If you want to reach the top of search ranking and stay ahead of your competitors, implementing effective SEO campaigns is non-negotiable. Regardless of which industry you are in, there are common SEO problems being surfaced across different industries. That being said, these problems are rectifiable as long as you are and it does not require rocket science to fix them.
To optimize your SEO efforts and to fully reap the benefits from it, you might want to be cognizant of the following common SEO problems that you do not want to find yourself repeating and the respective solutions on how to fix these SEO issues.
TOP 20 SEO problems
1. Ranking for the Wrong Keyword
If you want to rank well on Google, you must ensure that you are employing the proper keywords on all of your websites. One of the most common errors we see site owners do is to target generic keywords when optimizing their sites. You’re setting your sights too high if you’re a tiny company trying to rank for a keyword like “rental vehicle.” Make an effort to be more descriptive. It’s hard to compete with all the automobile rental firms across the world if you don’t!
As a suggestion, you may want to include a specific location into your keyword strategy long-tail keywords.
2. Sitemaps that are No Longer Up to Date
To assist search engines in better comprehending your site’s layout, you should use sitemaps. However, as a website develops, several modifications are made. A site’s URL may be restructured as part of a larger site redesign. Alternatively, certain elements of the website may be permanently erased.
All of your site’s important improvements will be missed if your sitemap isn’t kept up to date. As a result, search engines may discover broken links or other inconsistencies in your site’s content.
You may want to consider creating an updated sitemap and re-submit it using Google Search Console to prevent this common SEO problem. A dynamic sitemap generator may also be used (one that keeps getting updated as you make changes to your site).
3. Poor Mobile Surfing Experience
You may find it difficult to retain your visitors if the mobile user interface of your sites are not up to par. Visitors will leave your site faster if it is difficult to use or takes too long for them to load on their smartphones and tablets.
By using a mobile subdomain (like http://m.domain.com) with the aim of improving mobile experience may also backfire. This would eventually dilute your link equity or increase resource usage.
The best way to fix this SEO issue is to adopt a tailored interface to each device yet with the same content is provided by responsive design. This is where a website appears automatically and correctly on both mobile and desktop platforms.
4. More than One Version of Homepage
You may have started using different URLs which ultimately direct to the same website with the view of possibly higher visibility, ie: using “abc.com” and “def.com” which both lead to the same website. This may however do more harm than good where Google may be indexing numerous URL variants, your site’s visibility in search may be diminished.
To address this problem, you would need to see whether diverse URLs effectively flow to a single, universally-recognised URL. Another option is to use “site:yoursitename.com” to find out which pages are indexed and whether they originate from different URLs.
5. Insufficient Navigation on Site
Another common SEO problem is having a difficult time finding your way around your website can deter people from engaging with your content.
Google views poor engagement figures mixed with ‘crawlability’ concerns and other technical issues as all signals of poor authority. Your site won’t rank well in the search engines if it’s judged irrelevant and uninteresting to visitors. After all, the business of search engines is to provide its users with the most relevant resources.
6. Your Page speed is just not fast enough
Google now uses a page’s loading speed as a ranking factor. Google favours sites that load quickly.
One quick way to fix such technical SEO issue is to optimize your photos, which proves to be an effective way to boost your search engine rankings. Images on many websites are huge and take a long time to load in which doing so will slow down your website. The loading time of your photographs might be reduced by resizing them.
7. Missing ALT Tags
Photos with appropriate alt tags complement well for search engine optimization. The alt tag property tells the bot what the picture is about, which helps search engines index the website.
An easy technique to increase your page’s SEO value is by using images that improve the user experience of your site. It is simpler to keep up with image alt tags on your website if you do frequent site audits as part of your SEO standard operating procedures.
8. Failing in Retaining Visitors
You want to keep people on your website once they arrive. You don’t want your visitors to immediately return to Google after reading your content. Because of this, it is critical that you provide compelling reasons for visitors to explore your website further. Creating a call-to-action (CTA), which is usually a button that offers an action to your visitors, is the best way to accomplish this. The “buy” button on a product page or the “sign up” button for the newsletters are examples of this. Attempting to make your CTA stand out from the rest of your page is a mistake.
Adding relevant internal links to other pages on your website is another way to keep visitors on your site. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), this is an essential component of your marketing strategy. Your site’s visitors and Google will benefit from knowing which pages are related to one another and may be of interest if they’re conducting research on a specific subject. Spend some time on internal linking to ensure that your website has a strong structure that keeps visitors engaged.
9. Poor Reviews on Google
Positive and negative reviews are expected when a product or service is reviewed. There are other criteria that contribute to local search ranking, such as the quantity of reviews your company has. Even if favourable evaluations increase your website’s trustworthiness, having solely positive ratings makes it seem suspicious. It’s possible to lose visitors to your website if a large number of clients voice displeasure.
Despite it not being a technical SEO issue, effort is still needed to fix. You may use industry-specific review sites and social media to encourage customers to publish evaluations about your services and publicly address their queries to seem more authentic.
10. Cannibalism of Keywords
“Overcrowding” of the same themes and creating identical content that almost always focuses on the same keywords is among the most common SEO problems. The ultimate result is that a number of sites are vying for the same keywords. As a result, all of the sites affected suffer in search engine results.
A complete post is necessary in order to adequately address this issue. A keyword mapping tool should be used as soon as feasible to correct this serious problem. It may help you organise your website and ensure that each piece of content is targeting a unique collection of keywords. As a result, you won’t have to compete against the other people in your field who are also developing content.
