How to Identify and Fix the Top 10 Technical SEO Issues on Your Website
Having a website launched alone is not enough to make it attract traffic and generate conversions for your business. You need to regularly check it for any bugs or technical SEO problems and fix them as and when they emerge to keep it full-fledged. In this article, let us take a dip into the common technical issues on your website. Also, know how to identify them and how to fix them. However, before we do that, let me give you some insights about technical SEO problems.
What Is A Technical SEO Issue?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It consists of a set of processes intended to drive traffic to a website. There are different types of SEO activities – technical SEO, on-page SEO, content SEO, and off-page SEO. Technical SEO deals with the technical steps initiated to boost the visibility of a website through crawling, indexing, and more. Technical SEO issue is an umbrella term used to denote any website technical issues that pop up in technical search engine optimization.
Top Ten Technical SEO Issues and Fixes
Here is a list of the top ten most frequently reported technical SEO issues and their fixes.
1 Slow page speed
Ensuring that your website pages load fast is the most important thing today in search engine optimization. People are busy and they do not want to waste time waiting for your page to load. If the page takes ages to load, you must fix it instantly.
How to detect it?
Google page speed insight is a free and most effective tool to identify this particular website technical issue.
Fix
Optimize images
Optimize website compression
Improve browser caching
Improve server response time
2 Content duplication
When your website features similar content, search engines are led to identify them as duplicates. As a result, the actual content that you intend to be displayed in search results fails to be displayed.
How to detect it?
Check whether your website has the same content in different languages.
Check whether the same content is repeated across multiple pages.
Fix
Implement rel=canonical
Customize content for each language if you are providing content in multiple languages.
Implement hreflang tags correctly
3 Broken links
A broken link is one of the major reasons why a website fails to be ranked. Search Engine Optimization is done perfectly and at maximum capacity when your website has enough healthy inbound and outbound links. When any of these links get broken, it will begin to affect the overall experience.
How to detect it?
You can make use of any reliable backlink tools to identify broken links.
Fix
Conduct website audits on a regular basis. For each broken link detected, replace them with a healthy link.
4 Not having HTTPS Security
If your website does not have HTTPS security, the users who visit it will receive a ‘Not Secure’ warning. Given the high scale of cybersecurity issues out there today, no users will dare to take a chance by visiting a website that has a ‘Not secure’ warning.
How to detect it?
To detect this, simply type your domain name into Google Chrome. If you see the “secure” message (pictured below), your site is secure.
Fix
If your website host does not offer you an SSL certificate, buy SSL certificate from trusted ssl provider and install it on your website. The issue should go away right away.
5 Incorrect Site Indexation
If your website does not appear in the search result even when you search by your brand name, be confirmed that there is an issue with your site indexation. Search engines like Google and Bing list your web pages on the search results based on the indexing you have enabled.
How to detect it?
Load Google on your web browser and on the search field, enter “site: yoursitename.com”, it would let you know whether your web pages are indexed and if so, how many of them are indexed.
Fix
Add URLs of all your web pages to Google via Google Search Console.
6 Not having Alt Tags
Every image that you add to your website must have Alt Tags for increased SEO visibility. Images without Alt tags will literally fail to drive SEO.
How to identify it?
Running a comprehensive site audit can fetch you details about the images that are lacking Alt Tags.
Fix
After getting a list of images without Alt Tags through site audit, add Alt Tag to each image one by one. Thereafter, make it a point to add Alt Tag to every new image that is being added.
7 Not optimized for mobile devices
Today, mobile device users account for more than half of internet users. It means your website is more likely to be viewed on a smartphone or tablet rather than a traditional desktop or laptop. It means you need to optimize your website for mobile devices too.
How to identify it?
Use Google URL Inspection Tool to find out whether your website has been optimized for mobile.
Fix
Make sure that you have a dedicated and equivalent mobile site.
Ensure that proper hreflang links and codes are implemented for your mobile site web pages.
Update the equivalent Meta tag and meta description for the mobile site.
8 Incorrect Metadata
In search engine optimization, both Meta description and Meta title have a significant role to play. People decide to visit a website based on the impression they get from the Meta title and Meta description. If the metadata does not clearly tell the visitor what to expect on the site, it means the metadata you are using is incorrect.
How to identify it?
Search for one of your web pages on Google and see how it is listed. Check whether the blue-coloured title above the URL is fully displayed and tells what the page is about. Similarly, check whether the description below that is fully displayed in the search result.
Fix
Write a Meta title between the lengths of 50 to 60 characters.
Write a Meta description between 150 and 160 words.
Ensure that the primary keyword of the page is contained in the meta title and description.
9 Multiple Homepage URLs
It is usual for websites to have different home page versions such as www.domain.com, domain.com, https://www.domain.com/, and http://www.domain.com/. As a result, your website’s traffic and visibility are shared across all these versions, which significantly affects your site’s ranking.
How to identify it?
Use any free online tools to identify how many home page versions your website has.
Fix
If your website has multiple home page versions, use the canonical tag to specify one home page URL as original and redirect the rest of the URLs to it.
10 Unfriendly Navigations
Does your website have a homepage that clearly shows where to find specific information? If not, it is a clear sign that your website navigation is poor or unfriendly. The navigation options are one of the key factors that keep visitors stuck to a website. In addition, certainly, how attracted a visitor is to your website determines how SEO-friendly your website is. You cannot improve the latter without addressing the former issue.
How to identify it?
Go to your website’s home page and see if it enables the reader to navigate to whatever page he or she wants to in a single click. Also, check whether the visitor can return to the home page from whatever page he or she is on with a single click.
Fix
Sit with your website designer/developer and suggest the changes you want or ask them to improve the navigation.
Conclusion
We hope that this list of top ten technical issues on your website, the procedure to identify them, and their fixes would have helped you figure out where your website lags in SEO ranking. Besides helping your website achieve a high SERP (Search Engine Results Page) visibility, identifying these website technical issues and fixing them would have a significant impact on the overall user experience of your targeted audience.