SEO is a technical term used to enhance online presence and visibility. Startups are increasingly focusing on the SEO aspect to increase their organic reach, but there are some SEO mistakes that startups should avoid.
Everyone wants to appear on the first page of Google, whether they’re a startup or a large company, and developing an SEO strategy is no longer optional, but essential.
However, many startups are hindering their success by making certain SEO mistakes they should avoid.
Overall, SEO has become quite slow these days due to intense competition. It can take months to surpass competitors, but you know that a consistent SEO plan will help you achieve better reach.
If you own a startup or small-scale business, I recommend that you continue working on SEO, but you should definitely be aware of the SEO mistakes that startups should avoid in 2025.
SEO Mistakes That Startups Should Avoid
1. Selecting the Wrong Keywords To Rank
75% of the game depends on keywords, which need to be added in the right places, whether we’re talking about blogs, webpages, forums, or communities.
If you want to optimize your blog for organic reach, you need to choose keywords wisely, whether they’re focus keywords, primary keywords, secondary keywords, or LSI keywords.
For example, if you’re targeting an AI product, most people choose the main keyword “product,” but instead, they should choose “AI product” or “AI customized product.”
Choosing high-volume keywords will help you drive conversions and target users.
Without the right keywords, your content won’t appear in targeted search results.
However, it’s advisable not to use too many keywords, as search engines will be confused about which ones to rank and which ones not.
Choosing the wrong keywords is one of the top SEO mistakes startups should avoid.
2. Not Managing the Site Speed of the Website
We’re in 2025, and people can’t wait for anything; they want instant results while browsing.
If someone is surfing the internet and opens a website, and if that page takes too long to load, they’ll naturally turn back and go to the next one.
Because waiting becomes very frustrating, and that’s natural for all of us.
The same applies to your website for your clients or users, and it will lead to a poor user experience.
Managing site speed falls into the technical aspect of SEO, and not managing it is a foolish mistake that can have a significant impact.
By using Google SiteSpeed Insights, you’ll be able to learn about and manage your website.
3. Use of Wrong Metadata and Not Managing Content Structure
Don’t ever think that SEO is just a part of a website; it’s the entire base for your organic reach.
One of the other SEO mistakes startups should avoid is optimization for meta tags.
The major thing you must do on your webpage is manage keywords, but you also have to manage the metadata of your website with which search engines use to give you a rank.
Even the meta descriptions work as your business opportunity where you can persuade potential buyers and attract an audience.
Not creating the digital content production and having default, duplicate, or non-optimized meta descriptions are truly the biggest SEO mistakes.
Also Read: How to Rank Blogs #1 on Google? – Get Tips
It is advisable to manage the meta title length to around 60 characters with the focus keyphrase added into it, and for the meta description, it must be around 160 characters.
Page title must be an H1 that clearly describes the information to target the visitors and search engines alike.
4. Not optimized for Mobile or AMP Optimization
Over 70% of people conduct research on mobile devices, which are more suitable for them. Having a mobile-friendly website is crucial, as Google heavily considers this when determining how high to rank your website.
In 2018, Google introduced mobile-first indexing, which improves rankings for websites with mobile-friendly versions.
Therefore, you shouldn’t assume that most consumers own mobile devices, especially for online shopping.
The best way to avoid this mistake is to create an AMP-friendly website and then perform QA testing, reviewing every page, clicking every button, and recording how long it takes for your website to reload.
5. No Utilization of Analytics Tools
Google, or any search engine we’re talking about, offers free analytics tools. For example, Google offers Search Console to provide accurate analytics.
Analytics include the keywords our blogs are ranking for, allowing us to determine the impressions, clicks, and position of a specific webpage or blog. It also tells us how many people are visiting from mobile or desktop, and from which locations.
AI Tools For Freelancer – Free No-Code Tools
Not only Search Console, but there are many other free tools available online, such as:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- spyfu
- Ubersuggest
Although these are paid tools, we can use their free versions for a limited time, and if you like them, you can use whichever tool you prefer.
6. Failing to Optimize Images
Many times, when images or images in the content of a blog or webpage fail to load, it causes trouble for users, and they simply move on to another website.
To be honest, slow-loading images also indicate a low blog ranking and directly impact website performance.
To solve this problem, you can compress or resize the images, and this is a really important issue, so don’t ignore it.
You can use online image compressor tools such as:
- JPEG Image Compressor
- PNG File Size Compressor.
7. Overusing and Overstuffing of keywords
Overusing and stuffing a particular keyword will prevent Google from generating references and increasing visibility, and it won’t even index the website.
Furthermore, stuffing content with keywords is one of the major problems in SEO.
Therefore, it’s best to avoid secondary keywords and use the primary keyword correctly.
If you use keyword stuffing, Google’s ranking results will be affected, and you won’t get a special position.
Just be careful when adding keywords and focus on their density, audience value, original solutions, and content interpretation.
You can use SurferSEO to find high-quality keywords with a reasonable volume.
Overusing and stuffing a particular keyword will prevent Google from generating references and increasing visibility, and it won’t even index the website.
Furthermore, stuffing content with keywords is one of the major problems in SEO.
Therefore, it’s best to avoid secondary keywords and use the primary keyword correctly.
If you use keyword stuffing, Google’s ranking results will be affected, and you won’t get a special position.
Just be careful when adding keywords and focus on their density, audience value, original solutions, and content interpretation.
You can use SurferSEO to find high-quality keywords with a reasonable volume.
8. No Technical SEO Management
Another major SEO mistake startups should avoid in 2025 is not managing technical SEO. This directly impacts a website’s SEO performance and visibility.
You’ll need to manage slow websites, broken links, and crawl errors, which can undo all your SEO efforts.
Therefore, you need to fix these issues:
- 404 errors
- Duplicate content
- Missing XML sitemaps or robots.txt issues
- Broken internal/external links
