Five Common SEO Problems & the Solutions
Of course, you work hard on your SEO campaigns, doing everything you can to rank with the big search engines for relevant keywords. But even seemingly small issues can cause your website real problems if they’re ignored for too long. Here we look at some of the most common niggles, and, crucially, how you can put them right.
- Low page speed – especially on mobile
For some time now, loading speed has been a ranking factor. And with every second longer it takes to load your pages, more people will never click on your site again, especially mobile users.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a general feel for whether loading speed is affecting your ranking.
If it looks to be problematic, start by shedding any excess comments, coding and formatting to speed up loading time.
2. Poor internal linking
Anyone using your website must be able to return to the home page from anywhere on your site, indeed they should be able to navigate anywhere from any page. And you need to link up your smaller, ‘supplementary’ pages as well as your core ones.
Combine strong internal linking with high-quality content and you’ll be on to a winner.
3. Keyword cannibalisation
OK, so this one isn’t as gruesome as it sounds, in that no one actually gets eaten, but it’s pretty bad nonetheless. It happens when you publish very similar materials, targeting identical keywords, for which your pages end up competing in the rankings. This then harms all pages’ ranking chances. Consolidate those pages which target similar topics, incorporating them into one new page.
4. Improper page indexing
Use the Google Search Console to see if you have any indexing issues, such as not having the right tagging, which are likely to be internal. It’s good practice to check each month, just to see if there are any niggles. You can also use an audit tool to see which pages are indexed and which aren’t.
5. Dips in traffic
If traffic to your website dips steeply, particularly when compared with a similar period of time the previous year, and it doesn’t seem seasonal, e.g. because there’s been a bank holiday, you definitely need to investigate. There could be a problem with the analytics tracking code or it could happen after you’ve changed your web design template. But whatever the reason, this sort of issue always needs checking out.
How we can help
If you’d like to discuss any of these SEO issues in more detail, give Front Page a call for an informal chat. We’re highly experienced at getting to the root cause of and solving common issues that may crop up from time to time.