Semalt: Non-Obvious Website Problems That Hinder SEO
Sherlock is analyzing his site. Effective website promotion requires the elaboration of many small details. A well-thought-out structure, high-quality content and its regular updates, backlinks - all this affects the visibility of a resource in search.
Nevertheless, any site can contain many non-obvious errors that at first glance are completely invisible. Most often this concerns the technical part, but sometimes the very approach to solving a certain problem is wrong. And all this works against you, gradually nullifying all efforts aimed at promoting the project.
Visually, everything can look just great. The problems are inside. Determining them is easy and can be done using some tools that were originally created for such a diagnosis.
And here is a list of the most common problems that we recommend that you check your site for.
Slow download speed
Even a beautiful site will be useless if it is slow. Slow loading pages are sometimes due to the designers' desire to make them "pretty", to an excessive number of connected modules, or simply to bugs in the code that affect performance.
There can be many reasons. If you have a fast internet connection, this may not be noticeable. But that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist. So, it's always best to make sure everything is OK and people who use mobile internet or just a slow connection are doing fine too.
How to check:
Use Page speed analyzer. They allow not only to test the download speed, but also give recommendations on how this value can be improved.
Duplicate pages
Pages with completely identical or partially borrowed content are most often the result of the peculiarities of the engine. Moreover, this is typical for both open-source and free CMS. Pagination and filter pages are the most common examples.
Why are duplicates so bad? The fact is that the presence of several URLs on the site with identical or very similar meta tags and other duplicate content makes it difficult for search robots to assess their relevance and ranking. As a result, if there are many duplicates, this affects the visibility of the site as a whole. The problem is solved by making unique such pages and applying rel = "canonical" or meta name = "robots" attributes.
How to check:
The easiest way is to crawl your site with a special crawler like Screaming Frog SEO Spider or NetPeak Spider, and then check the results against the Title and Description list. Their coincidence is most often a sign of duplicates.
You can also view the report in Google Search Console -> Search View -> HTML Optimization. Here we are interested in the items "Duplicate meta description" and "Duplicate titles (title tags)", which contain similar information about duplicates.
Non-unique texts
There is no special meaning to 100% technical uniqueness, especially since in some topics this is impossible. But for the text copied from other people's sites a little less than completely, search engines will not pat on the head either. And there is no point at all to promote such pages. It's good if, due to this practice, the entire site does not fly away under the filter.
This is one side of the problem. Second, articles from your site can also stretch across dozens of other resources. Or the copywriter who is filling it, decides to simplify his life and, instead of a unique article, publish a mix compiled from several sources. In any case, the rule is "trust but verify".
How to check:
Individual texts can be manually checked using the Website uniqueness check or Page uniqueness check.
Insufficient study of landing
Service pages for a commercial site, product cards for online stores and other important landing pages need particularly careful study. After all, the conversion rate of visitors to business customers depends on how good they look and meet the potential needs of the target audience.
A common problem is that the necessary pages seem to be there, but the conversion for them leaves much to be desired. Competitor analysis, point analytics, and brainstorming provide insight into what to improve to maximize their value. And you can improve the following points:
- expand the semantics for which the page is optimized;
- add more text, make it more informative;
- add photos and videos content;
- add attention blocks and calls to action;
- structure your content to make it more readable.
How to check:
If you have web analytics goal tracking set up, check the conversion and bounce rate for each important page. If on some of them these indicators are significantly worse than on others, then they require improvement in the first place.
Go through similar pages of competitors from the Top, see how they look. Proceed from the buyer's position, if you needed a specific product or service, where would you make a purchase - on your website or some other more trustworthy one?
Incorrect use of keywords
This coin has two sides - insufficient integration of keys into the body of the page, or excessive saturation with them (over-optimization). In both the first and second case, you will have problems. Moreover, you may not always be able to quickly understand that something is wrong.
A high-quality semantic core is the basis of any work on site optimization. But you also need to be able to work with these keys, using queries carefully. There are no ready-made recipes here, just strive for balance so that the text and meta tags of the page contain the necessary queries while remaining readable and natural for perception.
How to check:
The density and occurrence of keywords on the page can be checked using any text analyzer. For example, the free service of the Dedicated SEO Dashboard, which can parse both text and URLs, works well.
Non-responsive design
The adaptability of the layout is the property of the site design to adapt to the parameters of the screen of the device from which it is viewed. The main task, which is solved in this way, is to ensure comfortable use of the site both on PC and mobile. And mobile users in some niches have already surpassed 50% of total traffic!
If a site is inconvenient to use on mobile, it affects sales, behavioural factors, and ultimately affects its visibility in search in general. You lose both profit and search rankings.
How to check:
The easiest way is to go to your site from a mobile phone and try to use it. Browse the pages, run a search, try to place an order.
Another option is to use a special service that allows you to test the display of the site on devices with different screen sizes. For example, Screenfly.
Viruses or hacking
Not often, but it happens. Naturally, this calls into question all progress. Outwardly, everything can be completely normal with the site, even the decline in traffic and orders will not go immediately. Security problems are most often detected after a notification is received from the hoster or from the search engine itself in the webmaster's panel.
The problem must be resolved immediately because it is not known how the attacker will act in the future. Eliminate vulnerabilities and, if possible, connect some modules for protection. Well, and at least, timely update the version of the engine, since the developers themselves regularly work on security issues.
How to check:
Follow the notifications in the webmasters' panels, section "Security problems" (Google Search Console).
Broken, outgoing and hidden links
Not only external links, but also internal links affect the ranking of a site. If it contains links that lead to non-existent pages, giving "404" errors, links to resources of questionable quality and "invisible links" (with the same colour as the background), search engines may well find this suspicious.
And users will not be too happy with the fact that instead of the material that they were "promised" to follow a certain link, they see an error message. This will also affect behavioural factors.
The goal is simple: find the problem and fix it. Replace broken links with actual ones, and remove unwanted backlinks or close them in "nofollow".
How to check:
Use the free DSD program and start scanning your site.
Conclusions
These problems are found on many sites and are often the main reason why your SEO efforts are failing. Not all of them influence the situation strongly enough, but, in the aggregate, they can bring a lot of problems.
Difficulties with search engine promotion are not always the result of incorrect methods or violation of search engine rules. Sometimes you just need to take better care of the state of the site itself. And in any case, focus on its user-friendliness.
To prevent is to cure. So, it will not be superfluous to check your site on this list so that the abundance of small errors does not turn into a snowball one day, which will be much more difficult to stop.
Do you have anything to add to our list? Share your opinion in the comments!