7 SEO Problems and How to Fix Them Fast (in 2025)

Source : 7 SEO Problems and How to Fix Them Fast (in 2025)
Published On : June 27, 2025 at 01:52PM
By : Ankit Singla

We get it — nobody gets Search Engine Optimization (SEO) right the first time. 

What you need is to recognize, acknowledge, and learn from your mistakes. If you can do all three, every outcome is progress — bringing you closer and closer to your SEO goals. 

In this post, we’ll take a look at seven common SEO mistakes and how to fix them quickly with the best online visibility management platform on the web: Semrush.

Let’s get started.

1. You’re Targeting the Wrong Keywords 

Whether you like it or not, great content means nothing if nobody is searching for it. 

That’s why keyword research is always the first step in planning an SEO campaign. It ensures you’re creating content that people actually search for — driving traffic and increasing the profitability of your website. 

Why It Matters

Apart from targeting search terms that generate traffic, effective keyword research also ensures you’re not positioning yourself against big competitors with deep pockets. 

Remember, an uphill battle in SEO typically means spending thousands of dollars per month and waiting several months before you see noticeable results. But if you pick your target keywords right, you can avoid high-competition keywords and improve your SEO rankings within a reasonable timeframe. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: Unleashing Keyword Magic Tool 

Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is, without a doubt, my favorite keyword research tool on the web. 

With the right tactics, it can help you find keywords that:

Have low-medium competition → Analyze Keyword Difficulty (KD) to find viable keyword ideas 

Target specific user intent → Filter keywords based on user intent (e.g., informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional)

Build a keyword list that gets traffic → Create a pool of target keywords that actually get searched

Keyword Magic Tool features a straightforward interface that lets you expand a seed keyword into thousands of potential keyword ideas. 

Just enter your seed keyword, tweak your location settings, and enter your domain (optional) to find juicy keyword opportunities to fuel your SEO. 

Within seconds, Keyword Magic Tool will generate a massive list of relevant keyword ideas along with useful metrics like KD, monthly search volume, Cost Per Click (CPC), and user intent categorization. 

Pro Tip: Use filters to find feasible, long-tail keywords (less than 49 KD). You can also sieve out keywords with “commercial” or “transactional” intent to attract users with purchase intent. 

2. Your Website Has SEO Issues You Don’t Know About

Even seasoned SEO experts still discover issues with their campaigns — if they decide to look deeper. 

To succeed in SEO, you need a thorough approach to technical or on-page optimization. And here’s why:

Why It Matters

Technical SEO improves the crawlability and indexability of your website. These components affect how effectively search engine bots or “crawlers” can evaluate your content’s rank-worthiness.

Without implementing a solid technical SEO framework, these crawlers may discover errors that would give you low rankings or worse — not index your pages at all. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: Running Comprehensive Site Audits 

With the Site Audit tool, Semrush provides a clear and exhaustive overview of all technical issues that affect SEO performance. 

Keep in mind that site audits (not just with Semrush) generally take time, depending on the size of your website.

Once the audit is completed, the report reveals crucial insights like errors, warnings, and site performance ratings. 

Semrush also highlights the top technical SEO issues that demand your immediate attention. Just click ‘Why and how to fix it’ for more actionable recommendations.

Pro Tip: Focus on the errors list to find high-priority fixes that can elevate your SEO performance quickly. 

3. You Lost Rankings and You Don’t Know Why

Whether you like it or not, SEO is an ongoing process. 

Lose focus once, and you might end up losing the rankings you fought so hard for. 

Why It Matters

Remember, your competitors are probably working day and night to overtake you in search results. 

Not paying close attention to your keyword rankings is like leaving a window of opportunity open for them to outrank your website. This, in turn, means losing monthly traffic and potential customers as well as their loyalty. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: Staying On Top of Your Keyword Positions

With its all-in-one SEO Toolkit, Semrush will help you stay on top of your keyword rankings with its Position Tracking tool. 

Similar to Site Audit, you can access this tool directly from your SEO Dashboard.

Using the Position Tracking report, you’ll be able to uncover a ton of valuable insights, like:

• Visibility Index → Your actual potential traffic based on your keyword positions and their corresponding calculated Click-Through Rate (CTR). 
• Rankings Distribution → An analysis of your SEO rankings brackets from position #1 all the way to #100. 
• Keyword Impact → Keywords that contributed to a positive or negative change in your overall visibility. 
• Top Keywords and Pages → Your top keywords and content that bring the most traffic to your website.

Pro Tip: Add your top five competitors to quickly identify who’s a threat to your rankings, analyze their strategies, and keep them at bay. 

4. Your Blog Posts are Competing With Each Other

A lot of website owners overlook the problem of “keyword cannibalization,” which is when two (or more) of your pages compete for the same keywords. 

This ends up confusing Google on which page deserves higher rankings — diminishing the SEO potential of all of them. 

Why It Matters

We all know that optimizing for specific keywords takes a lot of time and budget. 

If your pages are cannibalizing each other for the same keywords, you’re not just preventing each post from attaining its maximum rankings potential. You’re also effectively wasting all your keyword optimization efforts, which could’ve been used on other target keywords. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: Detect Cannibalization and Merge

The obvious solution to keyword cannibalization is to either combine the identical posts or completely repurpose some of them for a different target keyword. 

Regardless, it’s crucial to identify where keyword cannibalization is taking place. And that’s where Semrush can help. 

