Search engine optimisation requires a diverse skill set and an eagle eye for picking out tiny mistakes. Even the smallest of coding errors could make a huge difference to how well your website performs and ranks in search.
Here at topflight, our SEO team have successfully optimised hundreds of websites, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. Although, every website is different and requires a bespoke approach, we soon noticed that the same SEO technical problems were cropping up time and time again.
So, following our recent article on how to perform a technical SEO audit, we decided to put our heads together to compile a list of the 8 most common technical SEO issues and advice for fixing them.
8 common technical SEO issues and how to fix them
1. Indexation problems
The very first thing you need to check before delving deeper into your website’s technical SEO is that everything is set up correctly for Google to index your website’s pages.
If Google has not indexed your website, then its pages will not appear in search results.
To find out which of your web pages are being indexed, go to Google Search Console and review the Coverage section to identify URLs that should, or should not, be indexed.
If you see URLs in the Error, Valid with warnings and Excluded, investigate why Google has flagged them like than and make the appropiate changes, if needed.
How to fix it
Indexation issues can be caused by a variety of problems, here’s what you need to check if your website isn’t being indexed by Google.
- Have you added your URL to Google?
- Are there old versions of your website still being indexed?
- Has your site been hacked and spammed?
- Have any of your URLs been flagged as duplicate content?
- Is your robots.txt file correct?
- Have you mistakenly implemented a “noindex” or “canonical” meta tag?
2. The website is not secure
Some older websites are still operating as HTTP rather than HTTPS websites. HTTP websites are not secure and Google flags this up to users and penalises non-HTTPS websites in its search results.
How to fix it
You will need to acquire an SSL certificate and safely migrate your website from HTTP to HTTPS. Find out more about what Google says about how to use HTTPS on your domain.
3. The robots.txt file is blocking search engines
A robots.txt file tells Google and other search engines which pages to crawl, so this file must be set up and functioning correctly. To check that your robots.txt file isn’t blocking Google, type yoursitename.com/robots.txt into your web browser.
If you see the word ‘disallow’ after the expression User agent: * or User agent: [NAME OF THE SEARCH ENGINE], then you’ve got a problem.
How to fix it
If your robots.txt file is blocking Google from crawling your website speak to a web developer to have the file corrected. Or get in touch with us, we can fix it!
4. Web pages load too slowly
If your web pages are taking longer than 3 seconds to load, then your website is too slow. Site speed is one of the ranking factors that Google looks at and is also very important to user experience. It is easy to find out more stats about how fast your website loads by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.
Recommended read: 11 Web Design best practices to build an SEO-friendly website
How to fix it
You’ll need to get to the root of the problem and discover what is causing your web pages to take so long to load. Some common culprits include:
- Large image files
- Browsing caching problems
- Slow server
- Excessive number of queries, mainly from JavaScript/CSS files
- Excessive number of external elements (Analytics code, GTM, contact forms, chatbots, etc.)
- Unclean coding
5. Duplicate content
The quality of your website content is very important. If the same text content is repeated on different pages throughout your website, it can harm how your website ranks in search results, especially if the content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.
How to fix it
Always ensure that your web pages contain high quality, unique text content. If some duplicate content does occur on your website, then you will need to implement canonical tags. The rel=canonical tag is a piece of code that tells Google which is the original or preferred content and URL for indexing.
6. Broken links
An on-page broken link is a link on your website that no longer works or sends users to the wrong page. If your website contains broken links, it can negatively impact user experience and your website’s ranking in search results.
You can identify broken links on your website by viewing ‘crawl errors’ in the Google Search Console or by having a professional website audit carried out.
How to fix it
Broken links can be fixed by doing one of the following:
- Updating the link with the correct URL
- Deleting the link
- Redirecting the link
7. Missing alt tags
Failing to add alt tags to a website is one of the commonest technical SEO issues we see. Alt tags provide search engines and visually-impaired website visitors with textual descriptions of the images on your website, making them particularly important for image-heavy websites.
Adding optimised alt tags to your website’s HTML code can improve user experience, accessibility, and your website’s position in SERPs.
How to fix it
A professional SEO audit will identify all missing alt tags across your website. Although alt tags are not as important as they were a few years ago, they help search engines to understand the context of your content and give to your page the ability to rank on Google Images.
Using keywords within your alt tags will also provide maximum SEO value.
8. Keyword cannibalisation
Keywords help your website get found during relevant searches, but there’s a fine line between a well-optimised website and too much of a good thing. If your website is stuffed full of keywords (aka keyword stuffing), then it could be causing more damage to your search ranking than good.
Keyword cannibalisation occurs when the same keywords appear too frequently throughout your website. This can cause Google search engine problems as your pages appear to be competing with each other and Google doesn’t know which pages to prioritise. This may result in your preferred pages being ranked below less important pages on your website.
How to fix it
Keyword cannibalisation isn’t always a critical problem, but if it is causing your website issues then you have a few options for fixing it.
- Merge the two pages and combine the content to strengthen the relevance of the final page.
- Decide which page is more important, based on authority, relevance and traffic, and tag the second one with a “canonical” tag. This will be telling Google which page do you want to use for ranking purposes.
- Noindex the less relevant page, using the points explained above.
If you think any of these technical SEO issues apply to your website, getting them fixed could provide you with a quick boost in traffic and improve your website’s performance and ROI. Need help with correcting technical SEO mistakes? If you’re not confident dealing with website coding or keywords, then you could end up doing more harm than good.
Our team have the technical know-how to implement the fixes covered in this article quickly and efficiently for fast and effective results.
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