time, and i learned that the hard way.
 
I spent money on cheap backlink packages that actually hurt my site. You should avoid quick link building schemes and focus on earning real mentions instead.
 
SolarNoodle said:
I spent money on cheap backlink packages that actually hurt my site. You should avoid quick link building schemes and focus on earning real mentions instead.
Click to expand...
Same here. I also did not give value to good backlink packages. Also, I was exprementing with lot of blogs. I learned it hard way when I became short of funds in few months.
 
When I started blogging, I was not even doing any seo and still sites used to rank giving me lots of income. But I have realized over the years that SEO is becoming very hard day by day. You should be flexible to new changes in google algo ans do everything to remain updated about above.
 
My biggest mistake was focusing too much on rankings and forgetting that traffic only matters when it brings the right audience.
 
My biggest mistake was focusing only on keywords and ignoring search intent. Later I learned that understanding what users want is more important.
 
I have started seo in 2022 and was only working on backlinks for 1 year. After that i switched the company and come to know that there are other things also. Which are more important than backlinks.
 
The mistake I made was changing strategy too often. SEO rewards patience, but I kept restarting instead of improving.
 
The mistake I made was building links without checking quality. Now I focus more on relevance instead of just getting more backlinks.
 
In the beginning I chased high volume keywords without checking competition. Many hours were wasted on keywords that were almost impossible to rank.
 
james.johna said:
I guess everyone must have committed at least one wrong step when learning about SEO.
What is the mistake you committed in the beginning which either wasted your time or even money? It would be interesting to hear some practical experience from people who have done this for long.
Click to expand...
My biggest mistake at the start was focusing too much on backlinks before checking search intent, content quality, and technical issues. I spent time building links to pages that were not properly optimized or indexed. Now I check crawlability, internal linking, page quality, and keyword intent before starting any link-building campaign.
 
Early on, I burned a bunch of money buying cheap PBN link packages, thinking volume was the secret to gaming Google.

It took getting hit by a penalty and spending months disavowing garbage to realize that five solid, relevant links beat ten thousand automated backlinks every single time.
 
I think trying to learn everything at once is a common mistake Focusing on the basics first makes the process much easier
 
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