Your website can have a lot of issues preventing you from getting the ranking you deserved. Complex structure and navigability are major concerns, then there are more:
- Slow loading time,
- Broken pages,
- Duplicate content, and more…
These will simply deter visitors from coming back. Your content, even if it has professional touch, will be hard to access because of these issues.
Technically sound websites have become more important these days, since almost half of the buyers shopping online like self-direct buying. Apart from technical issues, there are lots of other things that may lead to decrease in performance of the website.
Technical SEO issues often impact the entire site, but there are some cases that individual pages are impacted. One way to solve common technical issues is to conduct a technical SEO audit on a regular basis. Here are some valuable information offered by top search engine optimization firm in Canada that will make your technical SEO audit a lot more effective and smooth.
Major Technical SEO Issues
1. Response Codes
A sophisticated website also makes search engine crawl on it easily, otherwise, there is no chance for it to rank on search engines. If you can reduce the amount of 3xx and 4xx response codes on your website, search engines will find it easy to crawl.
Some common 3xx and 4xx response codes include;301, 302 and 404.
To fix these codes, update pages containing links that direct users to 404, 301 and 302 code, to live destination pages on your website. This small modification will give a great user experience.
You also have to update internal redirects to avoid any redirect chains if you change the page again, in future. Redirect chains cause major issues for search engines as they crawl or index a website.
2. Duplicate Content
One area of on-page optimization that is often prevalent is duplicate content. An ultimate goal of a website is to offer a solution for users, and the best way to offer a solution is to provide unique content.
Make sure that each page contains a solid amount of unique content tailored to whatever the page is about.
- For other sites, write a unique content for the topic of the page. Moreover, your CMS should not create duplicate content by correctly configuring the settings.
- For eCommerce sites, each product should have a unique description or user generated reviews to differentiate the content.
By eliminating this particular issues, you can make your website and other related pages perform well for target keywords.
3. URL Structure
URLs should be concise and keyword rich as much as possible without keyword stuffing. Use a static URL over dynamic URL, to make sure your site URL is concise, and has keywords.
The static URL should follow the pattern of the navigation and how people navigate throughout the website. If your URL structure follows a particular navigation format, you can easily create a hierarchy for search engines to associate certain pages. As a result, your page will appear more regularly for targeted terms and topics.
However, do not change the URL structure of your website for the sake of SEO. Changing the URL structure is a strategy that should only be applied when appropriate.
Conclusion
With technical SEO audit, you can identify key issues that are holding your website back. Although, plenty of items needs to be checked as you conduct SEO audit, but above mentioned areas are more than vital for best results.