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The Most Common SEO Issues and Simple Solutions

Published: 18/03/22 - Updated: 23/03/22

The Most Common SEO Issues and Simple Solutions

Collectively, our team has audited the on-page and technical SEO issues of websites and assisted in website migrations for eCommerce and local businesses across several industries including software, travel, fashion, toys and other consumer goods, professional services, trades, freight and logistics and more.

While they may be unique in their industries, they are not unique in their SEO issues – commonly having the same ones requiring similar solutions. In this blog, we’re going to cover some of these SEO issues myself and the SEO team commonly encounter and some very straightforward solutions. 

How does search work and how does Google rank pages?

Before we dive in, I just want to cover how Google and similar search engines work so you can understand how this influences your website. The process is below:

    1. Google discovers URLs via robots.txt files and submitted sitemaps in Google Search Console.
    2. Once URLs have been found, Google crawls the URLs, renders the content on the pages of the URLs and then adds them into its Google Index.
    3. Once this has been done, Google uses this information to rank URLs in the SERPs.

Now that we understand how it works, I’ll now break down:

Why would Google not crawl and render your page?

Google has not discovered your pages.

Google cannot crawl your pages.

Google attempted to crawl pages but could not.

Why would Google not index your page?

Google thinks they are not supposed to.

There are canonical issues.

You have a Google Penalty.

The quality of your content is poor.

Straightforward Solutions to Common SEO Problems

Solution 1: Create an Internal Linking Strategy

You want to make sure you have an internal linking strategy that includes horizontal linking (internal linking to top-level categories) and vertical linking (internal linking to children and related blog/article content).

My colleague has created a blog covering how you can find internal linking opportunities if you want to brainstorm for more ideas.

You also want to make sure your important pages are in the navigation where possible and always ensure you have a sitemap and that it is submitted in Google Search Console.

Solution 2: Create a User-Centred Content Strategy

You want to make sure that you are creating a user-centred content strategy that:

You can also follow this process for delivering quick on-page SEO and content marketing opportunities.

Solution 3: Create a Proactive Website Health Strategy

Many businesses spend a great deal auditing websites and never get to fixing the key issues on their website in a timely fashion meaning they end up losing valuable time and money.

Once issues are identified there should be significant effort to address the following issues in month 1 as they tend to require less development time (it does depend on the CMS involved) and are easier to fix:

Once you have sorted the above issues you should create a strategy to address the other issues that may require more development time such as issues impacting Core Web Vitals etc.

You also want to ensure you are setting up proactive SEO monitoring to flag issues as they arise which you can do with scheduled ScreamingFrog Crawls and/or a tool like Content King.

Need some support fixing your common SEO issues? Get in touch with us today.

Kara Thurkettle
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