11. Incoherent Internal Linking
When a user visits a website, they need to be able to return back to the homepage, know where they are on the site, and be able to travel to any page on the site by following the links.
Make sure your main pages are linked from all of your “supplementary” sites and create new linkages between old and new information by going back and reorganizing your links as well.
12. Wrong Use of UTM Parameter
UTM parameters aren’t intended for monitoring internal links, as you may be aware. On-page marketing tools like promo bars, sidebars, and banners that connect to various portions of a site are often tracked using UTM parameters.
Use UTM parameters to monitor internal connections and you’ll be overwriting the true information. This visitor, like the one in the previous example, was incorrectly logged as originating from the homepage.The improper usage of UTM parameters might have a negative impact on your raw data over time.
Instead, internal links (clicks) may be tracked more effectively using events rather than UTM parameters.
13. Excessive Flash
Aside from the fact that today’s websites are less likely to use Flash, search engine robots still have a hard time accessing your site’s content.
It will be difficult for search engine bots to grasp your website if they can’t read or interpret it. Hence, you should avoid using Flash or use it sparingly if you want to avoid this problem. There are alternatives like HTML 5, CSS 3, and JavaScript, and you could even utilize a video if you require animation.
14. Insufficient Local Search and Structured Data Markup
Sites that have a presence on all the local search data sources, such as Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Bing and Yellow Pages, might notice a bump in local searches within their immediate city scope since Google identifies local search intent better than ever before.
Local SEO, which aims to provide local results to customers seeking information about local companies, may be more efficiently used by businesses if a distinct Web page is created for each location.
Structured data markup, often known as “rich snippets,” may help your website rank higher in search engine results. Even if rich snippets and Structured Data Markup may not have an impact on search engine results, they may increase clickthrough rates.
15. Wrong Rel=Canonical
For any site that has a lot of material that is almost identical, rel=canonical is critical (especially ecommerce sites). Google’s search bots may mistakenly believe that dynamically produced sites (such as a category page of blog articles or merchandise) are the same.
Search engines are able to discern which “original” page is most important via the use of the rel=canonical tag, which is akin to URL canonicalization.
You’ll need to spot check your source code to address this technical SEO issue. Fixes differ according on the format of your content and the web platform you’re using.
16. Poor Meta Descriptions
Search engine users utilise meta descriptions to assist them decide whether or not to visit your website. This doesn’t directly affect page ranking, but the relevancy of the meta description influences page CTR, which is essential.
One-third of websites have meta descriptions that are identical, while the other two-thirds have no meta descriptions at all.
You may use our Site Audit tool to uncover both problems, but it’s crucial to manually resolve them if required. When using WordPress, you may use a good SEO plugin to guarantee that all of your content includes meta descriptions.
17. Low Text-to-HTML Ratio
Low Text-toHTML ratio may be one of the lesser common technical SEO issue but it does not mean it is negligible. There are many sites that have a lot of back-end HTML code, but little actual content. This problem is sometimes a hint that you have additional SEO ranking difficulties that need to be resolved. Having a low text-to-HTML ratio, for example, might indicate that a website with a coding error (with invalid code and excessive Javascript, Flash and inline styling).
Please look for any pages where this warning occurs and take action to remove any unused code in order to make pages load faster and smaller.
18. Insufficient Word Count
As a general rule, there is no certain rule as to what is the correct amount of word count for pages when it comes to search engine optimization. If you eliminate fluff in your content, you’ll have a lengthier piece of material that Google is more likely to rank highly.
Important on-page material should be included wherever feasible. Your content’s depth and usefulness will be enhanced if you do all you can to give it depth. How much more enjoyable is an infographic if the designer takes the time to explain the data in greater detail? And your readers will as well.
19. Excessive On-Page Links
An overabundance of on-page links is a problem for SEO.
Linking is a difficult skill to master. While Google no longer enforces a limit on the number of links on a page, having a natural link profile that includes relevant and high-quality connections is still important for excellent SEO.
The value of your page might be diminished if you have too many links pointing to it. However, if the links pointing to your site are valuable and relevant, your site will continue to score well.
Consider conducting a link audit and ensure that all connections on the page in question are really beneficial. Otherwise, remove those that don’t in order to boost your SEO and enhance the overall experience for your visitors (which is also good for SEO.
20. Header Tag Issues
Header tags have long been a crucial aspect of SEO since they highlight the most significant parts of a website. On every given page, there should only be one H1 element, and it should be used to describe the content. Since HTML5 has made it possible to have more than one H1 element on a page, header tags are still essential in creating a hierarchical structure for both search engines and site visitors.
Knowing the distinction between title and header tags is so critical. Search engines use the information in your title tag; readers see it in header tags on your page.
You may have numerous H1 tags on a page, but only if you use the correct HTML5 syntax to differentiate between parts of similar value.
You may also learn more potential SEO problems from the video below:
Conclusion
Regardless matter how many SEO difficulties you have, you should focus on one at a time. No one can say for certain that you’ll be able to go to every one of them correctly straight immediately. In the long term, ignoring them will only cause additional issues.
If you are still having difficulties solving these technical SEO issues or figuring out how to fix SEO issues, why not consider seeking industry experts like Marketing Signal Lab. Equipped with the necessary expertise and coming with client-first approach, your sites’ SEO will be in safe hands. Contact MSL today to get your SEO problems addressed.