As the experts always state, SEO is an ongoing effort that demands timely changes, analysis, and reiteration. However, in our desire to produce better SEO results, sometimes we miss the most obvious issues. Join seobase, as we explore the world of common SEO pitfalls that often get overlooked and learn how to fix SEO issues.
Common SEO Issues to Know About
Now, let's explore common SEO challenges and learn how to fix SEO issues after performing a site audit:
Poor user experience
If your site is hard to navigate, not all buttons are working, and it's not adapted to different screens, you have a poor user experience. Also, excessive pop-ups can be a factor that lowers UX. This can frustrate the user and lower your conversions, penalizing you by Google.
How to fix SEO issues: After performing a site audit, follow the guides of proper UX, maintain website responsiveness, and ensure that pop-ups do not overlay the content and can be quickly rejected.
Toxic backlinks
As we stated before, not all backlinks bring value to your website, and it's essential to identify the ones that need to be removed from your profile. Apart from not getting value, harmful backlinks can signal to Google that you're using black-hat tactics (even if you don't use them). These links can harm your domain authority and drastically lower your ranking.
Read: Toxic Backlinks: How To Identify And Disavow Them Effectively
Duplicate content
Google values original content, and it can drop the ranking of a website if it has a lot of pages with unique URLs but the same content.
This happens mostly in e-commerce when one product is put into multiple categories. These categories create new pages for the same product, and search engines crawl them and see them as duplicates.
Slow site speed
If your website takes a long time to load - that's a bad sign. Search engines consider loading speed a major ranking factor: users tend to bounce off your page if it loads too slowly, so search engines do not see a website as valuable to recommend.
If you need a thorough assessment of your website speed, you can utilize tools like Google PageSpeed Insights.
How to fix SEO issues: To improve your page speed, compress the size of the files. For example, if your content features many images, compress them with tools like TinyPNG.
Keyword stuffing
The majority of SEO tactics revolve around keywords. We're taught to use more relevant keywords to target the right audience and trick the ranking system; however, search engines have become more aware of keyword-stuffing tactics. Nowadays, keyword stifling leads to penalties from Google and poor user experience.
Read: What Is Keyword Stuffing, And Why To Avoid It?
Lack of mobile responsiveness
The majority of the users search from their phones or tablets. Google even implemented mobile-first indexing to assess if the sites are mobile-friendly. So, if your website is not adapted to different screen sizes and a variety of devices, then you're guaranteeing a drop in ranking, organic traffic, and high bounce rates.
How to fix SEO issues: During your site audit, test if your website is mobile-friendly. You can do that Google's Mobile-Friendly test. Later, you can implement recommended UX guidelines to improve your mobile responsiveness.
Missing alt tags
Alt text is a tag placed in the image description - it is also a tool that communicates with search engines by telling the crawlers what the image is about. Alt text is a simple yet effective way to improve your SEO.
Read: Image SEO: Strategies for Optimizing Your Visual Content
Missing meta descriptions
Similarly to alt text, the meta description is a small content excerpt (no longer than 160 characters) that communicates to the audience what the page is about. This excerpt helps to index your page. Besides search engines, users also read meta descriptions to understand what value your page brings them.
However, a lot of times, meta descriptions need to be longer or missing altogether. That's why your meta descriptions, like page content, should always be well-written and optimized with relevant keywords.
Poor crawlability
We've discussed how search engines crawl your website, analyze it, etc. But sometimes, the most significant SEO issue that you have is the fact that crawlers need help to assess your website. This can happen for different reasons but always results from supporting SEO issues such as unindexed pages, link issues, poor site architecture, and redirect loops.
Conclusion
Sometimes, all you need to do is to look at the picture as a whole. Identifying and fixing common SEO issues can be tiring, but when you know where to look, your site audits will become much easier, and issues will be less present.
Learning how to fix SEO issues is crucial for anyone who has to deal with the ongoing maintenance of blogs and other web pages. So, follow this easy guide and improve your SEO health quickly and simply!
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