How To Troubleshoot Common SEO Problems

Search engine optimization (SEO) is imperative for websites. Google evaluates websites on various factors to improve search engine results pages (SERPs) and promote user-friendly sites in the search results. On the other hand, low-quality sites appear further down the page.

Google uses algorithms to filter its database and make it more valuable to the end-users. Thus, it’s critical for site owners to properly implement SEO. This includes applying only white-hat SEO techniques in their campaigns.

If you’re also struggling with SEO issues and need to fix them ASAP, you’re in the right place.

In this blog, we’re going to discuss the most common SEO problems and ways to fix them. Our tips will revolve around crawling and indexing, on-page SEO and content, as these are the most important areas to improve. 

Let’s get started!

1. Crawling and Indexing

After building a website, the next step is to make it visible to search engines. Google uses its web crawler to systematically browse your website and index it to Google’s database. So that means websites don’t appear in search results if Googlebot fails to discover or crawl them.

There are plenty of technical issues that can cause crawlability issues in your site. Below are some common issues you must solve to fix this problem:

• Server errors
• Faulty robots.txt and meta tags
• Nofollow links
• Internal broken links
• Improper sitemaps
• Wrong redirects
• HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Ways To Index Your Website on Google

Usually, when you verify your website’s Google Search Console, you make your website visible to Google. But what happens if Googlebot can’t crawl and index your website thoroughly due to certain issues?

Follow these tips:

1. Add robots.txt file to the root directory of your website (i.e., yourdomain.com/robots.txt).
2. Make sure you appropriately use nofollow and noindex tags.
3. Add an XML sitemap to your website and submit it to Google Search Console.
4. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check and improve the loading speed.
5. Use Google Search Console to detect and fix crawl errors. Go to Google Search Console and navigate to the Crawl section. Here, you can check if any of your website’s pages have 404 errors.
6. If your website runs on HTTP, convert it to HTTPS to secure your site.

You’ll also need to check whether all of your web pages are indexed. To do so, search site:yourwebsite.com on Google. Then, you can follow these steps:

1. Open Google Search Console.
2. Go to URL Inspection Tool. 
3. Paste all URLs into the search bar to index.
4. Click the “Request Indexing” button after Google checks URLs.

2. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a common issue most webmasters face nowadays. This problem appears when Google discovers similar content on the same or multiple websites. Due to this, Google can’t decide which page is the original source of the content and which page to list on search results. 

Duplicate content issues occur for several reasons, such as faceted navigation, mobile-friendly URLs, session IDs, parameterized URLs, print-friendly URLs, localization, etc.

Ways To Reduce Duplicate Content Issues

As said earlier, duplicate content issues can arise due to different reasons. Thus, there’s no generic solution for duplicate content issues. We highly recommend performing a thorough site audit to find duplicate content on the site. You can also use the Screaming Frog webmaster tool to find duplicate content issues.

Below are some recommended solutions to prevent duplicate content issues:

1. Go to Google Search Console and set your site’s preferred URL version. 
2. Use Rel=canonical tag if you have the same content on different pages of your website.
3. Create 301 redirects to combine different pages, decrease duplication and improve the site’s structure.
4. Use noindex meta tag to ensure unnecessary pages containing duplicate content do not get indexed.
5. Replace duplicate content with fresh, SEO-friendly content.  

3. URL Optimization

Optimized URLs are helpful for users and search engines. SEO-friendly URLs describe a web page to potential users and search engines. However, poorly structured, bad URLs make it difficult for crawlers to access and index them. Standard URL structure includes protocol, subdomain, root domain, TLD, slug and page name in order.

Poorly optimized URLs can cause several problems:

• Duplicate URLs for homepage
• www and non-www versions of URLs, dynamic URLs leading to the same page
• Loss of ranking
• Decrease in traffic

Ways To Fix URL Optimization Issues

Ensure your site has short, descriptive and keyword-rich URLs. The primary goal of URL optimization should be to make it readable.

