We audited 100 websites: the 10 most common SEO mistakes

Big brands have big SEO teams, so their websites must be perfect, right? We wanted to find out. We ran the homepages of 100 well-known websites (news sites, tech companies, online stores, software brands, travel, education and SEO companies themselves) through our free Website SEO Audit, which runs more than 40 checks on a page's raw HTML.

The short answer: even the biggest sites miss the basics. The good news is that most of these mistakes take minutes to fix on your own site.

How we did it

• The sites: 100 popular homepages from 10 groups: news, consumer tech, software (SaaS), retail, tech media, SEO and marketing companies, travel, entertainment, education and non-profits, and big community platforms.
• The tool: the same free audit anyone can run on Rankbench. It downloads each page's HTML once, like a search engine crawler does on its first visit, and checks indexing, titles and descriptions, headings, content, links, images, social tags, speed and structured data.
• The date: 2 October 2026. Websites change constantly; your results may differ if you test today.

17 of the 100 sites blocked us. They returned "Access denied", "Are you a robot?" or similar pages instead of their homepage. That's common for large news and retail sites with strict bot protection, so we left them out. All figures below are based on the 83 sites we could read. For the content checks we also set aside 6 big web apps that send almost no text until JavaScript runs (more on that below), leaving 77 sites.

The results at a glance

A score of 81 sounds fine, but the average hides a lot of small, fixable problems. These are the ten that came up most often.

The 10 most common mistakes

1. Meta descriptions that get cut off: 45% of sites

Nearly half the homepages had a meta description wider than Google's snippet (about 920 pixels, roughly 155 characters), so Google cuts it short with "…", often right before the most persuasive part. Only 6% had no description at all, so the problem isn't laziness. People write too much.

Fix: keep the key message in the first 120 characters. Check the real pixel width with the Meta Description Generator.

2. Links with no text: 53% of sites

More than half the sites had links with no readable text: icon-only buttons, logo links and image links without alt text. Search engines use anchor text to understand where a link goes, and screen-reader users hear only "link".

Fix: give icon links an aria-label, and give linked images alt text that describes the destination.

3. No H1 heading: 30% of sites

Nearly a third of homepages had no H1 at all in their HTML. The H1 is the page's main headline and a strong hint about its topic. Many designs style a logo or a big slogan as the headline without marking it up as an H1. Another 4% had several H1s.

Fix: mark your main headline as the single <h1>. It can match your brand promise, but it must be there.

4. Very little text on the page: 30% of sites

Almost a third of homepages had under 300 words of main content. A homepage doesn't need to be an essay, but pages made only of images, sliders and buttons give search engines little to understand. That's why so many brands rank for their name and little else.

Fix: add a short, genuinely useful introduction: what you offer, who it's for and why it's different. Even 150–300 well-written words help.

5. Images without width and height: 63% of sites

This was the most common issue overall. When images have no width and height, the browser doesn't know how much space to reserve, so the layout jumps as they load. That's measured as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), one of Google's Core Web Vitals.

Fix: add width and height attributes to images (CSS can still make them responsive). Check the effect with the Core Web Vitals Checker.

6. Heavy HTML: 40% of sites

Four in ten homepages had more than 500 KB of HTML, before counting a single image, script or font. Most of it is inline code, embedded data and repeated menus. Heavy HTML slows the first view, especially on mobile data.

Fix: move inline scripts and data into cached files, trim repeated markup, and minify the HTML.

7. No structured data: 28% of sites

More than a quarter of homepages had no JSON-LD structured data. On the sites that had it, the most common types were Organization (37 sites), WebSite (34), WebPage (25) and BreadcrumbList (11). On the positive side, none of the structured data we found was broken.

Fix: at minimum, add Organization and WebSite markup to your homepage. Test it with the Schema Markup Validator.

8. Missing social share tags: 25% of sites

A quarter of homepages were missing at least one of the Open Graph tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) that control how links look on Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp, and 22% had no X (Twitter) card tag. Without them, a shared link can show a random image or none at all.

Fix: add the three og: tags with a 1200 × 630 image using the Open Graph Generator.

9. Titles that are too short or too long: 38% of sites

24% of homepage titles were very short (under 25 characters, often just the brand name), wasting space that could describe what the company does. Another 14% were too long and get cut off. The typical title was 44 characters.

Fix: use about 50–60 characters: brand plus a clear description of what you offer.

10. Old habits that do nothing: 23% of sites

Almost a quarter of sites still use the meta keywords tag, which Google has ignored since 2009, and which shows competitors exactly which keywords you're targeting. 30% also used vague link text like "learn more" or "click here".

Fix: delete meta keywords. Replace vague link text with words that describe the destination.

Bonus finding: some sites are invisible without JavaScript

Six of the big web apps we tested (well-known social, music and learning platforms) sent almost no text at all in their initial HTML: everything appears only after JavaScript runs. Google can usually render JavaScript, but it takes extra time and resources, and most social networks and AI crawlers don't run JavaScript at all. Huge brands can afford that; a small business usually can't.

If your site is built with React, Vue or a similar framework, make sure important pages are server-rendered or pre-rendered. Our guide to meta tags in React explains the options.

What big sites get right

It wasn't all bad news. Almost every site served pages over HTTPS, had a viewport tag for mobile, declared a language and had a canonical tag (only 8% were missing one). Very few had serious indexing errors: only one homepage told search engines not to index it, and only one robots.txt blocked the page we tested.

In other words, the big technical foundations are usually solid. The everyday details are where points are lost, and those are exactly what a small site can get right.

Check your own site in 30 seconds

Every problem in this study can be found with the same free tool. Run the Website SEO Audit on your homepage and your most important pages, fix the errors first, then work through the warnings. Then check your internal links with the Internal Link Checker.

Methodology note: this study tested one page (the homepage) per site, from raw HTML, on 2 October 2026. Homepages differ from article and product pages, and sites change often, so treat the percentages as a snapshot, not a ranking of who is "good at SEO". We haven't named individual sites' problems; the goal is to show common patterns, not to single anyone out.