SEO Problems
In digital marketing, SEO plays an integral part in determining the success of a business. As such, poor SEO practices can hurt the business within a very short time. Due to a lack of experience, new businesses are mostly challenged by SEO. When brands become successful, they slowly but unintentionally abandon SEO because they have a lot to do. This explains why most brands that get to the top are unable to maintain the position.
Successful brands are those that integrate good SEO practices in their online campaigns. If you want to get more traffic with SEO and grow a brand that remains successful, you need to understand the basics of technical SEO and stay abreast of issues that arise as the internet evolves. According to Joel House SEO Sydney, some of these issues are not easy to fix and require the help of an SEO expert. The following are some common SEO issues you can expect and how to solve them:
This issue arises when your website pages have been indexed wrongly or have not been indexed at all. Unindexed pages do not appear on any search engine results. This means that if they are the most informative pages on your side, nobody will find that information.
To ensure that search engines do not miss your pages, ensure that you use proper URLs because search engines like Google can only rank what their bots see. On the other hand, web pages are indexed wrongly and show up in searches where they are not needed or intended. This means that internet users will rarely visit your site because it will be ranked on searches that are not relevant to readers at that particular time.
To address index management issues, consider using Google search console and remove noindex tags manually from pages that are not indexed. Ensure that your website descriptions are on point and use keywords that are relevant to the content you have on your web pages. You might need to conduct a cleanup if you have old pages with similar URLs that have been indexed already. Take advantage of the search engine tools to de-index old pages that do not exist anymore.
Online security should always be a top priority for any business While there are various aspects to digital security that include keeping business websites and customers safe from hackers, page security is a critical aspect that affects search engine rankings. An easy way to check page security is to check the URL – if it starts with “http” instead of “https”, that should be a cause for alarm.
Search engines do not pay attention to insecure pages. To fix this issue, get an SSL certificate. This certificate assures both customers and search engines that your web pages are secure – it is affordable and easy to install.
This is a major issue for many sites today but was not exactly a problem in traditional SEO. In the early stages of SEO, it was actually recommended to use the same keyword many times in order to increase online visibility. However, things have changed. Nowadays, sites that publish content revolving around the same topic and keywords increase end up with pages that compete against each other in keyword ranking.
As a result, search engine rankings for all pages involved are hurt. To solve this problem, use keyword tracking tools to diagnose any keyword cannibalization issues on your site. Create a single page containing all content that revolves around the same topics. This helps you ensure that the content you publish has a unique set of keywords.
Since 2018, site loading speeds on mobile devices has been a major factor in Google search rankings. While most sites have improved their speeds, a significant number of them continue to lag behind. Slow loading pages generally rank low on search engines. This means that businesses with such pages lose organic SEO traffic too.
Also, crawling and indexing the sites takes more time when site pages load slowly on mobile phones. Fixing this will require an audit of an entire website. You can use the pagespeed insights tool to test your website’s loading speeds and point out areas that need correction. For example, you might need to get rid of unused codes and excess comments. Even so, speed issues are more complex and you might need to contact an SEO expert to conduct further diagnosis on your site.
Most people today use mobile devices to conduct online searches. Sites that are designed with large screens in mind do not work the same on mobile devices. Search engines consider how your site displays different screen sizes to rank your site pages. As such, you need to update your site in a way that the pages display well on all devices, regardless of size.
Previously, search engines would create mobile subdomains that would redirect users who visited site pages using their phone or tablet. The content would be rearranged to fit the small screen, which meant that some of it were not available on mobile devices. However, this had changed – nowadays, Google does not use this approach because it messes with link equity.
To solve this issue, use responsive templates to create your website. Such templates allow your site to detect the device being used and display the content in a format that works best for the device. This ensures the link equity is not lost and that your ranking chances are not jeopardized.
This refers to the provision of time-sensitive information that users find valuable. Increasingly, internet users are opting for fresh information that contains recent studies and statistics. Where the content on a site is not updated, crawlers pick that fact and decrease your ranking. To address this issue, make regular content updating practice and replace old chats with new ones that relate to the latest information. Also, do away with content that is no longer relevant to your site.