A comprehensive SEO strategy will include not just on-page SEO (which is often the most emphasized) but also off-page SEO and technical SEO. The effectiveness of your approach will depend on how well you address the issues that arise as a result of all three. In this article, we will consider five of the most common technical issues and how you can solve them. That easy? That’s right.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO includes everything that is done to ensure the technical elements of your website match the requirements of search engines to improve your organic ranking and improve your online visibility. Technical SEO allows search engines to crawl and index websites more efficiently. It includes four primary elements:
- Site structure
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Rendering
Any issue that affects any of these elements will affect your site ranking and negatively influence the online visibility of your business (and you will agree this is bad). In fact, any attempt at on-page and off-page SEO without technical SEO will not yield a significant result. This means that against popular practice and focus, you should first deal with technical SEO issues before addressing others.
Common Technical SEO Issues and How to Solve Them
There is a multiplicity of issues that affects your technical SEO. Here are five of the most common and how you can solve them.
1. Site security
Sites that do not have HTTPs are considered as not secure. An insecure website will affect your ranking. To check if your website is secure or not, type your site address into Google. If your site is secure, then it will show a ‘secured’ message. If it is not secure, it will display a gray or red background with a ‘not secure’ warning. To fix this, you will need to buy an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority and install the same on your site. This will convert your site to HTTPS and make it secure.
2. Mobile-friendliness
Most people now conduct their searches on their mobile devices. A site designed for use on a larger screen will not work well on mobile if that wasn’t taken into consideration from the outset. This makes it less user friendly and invariably reduces how well you can rank. To fix this, make sure you use a responsive design on your site. This kind of design allows your site to adjust the way it displays its content depending on the type of device being used.
3. Outdated sitemaps
Search engines use sitemaps to understand the architecture of your site so that its links can be crawled by search engine bots. The longer a site has existed, the more likely the site structure has changed. Any update to your site structure and links will not reflect if the sitemap is not updated and the bots will end up crawling across broken links. You can easily solve this problem by using a dynamic sitemap generator or by updating your sitemaps and submitting through Google Search Console any time significant changes are made on your site.
4. Site speed
From 2010, the speed with which web pages load became a factor in how well a site will rank. It is estimated that if your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds or less, users will go to other sites. Google Bots are rendered unable to crawl every page on your website if it loads slowly meaning some of your pages will not be indexed. Also, you can use my site auditor’s page speed option to scan your website. You can also use Google Page Speed Insight as my site auditor alternative to identify specific problems with your page speed.
Ways to fix this include image compression, browser cache, and response time improvement, minifying JavaScript, etc. The specific method will depend on the identified cause. You can just talk to your web developer about this issue.
5. Duplicate content
Content is duplicated all over the internet all the time and it isn’t necessarily a problem. However, duplicate content becomes a problem when different URLs on your website lead to the same content. What this causes is that you lose crawler cycles so that there will not be enough resources to crawl your unique contents. To fix this issue, you can
a) Set your URL preference (www versus non-www) in Google Webmasters so that Google treats any site that links to something other than your preference as if it is still linking to your preference.
b) Use the canonical tag while sharing your links. All pages with the canonical tag that have similar content will be counted by search bots as links to the original page.
c) Use the Noindex tag so that search bots do not index duplicate pages.
Conclusion
SEO when done properly can help position your business for greater success. You must make handling any technical SEO issues you identify a matter of priority, starting with the ones we’ve mentioned.