Many people believe that search engine optimization is part of the later stages of an online business. However, it is not the ideal approach if you want to get it right the first time. For that, it is best to get an SEO consultant on board during the development process. Developers can leverage the insights of SEO experts to create websites that are ideal from the very beginning.
Hence, several businesses opt to work with digital marketing companies from the very beginning, helping them create the appropriate branding plan and starting the development process after complete ideation.
In this post, we will be covering some common technical SEO issues and how to solve them.
5 Common Technical SEO Issues & How to Solve Them by Digital Marketing Company USA
When it comes to search engine optimization, players like Google consider an array of factors while deciding upon the positioning of websites in search engine result pages. To remove all issues that can hinder the growth of your website, you can either start by having an SEO expert on board during the development process or resolve these problems as they arrive.
In this post, we will be covering some of the common Technical SEO errors and how to solve them.
Mobile Usability Errors
Problem:
Many a times, businesses make their websites the perfect fit for a desktop, however, neglect its responsiveness on other screens like mobile. Considering that one of Google’s latest updates makes it mandatory for websites to be available on mobile, it is a major problem that businesses should solve without wasting any time.
Solution:
Google’s mobile-first indexing has made it mandatory for businesses to first check if their website is mobile compatible. You can rely on mobile usability reports in Google search console or manual efforts to determine mobile usability of your website.
Once you have the report of mobile user errors, you can start to fix them before they have an impact on your ranking. To make a mobile friendly website, you can choose from three different configurations, namely responsive design, dynamic serving, and separate URLs.
No HTML Base
Problem:
For most part, organizations use content management system to manage their website, instead of other methods. The issue with these platforms is that they lack HTML base.
How does that impact the website?
Well, it means that if the JavaScript is turned off, the page becomes empty. Then, search engines like Google cannot pick up the page. This will result in all efforts of SEO service providers to go to waste.
Solution:
You can avoid turning off JavaScript or ensure that all the website pages have an HTML base.
Indexation Errors
Problem:
Indexation is among the most common technical issues related to SEO. These issues do not allow for proper crawling or indexing of web pages. For a page to be indexable, it should have:
- Crawlability: Accessible to search engine crawlers
- No Noindex Tag: Pages should not have a “noindex” tag as this tag tells search engines to not include the page in their indexes.
- Canonicalization: In the instances of duplicate content, pages should have canonical tags that indicate the main version of the content.
Solution:
To identify indexation issues, first conduct a site search on Google by going to the search bar and typing “site:example.com” or you can use tools like Ahref, Semrush, and others.
Then you can find the technical issues that are leading to these pages not being indexed by going to search console, and navigating to “indexed pages” and then to “reason” for it not being indexed.
Robot.txt
Problem:
Robot.txt files are responsible for telling search engines not to crawl certain pages. Developers can accidentally block important pages from indexing with robots.txt files, and that can hurt SEO.
Here is how a disallow statement looks: User-agent: * Disallow: /private?
These can sometimes be unintentional, but it is an easily solvable problem.
Solution:
Go to Google search bar and type site:example.com/robot.txt
If you do find your website pages to be not ranking, go to the robot.txt file, find links that are private, and remove all links that you would like to see on the result pages.
Slow Page Speed
Problem:
Page speed includes how quickly your webpages loads once the user clicks on them. It is among the ranking factors of Google, and hence have a huge say in overall website visibility.
How to Check the Page Speed?
To check the response time of your web pages, go to Page Speed and enter the relevant website in the URL section. The performance section will give you an overview of the page load time. Here, you will get all the details, including first contentful paint (FCP), largest contentful paint (LCP), total blocking time (TBT), cumulative layout shift (CLS), and speed index (SI)
Solution:
To fix speed issues, you can compress images on the website, move to a different hosting service, minimize files or code through minification, or enable browser cache.
Multiple Domain Versions
Problem:
Multiple domain versions include the circumstances where your website has duplicates of a particular URL. For example:
Viewers might not care about their intricacies, but Google does. This can dilute the overall link equity and that can result in poor ranking.
Solution:
Go to Google and type “site:example.com” with your domain name. Go through the results to identify inconsistencies or multiple versions of website URLs. You can then use 301 redirects to lead all the links to your preferred version.
Collaboration – The Pathway to Success
As people working on particular projects, it is both disheartening and demotivating to keep reworking on the same thing over and over again. Avoid it by keeping these common technical SEO issues in mind and preparing for them well in advance. You can always collaborate with others int he field to ensure that you have the right insights to ensure perfect results in the first round.
