12 things that ruin the SEO of your corporate website (and how to fix them)
Most corporate websites lose traffic to basic technical SEO mistakes. Here are the 12 most common ones and how to detect them in 5 minutes.
We have been auditing corporate websites for a while and the mistakes we see are surprisingly repetitive. We are not talking about advanced SEO: we are talking about basic mistakes any site should avoid and most have been dragging along since launch.
This article is not theory. These are the 12 errors we detect over and over in the free audit we offer at Arbenia. If your site has not been getting organic traffic for a while, you almost certainly have at least five of these.
1. Duplicated or empty title tags
The <title> is the strongest SEO signal a page has. When several pages share the same title (or, worse, leave it empty), Google does not know which one to rank and usually does not rank any of them.
In the audit: if you see "needs_improvement" in the basic SEO category, this is usually where it starts.
Fix: each page must have a unique title of 50-60 characters with the main keyword at the start.
2. Missing or auto-generated meta descriptions
Meta descriptions do not rank, but they decide whether people click. If you leave them empty, Google makes up a snippet that rarely sells your offer.
3. URLs with no structure or canonical
URLs like /?p=123 or /contact-page-v2 are red flags. Worse: the same page accessible at two different URLs (/contact and /contact/) without a canonical declaring which one is right.
4. Images without alt attribute
Double loss: accessibility and SEO. Google indexes images by their alt. If you have 30 images on your home without describing them, you are leaving 30 opportunities on the table.
5. Disordered headings
One h1 per page. Just one. Do not start the hierarchy at h3 because "it looks better". The bot reads the page as an index: if there is no clear index, it does not understand what it is about.
6. Load time above 3 seconds
Every second of load reduces conversion by 7%. And Google actively penalises: Core Web Vitals have been a ranking signal since 2021.
The three most common causes:
- Heavy images served unoptimised (4 MB PNGs in sliders)
- WordPress plugins loading scripts on every page even when not used
- Cheap shared hosting with no cache or CDN
7. No SSL or misconfigured SSL
An expired SSL certificate or with mixed content (HTTP inside HTTPS) triggers Chrome warnings. Users flee and Google penalises.
8. No sitemap.xml or robots.txt
The sitemap tells Google which pages to index. Without it, Google finds your site via external links. The robots.txt regulates what NOT to index (admin, carts, etc.).
9. SPF, DKIM and DMARC not configured
This does not affect site ranking, but it affects your email reputation. If you send mail from info@yourdomain.com and the DNS records are wrong, you end up in spam and clients think you do not reply.
10. No structured data (schema.org)
Structured data is what lets Google show your site with stars, FAQ accordions or company info in the side panel. Without it, you are just another result.
At minimum you need: Organization, LocalBusiness (if you have a physical location), FAQPage for your frequently asked questions.
11. Duplicated content between language versions
If you have ES and EN but do not declare hreflang, Google penalises you for duplicate content instead of serving the right version to each user.
12. No Google Search Console connected
The most absurd: not having Google free tool that tells you what your users search, what errors you have and when something new gets indexed.
How to know how many of these you have right now
We built a free auditor that checks these 12 errors in 30 seconds. No signup, no card. You have it at arbenia.com/auditoria-gratis.
If you see more than five red findings, do not invest in advertising before fixing them: you would be watering a leaky bucket.