New Orleans SEO Firm Reveals 10 On-Page Mistakes Hurting Google Rankings

Getting organic search traffic right comes down to the details most website owners skip. Big Easy SEO, a New Orleans-based SEO practice, recently published a technical guide breaking down the ten on-page mistakes that most reliably destroy Google rankings, offering both a public how-to resource and an internal agency playbook for practitioners looking to audit and correct client sites.

The guide arrives at a moment when on-page SEO is frequently misunderstood as a checklist task rather than a discipline requiring ongoing attention. What follows draws directly from that framework.

Missing or Poorly Written Title Tags

The title tag remains one of Google's most weighted on-page signals, yet it's routinely left generic, duplicated across pages, or stuffed with keywords in ways that read as spam. A well-crafted title tag communicates both the page's topic and its relevance to a specific searcher intent. Treating it as an afterthought, or leaving a CMS-generated default in place, signals to search engines that the page hasn't been optimized with intent.

Weak or Missing Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions don't directly influence rankings, but they powerfully affect click-through rates from search results pages, which does influence ranking over time. Pages that leave this field blank force Google to auto-generate a snippet, often pulling awkward fragments of body text. Writing a compelling, accurate meta description for every key page is one of the simplest wins available in on-page optimization.

Ignoring Header Tag Hierarchy

H1 through H6 tags create a logical document structure that helps both users and crawlers understand the content architecture of a page. A common mistake is using multiple H1 tags, skipping heading levels entirely, or treating headers as purely stylistic rather than semantic elements. When header structure is broken, Google's ability to parse topical relevance within a long page degrades significantly.

Thin or Duplicate Content

Pages with minimal substantive content, whether short product descriptions, placeholder pages, or near-identical variations targeting slight keyword differences, are a persistent drag on domain authority. Google's helpful content systems have grown increasingly adept at identifying pages that exist to capture search traffic rather than serve genuine informational needs. Every indexed page should justify its existence with original, useful material.

Keyword Stuffing and Unnatural Optimization

Overloading a page with exact-match keyword repetitions is a relic of early SEO practice, but it persists. Modern ranking algorithms penalize text that feels engineered for bots rather than written for humans. The correct approach is to establish topical relevance through natural language, semantic variations, and context rather than raw keyword density.

Slow Page Load Speed

Core Web Vitals have elevated page speed from a nice-to-have into a direct ranking factor. Images that haven't been compressed, unminified JavaScript, excessive render-blocking resources, and bloated third-party scripts all contribute to load delays that cause both ranking drops and user abandonment. Regularly auditing load performance through tools like PageSpeed Insights surfaces these issues before they compound.

Non-Optimized Images

Beyond file size, images frequently go unoptimized in other critical ways: missing alt text, unhelpful file names like "IMG_4032.jpg," and formats that haven't been converted to modern options like WebP. Alt text serves dual purposes, improving accessibility for screen reader users while giving search engines a text-based signal about what the image depicts. Every image on a page is a small, often ignored optimization opportunity.

Poor Internal Linking Structure

Internal links distribute page authority across a site and guide crawlers to important content. A flat site structure where key pages aren't linked from anywhere, or a site that relies entirely on navigation menus without contextual body links, wastes significant ranking potential. Anchor text for internal links should be descriptive and relevant rather than generic phrases like "click here" or "read more."

Not Using Schema Markup

Structured data tells search engines precisely what a page is about, whether it's a product, a recipe, an event, a business, or a how-to guide. Despite its value, schema markup remains underused, particularly among small business sites. Implementing relevant schema not only improves Google's understanding of page content but also unlocks rich result formats in search, including star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and event listings, all of which increase visibility and click-through rates.

Mobile Usability Problems

With mobile-first indexing now the default, Google evaluates a site's ranking primarily based on its mobile version. Text that's too small to read, buttons placed too close together, content wider than the screen, and interstitials that block the main content are all flagged as mobile usability errors in Google Search Console. Sites that haven't been genuinely tested on real mobile devices, rather than just resized in a browser window, frequently discover usability failures that are invisible from a desktop.

The Big Easy SEO guide functions as both a diagnostic framework and a remediation roadmap. Each of the ten issues it identifies represents a compounding problem: left unaddressed, these mistakes don't just limit individual page performance but collectively suppress a site's overall authority and crawl efficiency. For any site serious about organic visibility in 2026, working through this list systematically isn't optional. It's the baseline.