Have you ever been in a situation where you have continually been creating keyword-friendly content related to the topic, but you still haven’t seen any improvements in your site’s SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings?
We’ve all been in this situation where our SEO efforts have proven to deliver minimum or no outcome. This is bound to happen when the SEO process is halted after inserting relevant keywords in content pieces.
Many websites suffer the same fate of not getting ranked and the viable problem with this is negligence towards technical SEO.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on providing search engines with a more precise, cleaner path to crawling and indexing pages of your website without encountering any issues.
Technical SEO is not related to making your website’s content SEO-optimized or building links. This means that it is neither associated with on-page optimization nor is it related to off-page optimization; technical SEO aims to bring structure to a website by working on elements like the site’s loading speed, redirects, errors 404s, etc.
This article will focus on listing out similar technical SEO problems that are odd to handle but are commonly encountered by SEO professionals; in addition to this, the article will assist you in strategizing for every single one of those problems to help you effectively overcome them.
So, let’s begin listing them out.
Common technical SEO problems
#1 – Website’s loading and navigation speed
What’s the problem?
Since July 2018 page speed has officially become a factor that influences a website’s ranking. Google calls it ‘The Speed update’, this leading search engine enlisted page speed as one of the major ranking factors to achieve its ultimate goal of helping users find answers to their queries as fast as possible.
If your page takes very long to load, these constraints the GoogleBot from crawling over every page of your web, eventually leading to indexing only a limited number of them.
What’s the solution?
Making a website faster involves numerous elements including code density, extra large images, server placement, etc.. but there’s one solution to all of these problems Google PageSpeed Insights.
Google’s PageSpeed tool’s sole purpose is to make your website load faster. It will not resolve the barriers leading to slow loadings; instead, it will list out the issues that you can fix to improve your website’s speed by simultaneously guiding you through every step of doing so.
There’s a surprise here as well, it not only analyses the desktop version of your website for free, it also does the same for the mobile version. So, in mere seconds you get a detailed account of your slow loading speed barriers and solution.
If you are using WordPress, here is an excellent guide on how to speed up your WordPress website.
Moving on to adhere to the next problem.
#2 – Trouble with broken links
What’s the problem?
When the ratio of broken links on web pages are 3:100 or 4:100 then, that is not a huge problem to worry. Nearly every website has some anchor texts leading to Error 404.
But if the number increases from this ratio, then it becomes a problem that needs resolving ASAP. Too many broken links trouble the visitor, forming a negative opinion on the visitor’s mind. And that’s not all.
When it comes to the GoogleBot crawler, SEO experts are working to make it easier for the crawler to crawl over web pages. But when they lead it to too many broken pages, then it starts crawling a different site thus indexing only a handful of your web pages in the SERP. Which also has a negative influence on the domain authority of the website.
What’s the solution?
Now, here, once again, we seek help from Google itself. Visit Google Search Console, a tool developed by Google to enhance your site’s performance, add your website and in the dashboard visit the ‘Crawl’ section. This particular section will provide you with a detailed account of every link on your site leading visitors to Error 404. You can prepare a strategy to fix those links accordingly.
#3 – Metadata
What’s the problem?
Sometimes you invest significantly in making your website’s content keyword optimized and hoped that the SERP rankings would improve, but it doesn’t. This happens because you forgot about optimizing the other technical elements of your website, which will have an even more powerful effect on improving your SERP rankings and those are.
- Alt Tags – These are alternate texts for images that are displayed to the user if an image does not load on his or her device.
- Title – This refers to the title of a particular web page.
- H1 Tag – This is the main heading of the content on a web page.
- Page URL – Refers to the name of the page in the URL.
What’s the solution?
After you have extracted the keywords, use them freely in your content piece, but when it comes to optimizing your page entirely, you have to choose one primary keyword and use it more than the others. The primary keyword has the most search volume as compared to the other keywords.
You have to organically use that primary keyword in not only your content pieces but also in the alt tags, title tag, h1 tag, and page URL. You have to process this in the coding of the web pages.
#4 – Sitemaps
What’s the problem?
Sitemaps are a source of information related to your website that search engines use to study the nature of your website and it’s business. Errors in sitemaps will deliver the wrong information to the search engine which is the last thing that you’d want.
What’s the solution?
You need to create Sitemaps from a trusted plugin and check and then re-check it to detect and eventually resolve the errors committed in the sitemaps. Google has provided a detailed account of information related to the Sitemaps. It guides your through the tutorial on building and submitting sitemaps, and also how to manage them with the help of Sitemaps Report in the Search Console.
#5 – Mobile friendly website
What’s the problem?
In March 2018, Google rolled out mobile first indexing to help make the internet more user-friendly. The search engine juggernaut claimed that a majority of its users are performing searches through smartphones, so it rolled out mobile first indexing, where website’s which are mobile optimized are ranked first.
Which eventually means that if your site is not mobile optimized, then it won’t be ranked as high as your competitor who has a mobile-friendly website.
What’s the solution?
First things first, you need to check if your website is mobile friendly or not. After performing the mobile-friendly test, the potential improving points that you can work on to make your site mobile friendly is listed out. Plus, Google has presented with the list of parameters that you can work upon to make your site mobile optimized.
#6 – Robots.txt
What’s the problem?
Privacy is important. Google respects that. You can control what pages of your website should the GoogleBot crawl over. You wouldn’t want a guest to come uninvited and stick around for months to come, right? Well, Spider doesn’t want to crawl your website if you haven’t permitted him. If a particular page of your site has Robots.txt, then the Spider won’t crawl it and ultimately, won’t index it. Sometimes, it is present in the code, and you are unaware of it.
What’s the solution?
Here’s a simple solution, put your URL as this ‘yoursite.com/robots.txt’ after you’ve hit enter this window will pop up.
Now, you have a detailed account as to what pages of your website have Robots.txt active. If you have permitted any particular page not to be crawled by the Spider, then you can check it in the same results and remove the barrier.
#7 – Duplicate content
What’s the problem?
Studies have shown that nearly 29% pages on the internet had duplicate content. It is one of the major problems a website can face because if your site has duplicate content, your rankings will suffer a fall and if it somehow sustains it, then remember, the spiders are crawling continually. If they detect duplicates, then your website will get penalized, and it would lose the privilege of getting ranked in every SERP altogether.
What’s the solution?
You can easily fight duplicate content issues only if you know how to pursue achieving that. You can start by checking plagiarism of your content. After doing that you can include canonical links to the source of your page so that Google knows what page needs to be indexed.
You can insert the link through this code:
“<link rel=” canonical” href=”https://yoursite.com.com/category/resource”/>”.
Closing thoughts
Technical SEO is not as complicated as we think it is. Once you understand how to strategize ahead, or rather, once you can identify technical SEO from general SEO, then you can efficiently perform the several tasks you require to improve your SERP rankings.
These seven technical SEO problems that I have mentioned are the major ones that every SEO expert should focus on and improve upon as soon as they can. If these problems are efficiently solved, then you are probably going to see a rise in your SERP rankings.
Sahil is the CEO and Founder of Rankwatch – a platform, which helps companies and brands stay ahead with their SEO efforts in the ever growing internet landscape. Sahil likes making creative products that can help in automation of mundane tasks and he can spend endless nights implementing new technologies and ideas. You can connect with him and the Rankwatch team on Facebook or Twitter.
