After continually putting in efforts and resources in SEO and keyword research, it is very infuriating that some issues can still cost you a position on the first page of Google. What would it mean that you still do not show up in SERP for your targeted keywords even when you are trying? The truth is that sometimes it is not that you are not doing enough in SEO, but rather that you are struggling with some technical issues.
Technical SEO is one often overlooked space in the optimization processes, even though it has a critical role to play. Since not more website owners practice technical SEO, it is difficult for them to identify any technical issues that may arise, lucky for you, below is a compilation of some technical issues in SEO, and how you can prevent them:
Duplicate Content
It is surprising that something as simple as Duplicate Content can become very problematic to websites, and significantly deteriorate their search rankings. Duplicate content is material that been repeated within your site, or even without. You would be shocked at the high number of duplicate material there is online. Without paying much detail to the kind of information you share with your audience, it is easy to regenerate content, and hope for better results. This fatal mistake takes away your originality as a site, rendering your web pages non-indexable for ranking. Further, they lower your user experience, and that being a ranking factor, you also sabotage your position on SERP.
The good thing is that technology has provided a solution for virtually anything. This means that with a tool like Copyscape, you can very well identify whether your material can be found anywhere else online, before posting it. Filter through your site also to find any pages that may have accidentally replicated and resulted in this same technical issue.
Broken Links
Broken links are one of the most annoying issues on websites, for both search engines and audiences. For one, search engines repel the sites with broken links because of poor user experience. For audiences, it is very annoying that they waited on a page to load, only to find that has missing information. The error reports increase the bounce rates on your platform and ultimately lower your ranking position on Google. The worst bit is that as you keep generating content, your website broken links become a common place for your site.
The solution to this requires the reinforcement of an SEO tool. With a tool like the Google Search Console, you can find any crawl issues on your website. Further, identify the missing and broken links on your platform, and act on the insights of how you can fix them.
Website speed
If you check here, you realize that among the major issues of proper SEO practice, page speed is paramount. People online are too busy focusing on different things to wait on your web pages to load. Technically, the faster a website is, the better the user experience. The longest time that people are willing to standby for a site to load is 3 seconds. This means that their demands for better services are even higher than 3 seconds. Ideally, even Google sends few Google bots to crawl a site that takes more than 2 seconds to open. That directly translates to lower indexed pages, and that affects your rank position.
To solve this, you can employ the use of a tool Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool is not only easy to use but also, its affiliation to Google makes it convenient for measuring the performance of your website. The good news is that you do not need to worry so much about how to fix this error, because the tools offer actionable insights on how you can solve the technical issue.
Messy URLs
Rarely do website owners consider URLs as part of the website structure, or even consider them for SEO. It is why Messy URLs are a huge problem till date. A URL introduces your site to the world, that is, to search engines and target audience. For one, if you want your site to be memorable, the URL must have structure, and more so, capture the primary keywords. For example, a poor URL is that like, ‘https://www.index.php?p=367594’.
The way around this is to be intentional in editing your URLs before sharing your content. Ensure in part you capture your topic and the primary keywords. You also need to keep it short and easy to type in, for when need be. Further, instead of symbols and spaces, use hyphens to separate words, along with lowercase letters.
