Technical SEO Mistakes Which Can Reduce Traffic
The digital world especially eCommerce sites dealing with products and services is easily accessible to hundreds of thousands of viewers in one go. While millions of people have easy access to such websites, each site owner has to painstakingly focus on certain strategies that keep them in the limelight—thus getting noticed by their respective 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.
Once it starts doing well in the search engines, then definitely it is going to increase traffic as well. Therefore, website owners and SEO experts should start optimizing their websites technically. 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 that you do a deeper assessment and introspection at that particular moment. Chances are high for some technical SEO mistakes to bring such tough scenarios. You may need to get them addressed as quickly as possible and also diligently avoid their repetition.
Technical SEO errors for a website mean that that particular website is crawlable, indexable, and easy to understand for the search engines.
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Any website encountering certain technical issues won’t rank on the search engines. Chances are high for they are bound to fail to generate traffic. Here we discuss a few common technical SEO mistakes that can reduce your organic traffic. If such are the issues with your website, you need to take serious note of them for your timely action. Keep this key factor into consideration there are no perfect websites without any scope for improvement.
Almost all of them have a good scope to be improved 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 for such issues to be resolved at the right time. With an eye on such issues, you will be able to assess which are the ones for which you must give an instant focus and the best 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 the ranking level. Know more about them to rectify such issues at the earliest.
1. Not Optimizing the Meta Tags
Meta tags and descriptions of a page do inform search engines what the contents are all about on the website. Optimizing meta tags thus plays a pivotal role in helping websites improve their search ranking to a greatest extent possible. While optimizing title tags you must ensure using keywords at the beginning of the title itself. In addition to that, include the keywords naturally on 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 the slower pages nowadays. By optimizing the speed of your website, you will attain success in decreasing the bounce rate thereby you can see the traffic to your website improve significantly.
3. You Have Duplicate Content Issues
Keep this important factor into consideration if you have duplicate content on your website, then you are killing your ranking so the traffic day by day. Duplicate content is also projected as a mind-killer. Apart from the search engines, your human readers too would also not appreciate the duplicate content on your website. So, avoid duplicate content on your websites.
It is also understandable that by generating high-quality and fresh content for loyal readers, you are going to seek the attention of many more potential readers too. Nobody would like to read and re-read your contents which are repetitive. Before being uploaded, contents are to be checked by the editors to let them correct grammatically and to ensure that they don’t have any factual errors.
4. Your Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly
You should ensure optimizing your website for small devices, particularly various types of smartphones which are now commonly in use and accessible by everybody nowadays. Researches indicate that 57% of all online traffic comes from multiple categories of smartphones or tablets. Avail of the benefits of Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool and run a report to check whether your website is mobile-friendly or not.
In case your website is not a mobile-friendly one, then you are certainly going to miss huge 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 do, it would go in vain if Google doesn’t crawl and index your page 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, you should have the list of keywords in mind, but make sure you write for your users, nor 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. The secure sockets layer is essential as the users send the information on the Internet is passed from computer to computer to get to 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 carries errors like “404 Not Found”, then be ready 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 engage traffic, so find out errors and get them resolved.
9. Robots.txt and sitemap.xml files missing
Robotx.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, which may prevent your website from search engines from securing ranking. So, identify technical SEO issues and resolve them as quickly as possible.
10. Misleading URL Structure
Now it is high time to know about URL structure. URL optimization is one of the vital factors that can influence your SEO. SEO experts and webmasters ensure to include your primary keyword in the URL. Apart from this, you may also try to keep the URLs relatively short.
Meet all technical SEO parameters to influence your organic ranking and generate traffic.
11. AMP Pages
AMP pages are a custom web-development framework that acts as a catalyst to generate the speed of the loading time on mobile devices. Users are chiefly provided with the fast experience with a page that functions as a stripped-down rendition of your primary page. You can assess how much content is accessed via mobile. 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 benefit 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 go through the Technical SEO mistakes examples. With server performance getting improved, there is an opportunity for you to make your content accessible on AMP-only search engines. Also, it will prove to be a boon to you if you are an e-commerce site, as it will put you in a position to attain 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 tell you what your content is 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 associate the feature, what it can be used for, and how much worth is its usability, which will naturally strengthen the search results for products similar to that. 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 the ranking and traffic of your website.
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 linked as essentialities for ranking. This fact also can’t be denied that 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 should be through an optimizer and that uploaded images are only at the desirable size. The size of the images is directly proportional to the space of the memory. Image optimization is mandatory for a website.
14. Content Delivery Network
If you are looking to have your website visited by people worldwide, you need to look at the 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 their website.
With the delivery of the page speeding up to the user, your website gets faster and makes sense for global business that looks for speed across the world. However, you could do without a content delivery network and have a server only in your area of operation, in case you are a local.
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 works to inform the search engines to index a page by telling the bot what the image is all about. This technical SEO mistake ruins your site’s experience.
Summary: Technical SEO Mistakes
If your website carries technical SEO flaws, then it is next to impossible for you to rank that and generate more traffic. A countless number of technical errors would be 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 that you don’t let the above-mentioned 15 technical SEO mistakes decrease the traffic to your website. 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 different types of services including SEO services in India and SMO Services, especially Facebook marketing services; and Content Writing Services to name a few.
This place seems a great source of knowledge and I appreciate for every blog post you write. worth reading all about SEO and digital marketing services. The technical SEO mistakes you mentioned in the post can definitely ruin your organic traffic and ranking in the first place.
Hi Saikrishna,
These 5 technical SEO mistakes in the post can definitely ruin a website’s organic traffic and ranking in the first place. So, avoid them.
Hello,
your article is very useful and valuable for us. We understand that these 5 Technical SEO Mistakes Which Can Consistently Ruin Ranking & Reduce Traffic.
Apart from these SEO mistakes, there are many others which also can do the same.
Hi Joy,
Yes, we agreed. We have mentioned only 5 major Technical SEO Mistakes. There are many others as well.
Hey!!!
The article is very good and helpful for us.
We need to keep in mind these 5 technical SEO mistakes to save our website from getting devalued. Apart from reducing traffic, they will also reduce the organic ranking.
Hi Jenni,
Yeah. These 5 technical SEO mistakes can ruin your website. Be updated
Hi Team,
I find this blog useful and informative for me and my colleagues.
We should take care of these 5 technical SEO mistakes, otherwise, our websites will face the doom.
Hi Saurabh,
Thanks a lot for your elaborate feedback. These 5 technical mistakes can ruin your ranking and thus traffic, so take care.