Below are the following steps to systemically optimize your site’s URL for SEO:

1. First, modify the structure of URLs as per SEO guidelines and keep it uniform throughout the site. For instance, blog-centric websites should have a different URL structure compared to a global eCommerce website or a social networking site.  
2. Once you fix your site’s URL structure, the next step is to pick the keyword per page.
3. Use HTTPS instead of HTTP for your website to ensure user data safety. HTTPS enhances safety and adds more credibility to your site. Furthermore, Google prefers websites with HTTPS protocols and is more likely to rank these higher than unsecured sites.
4. Reduce the length of URLs and separate words using hyphens. Always use lowercase letters for URLs so that crawls can easily read and access them. Whenever you update your site URLs or add new pages, always use 301 redirects to avoid 404 errors and broken links.
5. Use subfolders instead of subdomains as this affects your SEO. Also, avoid keeping unnecessary folders in your site’s URL structure.

4. Mobile-Friendliness 

You may encounter issues regarding mobile-friendliness and get an error. This means your page isn’t mobile-friendly. It happens for several reasons, such as restrictive robots.txt files, non-responsive web design, slow loading speed and poor site structure. 

Ways To Fix Mobile-Friendliness Issues

1. Initially, you can go to the Google Search Console to discover mobile usability errors in the Mobile Usability section. 
2. Consider mobile devices when designing/redesigning your website. Address navigation and content visibility.
3. Implement Schema.org structured data.
4. Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to find out pages that are slowing down your site’s loading speed. 
5. Utilize browser caching to reduce the load time of your mobile pages. 
6. Use web caching to improve the performance of your website, decrease server load and enhance user experience.
7. Once done with mobile optimization, use Google’s mobile-friendly test to determine if your website is well-optimized for mobile.

5. Website Silo Architecture

Silo website structure is essential to create user-friendly navigation for better SEO. Silo structure allows webmasters to place structured content in the site, ensures page-keyword relevance and eases interlinking. 

Websites with poor silo structures are less likely to get discovered by search robots. Besides, improper silo structure can result in disorganized navigation and poor user experience.

Ways To Fix Mobile Friendliness Issues

It is easy to organize your website’s content in order with the silo website SEO structure. The primary goal behind silo website architecture is to improve it for users, making it easy to navigate and maintain a logical order. 

Below are some steps to follow to create a proper silo structure for your site.

1. Create parent pages as initial pages for your site.
2. Create a set of supporting pages for the initial pages.
3. Precisely plan your website architecture instead of creating pages randomly.
4. Carry out keyword research, then categorize and organize them into categories and subcategories.
5. Perform keyword research for hub pages.
6. Ensure all important pages of your site are reachable within three clicks from the homepage.

6. Canonicalization

Canonicalization is important to enhance the site’s SEO performance. Canonical tags allow the webmaster to inform search engines about the particular URLs that are the original. It prevents issues that often arise due to pages with duplicate content. When canonical tags aren’t placed or improperly added, the search engine fails to determine the master copies of pages.

Ways To Fix Canonicalization Issues

1. Make sure each page refers to itself through canonical when you do pagination for your site.
2. Websites that use hreflang should have URLs referring to themselves through canonical tags.
3. Always add a canonical tag for your homepage that refers to the homepage URL.
4. Manually check your site’s canonical tags, especially for eCommerce sites.

How To Improve Technical SEO and Avoid Potential Issues

To achieve higher rankings on SERPs, improving certain aspects of SEO isn’t sufficient. Technical SEO goes far beyond indexing or user-friendly web design. Webmasters must perform all technical SEO processes ethically to obtain long-term benefits. 

You must take the following things into account to improve your site’s technical SEO:

• Site architecture  
• URL ttructure  
• XML sitemap   
• Structured data   
• Duplicate content 
• 301 redirects  
• JavaScript  
• Canonical tags   
• 404 pages

We recommend following SEO guidelines and rules while creating site architecture, URL structure and other elements of the site. Also, always perform in-depth analysis and audits to discover and fix issues on the website once and for all.