Technical SEO Mistakes That Can Reduce Traffic

The digital world, especially eCommerce sites that offer products and services, is easily accessible to hundreds of thousands of viewers at once. While millions of people have easy access to such websites, each site owner has to painstakingly focus on specific strategies to keep their site in the limelight—thereby getting noticed by their target groups. It is well understood that it takes lots of effort as well as investments to make such improvements and therefore get the websites ranked. We have mentioned some common technical SEO errors that hurt your rankings.

Once it starts doing well in the search engines, then it is definitely going to increase traffic as well. Therefore, website owners and SEO experts should start optimizing their websites for technical performance. They must remain abreast of every single aspect to avoid all possible damages that might hinder such a website’s proliferation before the specified targets.

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What should you do in a scenario where you might have done everything right and still notice that organic traffic hardly improved? It is high time you conducted a deeper assessment and introspection at that moment. Chances are high for some technical SEO mistakes to bring such tough scenarios. You may need to address them as quickly as possible and diligently avoid their recurrence.

Technical SEO errors on a website mean that the website is crawlable, indexable, and easy for search engines to understand.

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Any website that encounters certain technical issues won’t rank in search engines. The chances are high that they will fail to generate traffic. Here we discuss a few common technical SEO mistakes that can reduce your organic traffic. If these are the issues with your website, you need to take them seriously and act promptly. Keep this key factor in mind: there are no perfect websites, and there is always scope for improvement.

Almost all of them have good scope for improvement to the best extent possible. You will find numerous issues on your websites and when evaluating them. You require the implementation of a concrete plan to resolve such issues at the right time. With an eye on such issues, you will be able to assess which ones you must give instant focus to and which ones to fix thereafter.

Some Major Technical SEO Mistakes Bound to Reduce Traffic

We have enlisted here the 15 most important technical SEO issues that should be addressed as quickly as possible. They not only reduce the website’s organic traffic but also affect its ranking. Know more about them to rectify such issues at the earliest.

1. Not Optimizing the Meta Tags

Meta tags and page descriptions inform search engines what the website’s content is about. Optimizing meta tags thus plays a pivotal role in helping websites improve their search ranking to the greatest extent possible. When optimizing title tags, ensure you place keywords at the beginning of the title. In addition to that, include the keywords naturally in the meta description so that it is found by the search engines.

2. Not Optimizing Your Website Speed

Optimize your website speed unfailingly because 47% of the consumers do expect that a website speed page loads in 2 seconds or less. Most of your prospects don’t have the patience for slower pages nowadays. By optimizing your website’s speed, you can reduce the bounce rate and see your website traffic improve significantly.

3. You Have Duplicate Content Issues

Keep this important factor in consideration: if you have duplicate content on your website, then you are killing your ranking and traffic day by day. Duplicate content is also projected as a mind-killer. Apart from the search engines, your human readers also would not appreciate duplicate content on your website. So, avoid duplicate content on your website.

It is also understandable that by generating high-quality, fresh content for loyal readers, you will attract many more potential readers. Nobody would like to read and reread your repetitive content. Before being uploaded, content is to be checked by the editors to correct grammatical errors and ensure it contains no factual errors.

4. Your Website Isn’t Mobile-Friendly

You should ensure that your website is optimized for small devices, particularly various types of smartphones, which are now widely used and accessible to everyone. Research indicates that 57% of all online traffic comes from multiple categories of smartphones or tablets. Take advantage of the benefits of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool and run a report to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.

If your website is not mobile-friendly, you are certainly going to miss out on significant online traffic. Optimizing your website for mobile devices is an important part of technical SEO. You should therefore never ever overlook it.

5. Google Doesn’t Crawl and Index Your Pages Correctly

Whatever efforts you make, they will go in vain if Google doesn’t crawl and index your pages properly. You should, therefore, check it regularly whether your pages are crawled and indexed at regular intervals or not. Traffic also helps to get your pages indexed quickly. That is why it is encouraged to share pages on different social media channels.

6. Prefer people over search engines

While writing content, keep a list of keywords in mind, but make sure you write for your users, not just search engines. Your business needs customers, not search engines. Search engines help you generate traffic, but your content helps you to convert the traffic into paying customers.

When you target your prospects, your readers will love your content. On the other hand, search engines will also rank you higher if your content is user-friendly. You should also learn how to create content for SEO purposes.

