SEO Mistakes Small (and BIG) Business Websites Make Most Often

What I keep finding

I’ve been designing and building websites for more than 15 years, and lately I spend a lot of time auditing other people’s sites. The pattern is always the same: the site looks great, and almost nobody touched the SEO.

A typical website made by a marketing agency has no real page titles and no meta descriptions. Sometimes it still has the default pages of the WordPress theme it was built with, sitting there and indexed by Google. The client paid for a website. What they got was a template with their logo on it.

That’s the problem with SEO: it’s the part nobody sees. You can’t tell from looking at the homepage that Google is reading “Home” as your title, or that your menu photos weigh 30 megabytes each. Everything looks fine until you run a crawler.

I’m not writing this to point fingers at anyone. Every example below comes from public audits I published on my blog, and in every case there were good things too. The point is to show you what to look for on your own site.

Even huge brands get it wrong

If you run a small business, you might think this only happens to small sites. It doesn’t. In August 2026 I crawled the Mexican websites of five car brands: 2,506 pages with 12,650 SEO problems between them. I scored each one by problems per page, where a flawless site gets a 10.

These companies have huge budgets. So it’s not a lack of money or knowledge. It’s that nobody is measuring. Technical SEO is invisible until somebody checks it. If it happens to them, it can easily happen to you.

The 10 SEO mistakes I see most often

1. Missing or generic page titles

The title is the blue link people click in Google. When I audited La Postal Teriyaki & Sushi, a restaurant chain with 19 locations in Baja California, the homepage title was “Home | La Postal Teriyaki & Sushi”. No sushi, no teriyaki, no Tijuana. On Honda Mexico’s site, 12 pages had no title at all, and Nissan had 1,260 pages with titles that were too short.

Avoid it: every page needs its own title of 30–60 characters, with what you sell and where, for example “Sushi and teriyaki in Tijuana | La Postal”.

2. No meta descriptions

La Postal had a meta description on 0 of 12 pages. Cafunsa, a steel structures company in Tijuana with 37 years in business, was missing it on 239 of 245 pages. Nissan, on 1,279. Without one, Google writes the text under your link by itself, usually with whatever it grabs from the page.

Avoid it: write a 70–160 character description for every page, as if it were a small ad: what the page offers and why someone should click.

3. No H1 heading

The H1 is the main heading that tells Google what the page is about. La Postal’s homepage didn’t have one. Neither did Cafunsa’s, plus 15 more of its pages. Nissan had 595 pages without an H1.

Avoid it: one H1 per page, saying in plain words what the page is about.

4. Giant, uncompressed images

This is the one that shocks owners the most. La Postal’s menu has 64 photos that add up to 449.6 megabytes. The heaviest one, a beef yakimeshi, weighs 31.25 MB at 6000 × 4000 pixels, and it’s shown in a card about 300 pixels wide. The browser downloads all 31 megabytes and then shrinks the photo twenty times to display it. I generated optimized versions of the whole menu: 2.17 MB in total, 99.5% less, with no visible difference.

Cafunsa had the same problem: photos saved as PNG, some over 1 MB on the homepage, and an average load time of 7 seconds. Not one of its 245 pages loaded in under 5 seconds. Their file names ended in “-min”, as if that alone made them smaller. It doesn’t.

Avoid it: resize photos close to the size they’re displayed at and save them as WebP. If you’re on Linux, here’s how to convert all your images to WebP for free.

5. Template leftovers and demo content

Cafunsa’s site had more than 200 URLs of demo content from its WordPress theme: an online store selling caps, belts and headphones (with a working cart and checkout), blog posts in English about social media, alternative homepages called “Home 03” and “Home 04”, and WordPress’s famous “Hello world!” post. All of it indexed by Google, with Cafunsa’s name on it.

At La Postal, one of the location cards in production still said “Aquí va la dirección de la sucursal” (“Branch address goes here”).

Avoid it: before launch, delete every demo page, product and post from the theme, including the ones that aren’t linked in the menu, and read every page as if you were a customer.

6. Missing or useless alt text

Cafunsa had 1,802 images without alt text. The ones that did have it were often worse: camera file names like “DSC07522 (1)-min”, or the logo’s name used on photos of their projects. Those photos are 37 years of work, and Google Images can’t see any of it. Missing alt text was also one of the four problems all five car brands had in common.

To be fair, La Postal got this one right: all 105 images had real, descriptive alt text. It can be done.

Avoid it: describe each image in a short, natural sentence. Not the file name, not a list of keywords.

7. The wrong language

La Postal’s website is in Spanish, but 11 of its 12 pages told Google they were in English, and two sections were titled “ABOUT US” and “CONTACT US”. It sounds like a detail, but it tells search engines your content is for the wrong audience.

