Search engine optimisation or SEO is one of the essential pillars of visibility online, so if your website is showing signs on poor SEO performance, it can be disastrous for your business. Poor SEO, as most online business owners have discovered can result in extremely poor rankings in search engine results pages, hinder user experience, and turn your business traffic off. In case your website operates on a few technical errors frequently pointed out by most SEO tools, fixing those mistakes can do wonders to draw organic traffic to your site, boost user experience, and help you achieve your business goals. This is a technical-SEO laden article, but bear with me. There are useful tips on how to rectify popular technical SEO issues.
Website Crawlability and Indexability Issues
- Understanding Crawlability and Indexability
Both are SEO basics; if they’re done incorrectly, they might go unnoticed, but their absence will significantly hurts your visibility. One of those basics is crawlability, making sure that your site can be reached and read by the bots that search engines send to crawl the web and build up their index. The other step is making sure that they indexed (marking your document as something they’ve encountered and for a searcher to possibly find). If the crawling of your site is hindered or slowed down, possibly due to poor coding or other problems, then search engines won’t have a chance to see all of your content and will therefore index much less of your site.
Crawlability and indexability can also be negatively impacted by certain common SEO errors: robots.txt files that are blocking search engines from crawling important pages; too much JavaScript; complex site architecture… When you find one of these errors, fix it: auditing your site for crawl errors with a tool such as Google Search Console is critical. Make sure you configure your robots.txt file so that your site’s key areas are easily crawled by these bots; consider reducing your site’s complexity using a simpler architecture.
Content Quality and Relevance
- Significance of High-Quality Content
Great content is the foundation of good SEO. Content that is informative, interesting and useful will drive visitors to your site and get links and social shares, all help with search rankings. But most sites have some content problems, such as thin content, duplicate content and out-of-date information, that can lower search rankings by sending weak signals to search engines – driving visitors away with poor user experience.
First, you should run a content quality audit to locate and prune out the bad or duplicate content and possibly replace it with new, well-researched original content, or relevant content that fully meets the needs and interests of your target audience. Republishing (with a redirect, of course) can also be useful where a piece is outdated and made better and more relevant by setting it live again (another way of breathing life into a dormant site). Ongoing content creation, refreshing and updating can also be a constructive way to keep a site on the radar of search engines.
On-Page SEO Optimization
- Critical On-Page SEO Elements
On-page SEO is concerned with optimising individual web pages by enhancing its ranking potential and earning more relevant traffic from search engines. Key factors in on-page SEO include title tags, meta descriptions, headers and keyword usage. If not planned and executed well, the opportunity to increase search visibility and earn organic traffic is lost. For example, if the title tags or meta descriptions are not written well, they can lead to low click-through rates even if your page ranks well.
Some basic on-page SEO fixes include having a title tag and meta description for each page that accurately describes the content and contains relevant keywords. Using header tags (H1, H2, H3) in a logical structure for your content can enhance the user and search engine experience by better communicating the main topics covered in the page. Also, steer clear of stuffing your site with keywords; if those same keywords fit semantically for the content and subject, then use them, but do so in a way that enhances readability.
Technical SEO Issues
- Identifying and Fixing Technical SEO Problems
Technical SEO is about optimising the technical aspects of a website so that it ranks well in search engines. This includes things like slow website speed, broken links, if the website is mobile responsive or not, or if there are no canonical tags set. Slow loading websites tend to have higher bounce rates, which will impact how many people click on the website in the search results.
For technical SEO, carry out regular site audits using Google PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog and so on; pinpoint issues such as sluggish page load times and address responsiveness by streamlining image files, leveraging browser caching, and minimising CSS and JavaScript files; use mobile-friendly responsive design and conduct site checks across multiple devices; repair links that are broken, and properly implement canonical tags to eliminate duplicate content, and to help search engines understand a site’s organisation or hierarchy.
Backlink Quality and Profile
- Importance of a Strong Backlink Profile
Backlinks are a core component of SEO as they tell search engines that your site is legitimate and authoritative; however, low-quality or spammy backlinks can do the opposite, and can damage your site’s reputation to search engine crawlers. SEO mistakes in this vein include obtaining links from irrelevant or low-quality websites, as well as neglecting to check your backlink profile periodically to remove toxic links.
So, to build a good backlink profile try and get high-quality backlinks from credible, similar-industry sites by doing some careful outreach and, if you share your content and get noticed, that’s even better as it will lead to natural referrer links. Above all, perform backlink audits using Ahrefs of Moz (or a similar-featured tool) and, if you have harmful links, get them disavowed elsewhere. A good backlink profile with the correct types of links will greatly benefit your site performance with the search engines.
User Experience (UX) and SEO
- The Intersection of UX and SEO
User experience (UX) and search engine optimisation (SEO) are so intertwined that poor UX will almost certainly damage your SEO. This is because Google, Bing and other search engines prefer to send users to sites with good UX. Site navigation strategy, mobile friendliness and content accessibility are all often focal points for UX, and thus for SEO as well. Common UX SEO mistakes include difficult to manage site navigation, long load times, and disturbances such as intrusive pop-ups.
To optimise your UX and your SEO at the same time, you can look at the technical aspects of your design, such as webpage loading speed, ease of navigation and optimisation for all devices, in addition to making sure your site is less intrusive – for example, don’t use pop-ups, but instead use slide-ins or banners when it makes sense to get in front of your visitors. The better your user’s experience, the longer they will stay on your website, and the more signals you’ll send to the search engines that your site is high-value and relevant.
Conclusion
There are a few common problems that you need to address if you want to sustain and grow the SEO performance of your site. If you iron out problems with crawlability, content, on-page optimisation, the technical implementation of the site, your backlink profile, and the user experience, you are likely to also improve how well your site performs when it comes to organic search, and the traffic it attracts. This is a work in progress. It is vital to your success to conduct audits and regular checks, to learn more about SEO, and to keep up with developments and changes. Taking care to tackle these SEO mistakes and fix them for the future are the key to ensuring your site stays competitive, instead of simply trying to fix the mistakes in a beleaguered manner when a penalty is slapped on.