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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial component for enhancing your website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages. With the landscape of SEO perpetually evolving, it’s easy for both new and old issues to emerge unnoticed.
“Good SEO is paying attention to all the details that most bloggers ignore.”
Ryan Biddulph
Many website owners prioritize addressing prominent issues, often overlooking the subtler, yet critical elements that could be undermining their SEO efforts. These seemingly minor oversights can accumulate, leading to significant impediments that hinder your website’s performance and its capacity to fully leverage your digital marketing strategy. Below, we explore some of the most frequently missed SEO problems that you should be aware of.
A surprisingly common issue that goes often unnoticed is the presence of multiple URLs leading to your homepage. While some site owners might overlook this, the implications for search engine crawlers are significant. Your website could be accessible through various addresses, such as www.yourwebsite.com, yourwebsite.com, or www.yourwebsite.com/index.html, among others.
Though it might appear trivial at first glance, this scenario can detrimentally impact your site’s perceived value and its search engine rankings. Search engines like Google might index multiple URL versions of your homepage, which can lead to confusion. Despite these URLs directing to the identical page, the distribution of “link juice” or the value passed through hyperlinks, becomes diluted across these different versions. This dilution can weaken your site’s overall SEO performance.
“SEO is a marketing function for sure, but it needs to be baked into a product, not slapped on like icing after the cake is baked.”
Duane Forrester
HTTPS has always been necessary for e-commerce sites, but now it is a requirement for all websites. Google announced last year that starting January 2017, all websites which require you to enter passwords or credit card information and are still non-HTTPS will be tagged as a “non-secure” site. They are also planning to tag all non-HTTP sites as “non-secure” in the future. This is one of their efforts to create a more secure web.
If your site is tagged as non-secure, security warnings will pop up affecting site visitors’ trust. Instead of visiting your website, they will visit your competitors’ (and other) sites which appear to offer a secure and safe transaction.
Another easily overlooked issue is an improperly configured robots.txt file. Not every website owner is familiar with how to examine or modify their site’s robots.txt file, yet this small file plays a pivotal role in your site’s visibility to search engines. A single misplaced “/” in the file could lead to significant pages—or even the entirety of your website—being inadvertently blocked from search engine crawlers.
Such a blockade can severely limit your website’s organic traffic by preventing important pages from being indexed and displayed in search engine results. Ensuring your robots.txt file is accurately configured is essential for optimal site performance and search engine ranking.
If your site is set to NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW or both, you need to change that immediately. Search engines won’t be able to crawl through your site’s pages properly, which affects the value of the page. When this happens, your site will not get organic traffic and will not appear on search results pages.
The loading speed of your website is crucial, not just for search engine rankings, but for providing a positive user experience. Adam Krzywda highlights the significance of this factor by stating,
“Google’s mission is to deliver the world’s information to users in an accessible and useful way. Page speed is becoming increasingly important in achieving this mission, especially on the mobile web. We’re now starting to see strong correlations between fast page load times and higher search rankings.”
Fast loading times are now a top criterion for Google, impacting not only how your website ranks but also how users interact with it. Despite its importance, many site owners overlook website speed, focusing on other elements they consider more critical. However, as Google continues to prioritize speed and mobile-friendliness, ensuring your website loads quickly is indispensable.
Ignoring these seemingly minor issues can lead to larger problems over time, negatively affecting your site’s performance and search engine visibility. If you’re unsure how to address these issues, consider seeking assistance from SEO professionals like Local SEO Search. We can provide an in-depth technical audit of your website to identify hidden issues, offer recommendations to solve problems, and improve your search engine results.
