How to Fix Common Technical SEO Issues Hurting Your Website
There was a time when a business website was not much more than a fancy virtual business card, offering basic contact information and some limited details about the products or services a business has to offer. This is, quite obviously, no longer the case.
Business websites have become a vital part of any company’s growth strategy. With computers literally in our hands or nearby for most of our waking hours, the ability to communicate with and connect to potential customers has never been more important.
A business website provides credibility, enhances the customer experience, and offers a direct channel for a potential customer to reach your sales team. Having a well built, functional website is paramount to modern business growth and sustainability.
For these reasons, it matters how your website is constructed and optimized. Regardless of how incredible your website is, without its ability to be found when and where it needs to be, you will miss opportunities for business growth. This is where technical SEO comes into play.
All of the effort put into creating a website is useless if technical problems prevent search engines from crawling, indexing, and properly presenting it. This article explores five of the most common technical SEO issues that businesses seem to face and presents solutions to solving the issues so you can move forward with your online business goals, even without the help of a technical SEO agency.
Common Technical SEO Issues and their Solutions
As you can imagine, there are many aspects of technical SEO, all of which can be discovered with a thorough technical SEO audit, whether done on your own or through a technical SEO audit service. It doesn’t have to be a scary or overwhelming thing, however. Here are 5 of the most common technical SEO issues and what you can do to address them so your website can deliver better results.
Page Speed
We live in a time when everyone expects instant gratification. Buffering, once a common toleration, is no longer acceptable. For this reason, websites that load slowly are a frustration that few people are willing to accept. When a webpage loads slowly, people tend to bounce, meaning they leave the site without any meaningful interaction. Bounce rate is a metric that search engines consider when determining which pages to rank. You want as low a bounce rate as possible.
Fortunately, you can improve your page loading speed without having to invest in technical SEO services by using free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix to test your site and identify issues. Be sure to check both the mobile and desktop versions of your site, as both matter. Some of the most common ways to fix page loading issues are by optimizing images, reducing the number of redirects on your site, caching, minifying code, and compressing files. Your hosting may also be to blame, so be sure to invest in quality hosting that is not bogged down by sharing server space with countless other sites
Mobile Responsiveness
Most websites are built to be mobile responsive, meaning that the content automatically adapts to fit the screen on the device from which it is being viewed. This is no longer an optional feature. Depending on your industry, a large percentage of your website visitors will likely be accessing your site from their mobile device, making a mobile responsive site a necessity, as sites that are not designed for mobile are quickly ignored out of frustration.
To ensure your site meets this standard, you can use a testing tool like Google PageSpeed Insights, which shows how well your site performs on mobile devices. There are also other paid tools, and you can also turn to a technical SEO consultant or technical SEO agency to do this work for you.
The simple solution is to first make sure your site is built with a mobile responsive design. This is accomplished by using a mobile-friendly website template or theme, but you can also accomplish this by working with a developer from a high-quality technical SEO agency to implement responsive design features.
Broken Links
One of the most common culprits for poor technical SEO is broken links. Over time, sites evolve, and pages tend to fall out of use. It is a good practice to de-index pages that are no longer relevant, but doing so without first ensuring no other pages link to them can leave broken links that go nowhere. This is not good for your technical SEO, as it not only creates a poor user experience, but also causes issues with search engines attempting to rank pages.
Your first step should be establishing a practice of checking regularly for broken links and, even more proactively, removing any links you know will be impacted when making site changes. To do this, you can either replace the impeding defunct links with replacements that work, or you can add a redirect to another page that you know still exists. A technical SEO expert can assist with this, however, it is likely something you can handle on your own with just a little effort.
Missing SSL
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a digital certificate that shows a site is authentic and secure. This SSL certificate is what allows a site to show HTTPS, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, meaning your site has increased security for data transfer. Most people know that an HTTP site is not secure, and most web browsers will now call this out as HTTPS protects user data and helps to instill trust in your website.