Avoid it: make sure the lang attribute of every page matches its actual language, and translate the theme’s default labels.

8. No canonical URLs, structured data or social previews

La Postal: 0 of 12 pages with a canonical URL, 0 with structured data, 0 with tags for social networks. Honda: all 80 pages without a canonical. Four of the five car brands were missing structured data on most of their pages. Cafunsa had no preview at all when you shared a link on WhatsApp or LinkedIn.

For a restaurant, the lack of structured data means no rich result with its menu, prices or locations. For any business, a link without a preview gets fewer clicks.

Avoid it: canonical URLs on every page, LocalBusiness or Organization structured data, and Open Graph tags with a real image. These are set once in the template, not page by page.

9. A broken mobile experience and broken links

On Cafunsa’s site, the mobile menu opened with dark text on a black background. The links were invisible unless you held your finger on them, so a customer arriving from their phone couldn’t get past the homepage. For me, that was the most urgent problem, because it’s a business problem before it’s an SEO problem. Jeep Mexico had 106 broken pages, the most of the five brands, and Cafunsa had 4 broken links.

Avoid it: test your site on a real phone, not just by shrinking the browser window, and check for broken links regularly.

10. No analytics and no Search Console

Neither La Postal nor Cafunsa had analytics installed or Google Search Console set up. That explains everything above: if nobody measures, nobody notices.

Avoid it: install Google Analytics and Search Console from day one, with you as the owner, not the agency.

Why this keeps happening

In most cases the person who built the site knew how to install a WordPress theme, and not much more. Agencies sell what the client can see: the design, the colors, the slider. SEO is invisible, so it’s the first thing to get skipped when the deadline comes, and nobody comes back for it after launch.

The good news is that none of this requires redesigning anything. Neither La Postal nor Cafunsa needed a new website. They needed the last step that was never done: optimize, clean up and review. Most of these fixes take days, are done once, and many of them are solved in the template for every page at the same time.

Check your own site in minutes with basicseo.net

I built basicseo.net exactly for this. It’s a free tool that crawls your whole website and shows you, page by page, the problems that matter most:

• Pages with missing, duplicate, too short or too long titles.
• Missing, duplicate or badly sized meta descriptions.
• Pages without an H1 or with more than one.
• Images with missing or non-descriptive alt text, including the camera file names I mentioned above.
• Broken links (404s) across the site.

You get a clear list you can export to Excel and hand to whoever manages your website. It’s designed for small business sites, up to about 1,000 pages.

Run it before you hire anyone, and again before you approve the final delivery. It takes a few minutes and you’ll know exactly what you’re paying for. Request free access.

What to demand before you pay for a website

Put this list in your contract or your quote. A professional web developer won’t have any problem with it, and if someone pushes back, that tells you a lot.

1. A unique title and meta description for every page, written for your business, not left as “Home”.
2. One H1 per page.
3. Photos resized and converted to WebP. As a reference, no image on a normal page needs more than a couple hundred kilobytes.
4. Descriptive alt text on every image.
5. All demo content removed: theme pages, sample products, “Hello world!”, placeholder text.
6. The correct language declared on every page, and the theme’s labels translated.
7. Canonical URLs, structured data for your business and social previews (Open Graph) with a real image.
8. The site tested on real phones, including the menu.
9. A sitemap.xml and a robots.txt that doesn’t block Google.
10. Google Analytics and Search Console installed, with you as the owner.
11. No broken links at launch.
12. An SEO report from a crawler as part of the delivery, showing all of the above is done. You can run it yourself with basicseo.net.

And after launch, check your site again every time something changes: new pages, a new theme, a plugin update. SEO isn’t something you do once and forget. If you’re starting from zero, our basic SEO recommendations are a good place to begin.

FAQ

If my website looks good, does it have good SEO?

Not necessarily. Design and SEO are different things. Every site in this article looked professional, and all of them had serious SEO problems you can only see with a crawler or by reading the code.

Do I need to rebuild my website to fix these problems?

Almost never. In the cases I audited, nothing required a redesign. Titles, descriptions, headings, images, demo content and tags can be fixed on the site you already have.

How long does it take to fix them?

Most of these fixes take days and only need to be done once. Many are solved in the template for every page at the same time. Speed usually takes a bit more analysis.

Is basicseo.net really free?

Yes. You request access, and once it’s approved you can crawl your site and export the results to Excel at no cost.

Sources

• El tamaño sí importa: el sushi de La Postal tiene un enorme problema (christianjavan.com)
• SEO, lo que no se ve: el caso de Cafunsa (christianjavan.com)
• 5 grandes marcas de autos con pésimo SEO (christianjavan.com)