Every year, businesses spend billions of dollars not only on SEO but on technical SEO issues and ways to fix them.
It may appear to be an excessive sum of money, but it is justifiable in light of the numerous chores that business owners must manage on a regular basis, such as maintaining current customers and developing several business profiles in prominent local directories.
Furthermore, there are technical SEO issues that must be addressed, failing which the company’s online visibility may suffer. Businesses must discover and fix common on-site technical SEO problems with their websites to avoid losing clients and maintain business growth.
Here in this article, we will discuss some technical SEO issues and ways to fix them.
We will ponder upon the most common technical SEO issues one by one with the solution or the method to resolve the issues. So let’s begin:
How to Fix Technical SEO Issues?
#1 – Website loading time
The speed of your website has a significant impact on your SERP ranking. Because a speedier website provides a better user experience, slower websites are penalised, causing them to fall in the rankings. If the server response time is more than 2 seconds, Google limits the number of crawlers delivered to your page. As a result, fewer pages will be indexed!
The Solution: Google PageSpeed Insights, in a nutshell. This tool monitors and analyses your website’s performance on both desktop and mobile devices. For pages that are not properly optimised, alerts are sent out. The best thing is that PageSpeed Insights provides step-by-step instructions on how to fix the issue.
#2 – Inactive Links
One or two broken links on a website with hundreds of pages are to be expected and is scarcely an issue. Hundreds of broken connections, on the other hand, are a major setback because the user’s opinion of your website’s quality deteriorates.
Your crawl budget could be thrown out the window if you have broken links. When search bots encounter too many broken links, they redirect to other websites, leaving crucial pages on your site uncrawled and unindexed.
The page authority of your website is also harmed.
The Solution: To troubleshoot technical SEO problems and to find out which of your pages are returning 404 responses, go to Google Search Console and click on the “Crawl Errors” option under “Crawl.” Any 404 problems should be corrected as soon as possible to avoid bothering your visitors and redirecting them to other areas of your site – or off your site entirely!
#3 – Content Duplication
Duplicate content is a problem that many websites face as more firms use dynamically built websites, content management systems, and worldwide SEO. It may “confuse” search engine crawlers, preventing your target audience from receiving the relevant content.
Duplicate content can happen mainly for:
- Items from an eCommerce site’s store can be found on many versions of the same URL.
- The material on printer-only web pages is the same as on the main page.
- On a global website, the same content is available in several languages.
The Solution: Each of these three problems can be solved using the following methods:
- The rel=canonical attribute should be used correctly.
- Proper configuration is required
- The use of hreflang tags should be done correctly.
Some other ways to avoid duplicate material, according to Google’s support page are to use 301 redirects, top-level domains, and limit boilerplate text.
#4 – Broken images and missing alt tags
Image optimization issues are prevalent, however, you can save them for later unless your website is extremely reliant on them. The two most common issues that business owners must address are missing alt tags and damaged images.
Alt tags are HTML elements that describe the contents of images. If an image component on your website fails to render properly, the alt tag for the image will convey the contents as well as the function.
The Solution: Putting these tags in place is rather straightforward. Simply find the image component in your HTML code and replace it with the alt tag.
#5 – Contact Forms That Aren’t Working
According to Formisimo’s research, just 49% of 1.5 million web users begin filling out a form as soon as they view it. Furthermore, just 16 % of the 49% submit a completed form. So, if you want to succeed, you must go above and beyond to solve this difficulty.
The Solution: Make the contact form as appealing as possible to users. Make it as brief and straightforward as possible. Only collect the information you require, such as a person’s name and e-mail address. Additional fields, such as phone number or work title, should only be included if absolutely essential, as it is recommended that your form include no more than five fields. Instead of the conventional “Submit,” write something special for your CTA content. This is the most important element while troubleshooting technical SEO problems.
#6 – NOINDEX has been misconfigured
NOINDEX is one of the most common SEO concerns that companies experience. In fact, the negative consequences of this problem considerably outnumber the negative consequences of a misconfigured robot.txt file.
To begin with, a misconfigured robots.txt file will not remove your site’s pages from the Google index, but a NOINDEX directive will delete all of your indexed pages from the Google index. NOINDEX is handy for websites in development since it stops them from appearing in users’ search results too soon.
The Solution: Using an online tool like Screaming Frog allows you to scan numerous pages at once and is easier (and faster), than conducting a manual check.
Replace NOINDEX with INDEX if you come across it in any of the codes. You may even leave it blank if you want. Once you’ve done this step, Google will get an automatic signal to resume indexing your web pages.
#7 – Ellipses at the end of meta descriptions
In the results pages, Google frequently replaces some text with ellipses (a series of dots), as shown in the second example in the image below. Why? Because the length of the text exceeds the word or pixel limit.
When this happens, it’s aggravating for the user who is attempting to figure out if your site has the information they need. In the search results, there are ellipses in the meta description.
The Solution: You must limit the pixel length of web page names and meta descriptions to guarantee that search engines do not look for the remaining text, which could lead to users clicking on a different link.
#8 – Errors in XML Sitemaps
Google is alerted by XML Sitemaps, as a result, if your Sitemap is missing or incorrect, Google may receive inaccurate information about your page. Not only are search engines having trouble comprehending the contents of the site, but the website’s hierarchy is also unclear. Such problems can also be discovered using Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
The Solution: The Sitemaps report’s home page displays a list of Sitemaps that have been uploaded to the Search Console. Drill down for more information (if it’s a Sitemap index) by clicking on one of them. You’ll see errors listed among the other bits of information.
Conclusions:
Hopefully, you now have a better knowledge of the major on-site technical SEO issues that plague websites and finally the methods on how to fix technical SEO issues. Take a proactive approach and check each of these concerns to ensure you’re not losing consumers or business growth.