So, what should you do if this security is missing? An SSL certificate is provided through your website’s hosting provider, either at a small cost or for free, depending on your hosting service. You can also use third-party SSL plugins, like Really Simple SSL. If you are still unsure what to do, you can work with a technical SEO agency to put HTTPS security in place for your website.
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are an important part of technical SEO best practices, and they play a significant part in your site’s overall optimization. Meta descriptions are short summaries of what can be found on a specific web page. These descriptions allow both search engines and site visitors to know what they can expect from your page. They are found on SERPs (search engine results pages) and can play a key role in influencing whether a person clicks through to your site.
You can check for missing or non-optimized meta descriptions by looking at your website’s code, or more simply, by using third-party tools like SEO Meta in 1 Click or more complete site audit tools like SEMrush, MOZ, or Ubersuggest. Optimized meta descriptions should be between 145 – 160 characters (not words) and should properly represent the page content. In fact, Ahrefs has found that 40.61% of pages have meta descriptions that get truncated, which means the description is shortened to meet the character limit, hurting SEO. Keep in mind that your meta description should also incorporate your target keyword(s) for the page.
Other Common Technical SEO Issues
While we aren’t going to explore them in this article, there are several other technical SEO aspects to consider. They include the following:
- Duplicate Content – This is content that appears on more than one web page
- Sitemap Issues – Sitemaps help search engines effectively crawl your site
- Image Optimization Issues – Image optimization is about delivering high-quality images in the optimal format, dimension, and resolution
- Robots.txt issues – This is a file that tells search engines how to crawl and index a website
- Missing Image Alt Tags – Alt tags describe an image or what the image is representing, and should include keywords
- Canonical Issues – This can happen when a website has more than one URL that displays similar or identical content
- Missing Structured Data Markup – This is code added to a page’s HTML to help search engines understand its content
Why is technical SEO important? Beyond the user experience, technical SEO directly impacts how your website performs in search results. As you can see, there is a lot that goes into technical SEO, and ensuring it is up to par is key for an effective website.
Technical SEO Services
We hope this article has shown how technical SEO can be handled in-house, however, you may find some of this to be more complex than desired. If that turns out to be the case, then know that there are technical SEO experts readily available to help overcome these issues on your behalf.
A professional technical SEO service should include all of the things we’ve listed and more. A trustworthy technical SEO agency will not only resolve the issues but also educate and inform you on how to prevent future issues from popping up.
Start with a technical SEO audit, and be sure to run it again regularly to ensure best practices are being met. If you are unsure, then reach out to our team of technical SEO experts to get your site back on track. Reach out for SMB SEO services, and we will make sure you are poised for success!
FAQs
What are sitemaps, and why are they important for technical SEO?
A sitemap is a file that instructs search engines on where to find each of your website's key pages. It functions similarly to a website roadmap. Having a sitemap will enhance your SEO and help search engines index your website more efficiently.
How do I optimize images for technical SEO?
There are several things you can do to make images better for SEO, such as:
- Using filenames and alt tags that are clear: Use keywords that are important in the names of your files and the alt tags.
- Getting pictures smaller: Large images may cause your website to load more slowly. One way to reduce the size of your pictures without losing quality is to use a tool like TinyPNG.
- Using the correct picture format: For photos, use JPEG, and for images that need to be see-through, use PNG.
How does robots.txt affect how search engines crawl my website?
A Robots.txt file instructs search engines what pages on your website they should or should not crawl. For example, to stop search engines from crawling irrelevant pages, like admin or login pages, you can use the robots.txt file.
What are structured data and rich snippets, and how can they improve my SEO?
You can offer search engines more details about your site's content by using structured data. Rich snippets are more detailed search results that can contain product prices, reviews, and star ratings. In order to qualify for rich snippets, you will need to implement structured data markup. Rich snippets can increase your click-through rate and make your website stand out in search results. You can learn more in our blog article, The Benefits of Schema Markup.
How can I monitor my website's technical SEO health?
If you don’t want to engage a technical SEO agency, you can monitor your site’s technical health yourself using third-party tools. Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are just a few of the tools available to keep an eye on the technical SEO health of your website.