In the Position Tracking report, switch to the ‘Cannibalization’ tab for a detailed overview of your website’s “cannibalization health.” 

You can then pinpoint where the cannibalization is occurring on your website — be it on a page-level or keyword-level. 

Pro Tip: Conduct content research with topic clusters in mind — that is, linking together a “pillar” page about the main topic and more detailed pages for subtopics. For existing cannibalization, consider repurposing content into another format (i.e., infographics) or merging it with a post about another subtopic.

5. Your Content is Thin or Weak

Here’s the thing about SEO: Success is and always will be dependent on content quality. 

If you’ve been pumping out dozens of articles for weeks without any meaningful progress, it’s time for you to take a step back and shift your focus to quality — not quantity. 

Why It Matters

Over the years, Google has consistently rolled out algorithm updates that rewarded content that offered quality as well as E-E-A-T (short for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). 

Lacking in both quality and E-E-A-T causes your content to be overshadowed by hundreds — if not thousands — of competitors that offer better content. Not to mention that your target audience may have a negative impression of your brand if you publish poorly written posts. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: The New and Improved Content Toolkit

In case you didn’t know, Semrush recently updated its platform to implement the “Toolkit” logic. 

With the Semrush Content Toolkit, you have everything you need to create high-ranking, top-quality content. 

The SEO Writing Assistant, for example, conducts a real-time analysis of your draft and provides actionable suggestions to improve quality. 

To help you address these issues, take advantage of Semrush’s built-in generative AI for the following tasks:

• Rephraser — Instantly create a better and more SEO-friendly version of your text. 
• Compose — Reignite your writing mood by having AI generate a few sentences or paragraphs based on your prompts. 
• Ask AI — Stop switching between Google and your text editor by simply asking Semrush’s AI your content research questions. 

Pro Tip: When using the SEO Writing Assistant, always aim for a green score before aiming to publish your post. This will give your content the best chance to perform well and eventually outrank high-ranking competitors. 

6. Your Internal Linking is Weak

Internal linking is something that should happen naturally, especially if your website focuses on a specific set of topics and subtopics. 

Unfortunately, there are plenty of bloggers, marketers, and website owners who take on SEO content writing without first planning an effective internal link structure. 

Why It Matters

Internal links are crucial because they allow search engine crawlers to discover and index more of your website’s content.

For example, if there are no links pointing to a specific page, it’s considered “orphaned” and pretty much unreachable to crawlers — thus preventing it from gaining rankings. 

At the same time, internal links help readers find content that’s relevant to their journey. If you use internal links right, you can keep your audience deeply engaged longer, earn their trust faster, and push them to a purchase decision more reliably.

Quick Fix with Semrush: Inspecting the Internal Linking Report

If you ran an SEO audit, you’ve already completed the first step.

Take note that the Site Audit report includes an analysis of your website’s internal link profile. 

Under the “Thematic Reports” section, click ‘View details’ under “Internal Linking” to start your analysis. 

Under “Internal Link Issues,” you’ll find a list of opportunities to optimize your website’s internal link structure. The issues should include things like broken internal links, orphaned sitemap pages, pages with only one internal link, and more. 

Pro Tip: Try to identify your high-traffic pages and aim to naturally include contextual internal links to important pages (e.g., product pages, lead magnets, and offer pages). 

7. Your Competitors Are Outranking You (and You Don’t Know Why)

Finally, there’s no worse problem in SEO than competitors consistently outranking you across multiple keywords. 

Regardless of niche, there are bound to be competitors who seem to do better than you. And, if you’re serious about SEO, it’s in your best interest to find out why that is. 

Why It Matters

Remember, you can’t win at SEO if you’re afraid to compete. 

Chances are competitors also look into your website’s performance — identifying weaknesses, learning your strengths, and using them against you. 

The good news is, you can also play (and win) at their game, especially with a tool like Semrush by your side. 

Quick Fix with Semrush: Conducting Gap Analysis

Semrush’s gap analysis tools — namely Keyword Gap and Backlink Gap — are designed to let you skip the intense number crunching and jump straight to opportunities to get ahead of the competition. 

Using the Keyword Gap analysis tool, simply enter your domain along with that of up to four competitors. Click ‘Compare’ and let Semrush work its magic.

In the Keyword Gap report, you can instantly scoop up keywords that are missing from your portfolio. 

You’ll also find a bunch of lucrative keyword ideas under these categories: 

• Weak → Keywords that you have the lowest rankings out of the entered domains. 
• Untapped → Missed keywords opportunities that only at least one other competitor ranks for. 
• Unique → Keywords that only you rank for (and should plan to keep your advantage). 

Moving over to the Backlink Gap report, the main idea is the same: Comparing your performance for specific backlink sources with the competitors you’ve entered. 

The categorizations of backlink sources are also the same with the Keyword Gap report. You’ll find keywords that are missing from your strategy, giving you the lowest rankings, unique to your domain, and so on.

Pro Tip: Whether you’re optimizing for missing/weak keywords or backlink sources, always aim to create content that clearly outperforms competitors in terms of quality. 

Ready to Fix Your SEO? 

With Semrush and a little bit of guidance, every SEO problem is fixable if you put in the work. 

Keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing battle that pays dividends in the long run. What you need to do is take action now, set your goals straight, and be prepared to work as hard as necessary to gain the upper hand.

Start your 14-day free Semrush trial here!

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