SEO is an ongoing process, meaning that you cannot just set it and forget it. Right?
But still, there is no guarantee that how soon you will see your ranking go up (well, that’s the bitter truth of SEO).
And what hurts the most is to lose the result of your hard work in moments. How?
You tried so hard to improve the ranking of your website. But some SEO issues are occurring over time that cost your ranking. That’s why it is important to keep track of your SEO issues and resolve them timely.
They might be minor issues at first. But they can evolve into serious issues over time.
But, you do try to fix it, only to find that most fixes might not work for certain data.
Maybe today you are not serious about your site load time. It might be just okay with the existing data. So it is okay to upload large 150kb image files. But what happens after several months of adding too many images?
And your website fails to load in even 3 seconds, hurting the user experience of your website.
You can ignore such issues and let them go up as your site grows only to see a large portion of fixes on your plate. Even worse, maybe your fixes might not work later.
Keeping this in mind, here I have outlined common SEO issues that need your immediate attention.
Poor Website Speed:
Let’s admit it. Poor website speed might not be your priority right now amidst those big traffic goals. But it should be. Imagine how a user reacts after interacting with your website that takes minutes to load. Quite frustrating will it be. Isn’t it? No wonder they leave your site. The faster your site loads, the better the user experience. And Google is so much particular about the user experience that it can penalize the slow-loading websites.
Make sure to check the speed on your website on Google Page Speed Insights. This tool tracks the speed of your website and offers tips on how to solve speed-related problems.
Broken Links:
If you have hundreds of pages, one or two broken links might not be an issue for you. But having dozens of broken links can be bothersome. Firstly, it will hurt your reputation. Search bots can divert traffic to other websites just because your site has too many broken links.
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This way, your site looks no more reliable. Even worse, too many broken links convey a message to Google that your site is outdated, hurting its ranking.
Here is how you can fix it.
Go to the Google Search Console and click on the “Crawl Errors” option under “Crawl” to figure out which of your pages are giving 404 responses. Any 404 error should be addressed immediately so they don’t bother your traffic and divert it to other parts of your website or your competitor’s website.
Spammy Traffic or Referral SPAM:
If you find that a site that is nothing to do with you sends a lot of traffic your way, consider it a case of spammy traffic.
Spammy traffic means unwelcoming visitors to your site. They might be a bot or spam webmaster tool that visits your site and bounce back.
Spambots traffic can manipulate your data when being reported in your Google Analytics data. Such kind of traffic will only raise the bounce rate of your website.
You will also see your site’s average bounce rate become very high due to this bot-generated traffic.
You can fix this problem with a tool option available in your Google Analytics.
Click on the Admin tab and choose the site you want to fix. The next page will give you the option “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.” Check the option and save it. This option can help you prevent spammy traffic issues.
No HTTPS Security:
HTPPS or Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP and encrypts the data between a web browser and a website.
If your site lacks HTTPS, you are going to take a hit in many ways. Firstly, your site will be prone to a cyberattack. Secondly, visitors are less likely to visit your site as it is not safe. Thirdly, Google is likely to penalize your website.
To convert your site to HTTPS, opt for an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority. Once you buy and install your certificate, your site will be protected.
Incorrect Indexing:
Search your website on Google. Does it show in the search results? If not, it might be because your site is not indexed. If the site is not appearing in the search results, your pages are not indexed properly.
Here’s how you can check if your site is indexed or not:
Type “site:yoursitename.com” into Google’s search bar to get the count of indexed pages for your site.
If the site is not indexed, you can start by adding the URL to Google.
However, there could be some issues even with an indexed site. In such a scenario, you can check the website for hacking spam or old versions that are indexed instead of the right redirects in place to point to your updated site. Also, make sure your web pages are not blocked by your robot.txt file. Or you can check if you have implemented a NON INDEX meta tag by mistake.
Missing Alt Tags:
Missing Alt Tags can also hurt your SEO efforts. The image alt tags help the search engine understand what the image is all about. This way, it can improve the SEO value of your page that contains the images with an alt tag.
You can fix the missing alt tags by identifying the images with broken and missing alt tags. All you need to conduct a regular site audit.
Missing or Poor Meta Descriptions:
Meta descriptions are a 160-character summary of your web page, helping search engines index your page as well as give the audience an overview of the page.
But there are a lot of web pages that lack this important information. Therefore, make sure to check your web pages for meta descriptions as well as optimize the existing ones.
Duplicate Content:
Sure, duplicate content might not attract penalties from Google unless it aims to manipulate search results. But the issue with duplicate content is that it might confuse crawlers and hinder the correct content from being served.
Many reasons lead to duplicate content such as eCommerce sites storing items appearing on multiple versions of the same URL. Sometimes printer-only web pages repeat content on the main page while the same content shows up in multiple languages.
Such issues can be fixed by using proper rel=conocial, proper configuration, and the correct implementation of hreflang tags. Or you can refer to Google’s support page where you can find ideas to minimize duplicate content including using top-level domains, 301 redirects, and minimizing boilerplate content.
So these are some common SEO issues you should fix ASAP. In other words, nip them in bud so that they cannot trouble your website later.
What do you think? Let me know by commenting below!