SEO Issues: Categories, Definition, and The Best Practices

Have you ever implemented SEO to your site but unfortunately it impacts nothing on the website performance? Do you know why that does not work? Do you encounter SEO issues and how to fix SEO issues? If you are related to those questions, this article is for you.

SEO issues often appear when you implemented strategies to your site. Several common SEO issues can negatively impact a website's ranking and overall performance. In this article, we will discuss the different categories of SEO issues and how to address them.

SEO Issue Categories and The Best Practices

To help you understand all SEO issues that might affect your site, it is better to categorize them into several groups. These categories are based on where the issue appeared. Here is the list.

Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO issues are related to the technical aspects of a website that can impact its visibility on search engines. These issues can range from site speed to broken links and crawl errors.

Technical SEO issues can significantly impact a website's ranking and visibility on search engines, as well as the user experience. To ensure a website's success, it's essential to identify and fix technical SEO issues.

Picture 1: Illustration of technical SEO issues

Common technical SEO issues and their impact on website ranking:

Site Speed: Site speed is one of the essential technical SEO factors that can impact a website's ranking on search engines. A slow-loading website can negatively impact the user experience, leading to a high bounce rate and low dwell time. Google considers site speed as a ranking factor, and slower websites are often penalized in search results.
Mobile Responsiveness: Mobile responsiveness is another crucial technical SEO factor that can impact a website's ranking. With more users accessing websites through mobile devices, Google has started to prioritize mobile-responsive websites in search results.
Crawl Errors: Crawl errors occur when search engine bots are unable to access a website's pages. These errors can be caused by broken links, server errors, or incorrect robots.txt files. Crawl errors can negatively impact a website's ranking and visibility on search engines.
Broken Links: Broken links are links that lead to non-existent pages on a website. These links can negatively impact the user experience and lead to a high bounce rate.
XML Sitemap Issues: XML sitemaps are essential for search engine bots to crawl a website's pages. XML sitemap issues can negatively impact a website's visibility on making the crawler harder to understand the site.

How to fix technical SEO issues

Site Speed: Website owners can optimize their website's speed by compressing images, minifying code, and enabling browser caching.
Mobile Responsiveness: Website owners can ensure that their website is mobile-responsive by using responsive design or building a separate mobile website.
Crawl Errors: Website owners can fix crawl errors by using tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix issues, fixing broken links, and ensuring that the robots.txt file is correct.
Broken Links: Website owners can fix broken links by using tools like Google Search Console to identify and fix links or by using a broken link checker tool.
XML Sitemap Issues: Website owners can fix XML sitemap issues by ensuring that the sitemap is up to date and contains all of the website's pages.

Those are the technical SEO issues and how to fix them. Knowing this insight will be very nice to optimize your site.

Content-Related Issues

Content-related SEO issues refer to problems related to the content on a website that can impact its visibility and ranking on search engines. These issues can include duplicate content, thin content, and keyword stuffing. It's essential to identify and fix these issues to ensure that the website's content is optimized for search engines.

List of content-related SEO issues

Duplicate Content: Duplicate content occurs when identical or similar content appears on multiple pages on a website or across different websites. Duplicate content can bring a negative impact on a website's ranking as search engines may not know which version of the content to index and rank.
Thin Content: Thin content refers to low-quality content that does not provide value to the user. Pages with thin content may not rank well on search engines as they do not provide the information that the user is looking for.
Missing meta information: the search engine algorithms may not be able to fully understand the content and its relevance to user search queries. Additionally, if the meta information is missing, users may be less likely to click on the link

Solutions to fix content-related SEO issues

Duplicate Content: Website owners can fix duplicate content issues by redirecting duplicate pages to the original page, using canonical tags, or removing the duplicate pages altogether.
Thin Content: Website owners can fix thin content issues by adding more valuable and informative content to the webpage or merging pages with similar content.
Missing meta information: make sure all pages have a clear meta title and description. Also, make it unique for every page.

Off-Page SEO Issues

Off-page SEO refers to the actions taken outside of the website that can impact its search engine ranking. Off-page SEO issues are often caused by factors beyond the control of the website owner, such as backlinks and social media presence.

Common off-page SEO issues

Poor quality backlinks: poor quality backlinks can come from spammy or irrelevant websites and can harm the website's ranking.
Social media negativity: Negative social media sentiment can also harm a website's ranking, as search engines may view it as an indication that the website is not trustworthy
Negative reviews: Negative reviews can also harm a website's ranking, particularly for local businesses that rely on local search engine optimization.

The best practices

To fix off-page SEO issues, website owners can focus on building high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative sources, monitoring and managing their social media presence and addressing negative reviews by responding to them in a professional and helpful manner.

Local SEO Issues

Local SEO refers to the optimization of a website to improve its visibility in local search results. Local SEO is particularly important for businesses that rely on local customers, such as restaurants and retail stores.

Picture 2: Illustration of local listing on SERP.

Common local SEO issues

Incorrect information on local directory listings: Incorrect or inconsistent business information can harm the website's ranking by confusing search engines and potential customers
lack of local keyword: Lack of local keyword optimization can also harm the website's ranking by making it less relevant to local search queries
poor reviews on local review sites: Poor reviews on local review sites can also harm the website's ranking by reducing the website's trustworthiness.

How to Fix Local Issues

To fix local SEO issues, website owners can ensure that their business information is correct and consistent across all local directory listings, optimize their website for local keywords, and actively monitor and manage their reviews on local review sites.

By fixing these issues, website owners can improve their local search engine ranking and attract more local customers to their business.

Extra Tips

Run a site audit regularly to spot crucial SEO issues that happen on your site. You can use Sequence to do it and schedule the site audit to run regularly. The results are quite complete so that you can determine the corrective action.

Picture 3: Site Audit feature in Sequence Stats.

By scheduling your site audit, you will be kept informed and up to date on your website's health.

Conclusion

In conclusion, SEO issues can have a significant impact on a website's ranking and traffic. By understanding the different categories of SEO issues, you can take steps to identify and address these issues in order to improve your website's visibility in search results.

By following ethical and sustainable SEO practices and regularly monitoring their website for issues, website owners can maintain a strong search engine ranking and attract more traffic to their sites.

Addressing SEO issues may require some effort, but the benefits of higher search engine visibility and increased traffic make it a worthwhile investment.

For more SEO tool benefits, register to Sequence and enjoy the free trial!