Top 10 Technical SEO issues and how to fix them

Technical SEO issues are a known reality for many website owners struggling to maintain their Google rankings without having to invest more money.

SEO is a very important part of digital marketing and cannot be ignored.

A lot of SEO mistakes can be avoided by following some SEO best practices.

If you are looking for an expert who can help you fix your SEO problems, and grow your business online, book a free consultation with our experts now.

The key is to analyze the problems and fix them accordingly. Here is a list of 10 technical SEO issues that you can check and fix today:

1. Duplicate Content
2. Google updates
3. Poor Mobile Experiences
4. Selection of User-friendly images
5. Improper redirects
6. Too many 404 pages
7. Messy URLs
8. Slow Page Speed
9. Local search and structured data markups
10. Shady link building

1. Duplicate content

This is often caused by duplicate opt-in forms on your site or blog post footers that look the same, leading people not to understand how your content differs from another blog post. Duplicate content on a website is a huge issue many websites face.

Most try to solve this issue using standard content management systems like WordPress or Drupal.

“Google’s crawlers must cover a lot of ground,”

Michael Stricker, U.S. marketing director for SEMrush.

They use crawlers and repeated edits to choose one URL as the main URL.  

But this solution is not sustainable if your main URL gets changed and you have no way to update it in all your other URLs.

This problem can be solved using meta tags. In meta tags, you can create a unique link that points directly to one of your URLs as the default version and other URLs with unique links pointing to them if they are different at some point.

A common duplicate content issue occurs when one site has either a URL beginning with “www” or a URL that doesn’t contain “www,” according to Ramon Khan, online marketing director of National Air Warehouse.

For instance, both WordPress and Drupal websites use meta tags when there is a change in their default.

2. Poor Mobile Experience

Mobile websites are considered the most critical aspect of modern search engines because they have more than 60 percent market share in the US alone.

Poor mobile experience and poor SEO ranking are two significant issues that website owners face daily.

This is because around 90% of Google’s search volume comes from mobile devices, which make up nearly 75% of internet traffic.

While there are several ways to increase your SEO ranking, technical SEO issues are often neglected. It has been statistically proven that 53%of mobile website visitors will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load

KISS metrics’ 2017 list of technical SEO mistakes include:

• Overoptimization
• Ignoring site speed and loading speed
• Too many redirects
• Overuse of JavaScript and plugins

The following tips can help you improve your site’s mobile experience:

• Keep images at a minimum and optimize for text size
• Keep pages short and engaging    
• Minimize the use of plugins 

3. Poor Navigation

Sometimes even the most well-written article can suffer from poor navigation. This is where the Keywords and Article Body sections are too far apart and make it difficult for readers to find relevant topics.

The best solution to this issue is to separate your content into multiple pages or blog posts. That way, you can have a dedicated page for each topic you want to cover.

4. Selection of User-friendly images

Many SEO issues can hamper the success of company websites, but it’s not always easy to pinpoint them. Most technical SEO issues stem from image use and alternate text.

How to fix Image related SEO technical issues:

• Image alt text is not informative enough; name your images accordingly
• Change image file names to make them more descriptive
• Make sure you have a responsive theme in place
• Make sure your content is original and relevant for users
• Add an XML sitemap

Google (Google Images) held 91.94% of the total search engine market share, followed by Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, and YANDEX in 2020.

5. Improper redirects

When you want to redirect a URL, but it ends up with an incorrect or outdated link, instead of using 302 temporary codes, you should use 301 permanent codes.

6. Too many 404 pages

The best way to fix this issue is by removing these pages or adding them to other websites instead of creating new ones.

7. Messy URLs

When a URL is no longer clean, it is time to switch to a new one. It is not easy finding and replacing broken URLs.

There are many factors in keeping the URLs in check and completely clean.

Luckily, some tools provide an easy way to keep the URLs clean and concise. This will help you avoid losing ranking on search engines and make your website more accessible, scalable, engine-friendly, and malleable!

8. Slow Page Speed

Slow loading pages are the enemy of any content marketing strategy.

They’re bad for the user experience and make it hard for marketers to take their business further.

This is where web hosting services come in. They offer several options that can help improve page speeds, like CDN and application caching. Google introduced three tools for improving the website’s speed.

These tools are Google Page speed, Page Speed, and YSlow. Later, many web hosting services joined the bandwagon to get their websites faster on the search engine result pages (SERP).

The goal of this section is to introduce users to page speed tools and how they can use them to improve their website’s load times.

Although Google’s page speed tools can help improve the speed, ultimately, it’s about choosing a hosting web service with lots of options and resources to help you get the best results possible.

9. Local search and structured data markups

A local search is a magical tool that helps people find what they need.76% of people who search for a local business on their mobile phone visit a related business 24 hours. 

However, people often mistake a few sources of information for one place, leading them to make the wrong decision.

Until recently, the only way to improve local search was by adding websites and social media links.

But with structured data markup, businesses can quickly improve their click-through rates in a more targeted way.

Structured data markup helps local businesses improve their click-through rates by delivering more relevant content to searchers and giving them the ability to make better decisions about where they should go.

The first step of this process is adding structured data markups on the site for specific products or categories of products and then optimizing website content for those specific items and in-article calls to action.

10. Shady link building

Google Penguin is an update from Google that “punishes” websites for spammy link-building practices.

This update was first rolled out in April 2012 and has been updated several times.

The latest Penguin update on October 17th, 2018, is known as Penguin 3.0. It has been a game changer for the SEO world, including new algorithms to detect spam-like link-building practices such as unnatural links and disavow questionable backlinks.

Penguin 3.0 distinguishes between what Google determines to be natural and unnatural links, which will make SEO much harder than before. If the Penguin updates hurt your site, it may be necessary to disavow questionable backlinks to it, and if necessary, ask webmasters to remove those links.

Always use safe organic link building for full authority and better results in SEO.

An extra one: Google updates

Google consistently updates its algorithm, but some users don’t consider this when building their site or blog.

The best way is always to update your site once a year or even more often and be on the lookout for any changes that don’t fit your site’s user experience.