7. Your site doesn’t use SSL (HTTPS).

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol. Websites use SSL to secure the traffic between browsers and web servers. Secure Sockets Layer is essential because the information users send over the Internet is passed from computer to computer before reaching the destination server.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is used for secure communication over a computer network. A website with technical issues won’t perform well, so shift to HTTPS now.

8. Secure your Website from “404 Not Found”

If your website has errors like “404 Not Found”, be ready for them to affect both your user experience and your website’s crawlability. If any of your web pages link to a now-deleted page or misspelled URL, then you should either remove those broken links or point them elsewhere.

A website with technical SEO mistakes will neither rank nor drive traffic, so identify the errors and get them resolved.

9. Robots.txt and sitemap.xml files missing

Robots.txt files and XML sitemaps are used to inform search bots on how to crawl a website. The sitemap is a list of all links on a website you want Google to index. On the other hand, robots.txt informs the bots that they are allowed to crawl a particular website and which pages to ignore.

These are technical SEO issues that may prevent search engines from ranking your website. So, identify technical SEO issues and resolve them as quickly as possible.

10. Misleading URL Structure

Now is the high time to learn about URL structure. URL optimization is a vital factor that can influence your SEO. SEO experts and webmasters ensure that your primary keyword is included in the URL. Apart from this, you may also try to keep the URLs relatively short.

Make sure technical SEO parameters influence your organic ranking and generate traffic.

11. AMP Pages

AMP pages are a custom web development framework that helps speed up loading times on mobile devices. Users are primarily provided with a fast experience on a page that serves as a stripped-down version of your primary page. You can assess how much content is accessed on mobile devices. Hence, a bad mobile visit may lead people off your site altogether. Although the primary benefit of AMP pages is speed, a solid AMP page can help you in many other ways.

If you are running a website with larger quantities of content, then AMP pages are the best option for you. You may review the examples of Technical SEO mistakes. As server performance improves, there is an opportunity for you to make your content accessible to AMP-only search engines. Also, it will be a boon to you if you are an e-commerce site, as it will put you in a position to achieve a higher conversion rate.

12. Schema Structure

The code used to provide clear information to search engines to understand your content is Schema Structure. In the absence of a strong Schema Structure, there will be a lack of clarity or keywords in your content. Also, the schema isn’t supposed to be your content, but what it means.

For example, think you write the name of a product involved in your content. In that case, the schema structure won’t just highlight what it looks like but also associate the feature with what it can be used for and how valuable its usability is, which will naturally strengthen search results for products similar to it. You must attach meaning in the markup when writing your SEO keywords. As a result, it allows more precision when popping up in the search engine. Improper schema structure is one of the top 15 common technical SEO issues, which can hurt your website’s rankings and traffic.

13. Unoptimized Images

Who can disagree that a significant area for memory is within images on a website? Pictures, videos, and other rich media are considered essential for ranking. This fact also can’t be denied: they are memory-intensive. But there are different ways around it. First, make it in your order of priority to use JPEG and PNG file types for images.

Next, you are supposed to ensure that the images you run are optimized and that uploaded images are only at the desired size. The size of the images is directly proportional to the amount of memory space. Image optimization is mandatory for a website.

14. Content Delivery Network

If you want your website to be visited by people worldwide, consider a content delivery network. It is only possible when several servers have your website available for download into the browser. The pages render from the closest server when a user visits your website.

As page delivery speeds up for users, your website gets faster and makes sense for global businesses that look for speed worldwide. However, you could do without a content delivery network and have a server only in your area of operation if you are local. It is one of the technical SEO mistakes you need to fix today.

15. Missing Alt Tags

Missing alt tags is one of the technical SEO mistakes that kill a website’s organic ranking and traffic. While uploading an image, you must write an alt tag, as it is an SEO opportunity.

The image alt tag attribute helps search engines index a page by telling the bot what the image is about. This technical SEO mistake ruins your site’s experience. Read this post to understand Why Technical SEO Issues Are Costing You Organic Traffic.

Summary: Technical SEO Mistakes

If your website carries technical SEO flaws, then it is next to impossible for you to rank and generate more traffic. Countless technical errors can be fixed beforehand, but the ones mentioned above can literally ruin your website. If such errors are on your website, get them removed and rectified as quickly as possible.

Technical SEO is an important part of website optimization. Make sure you don’t let the 15 technical SEO mistakes mentioned above reduce your website’s traffic. Try to fix them now and keep doing the technical SEO audits regularly to optimize your website and therefore keep it technically perfect and robust as well.

We at SEO Content India offer a range of services, including SEO services in India, SMO services (especially Facebook marketing), and Content Writing Services, to name a few.