Avoid These 7 Technical SEO Mistakes To Raise Rankings

If your search engine optimization (SEO) plan is not working, it is time to closely examine your fundamental elements. A veteran SEO agency analyzes each page thoroughly to identify the most critical issues.

However, it also helps to know why you are not getting the desired results. These include seven common — but costly — technical optimization mistakes:

• Duplicate content
• Broken, missing, and dead links
• Poor crawl budget management
• Lack of or bad site structure
• Unsecured website<
• Slow site speed
• No site updates

We will expound on these points and, most importantly, provide effective tips to avoid them.

Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

7 Costly Technical SEO Errors and How To Avoid Them

The best SEO campaigns pay attention to every primary element of optimization, especially technical. Failing it means:

• Poor spider crawlability and indexing, which means search engines cannot add your pages to their database, and your target audience cannot find you
• Low domain authority, so you struggle to rank higher than your competitors
• Bad online reputation because of poor user experience (UX)
• Underperforming conversion rates because of low click-through (CTR) or high bounce rates

Fortunately, a good SEO agency can help you uncover these issues through a comprehensive SEO audit, offer recommendations, and fix your site.

Here are seven of the most common ones (and how to prevent them):

     1. Duplicate Content: Create Unique, Relevant Copies

Duplicate content is exactly what you might think it is: having the same copy across different pages or websites. This is not a mortal sin unless you purposely try to manipulate search engines.

It hurts your ranking success, though, by confusing search bots, wasting your crawl budget, and diluting your content. For example, search engines could index the least compelling content or show your pages for the wrong keywords.

Get rid of duplicate content by:

• Maintaining the same content for your mobile and desktop versions.
• If you are doing local SEO, use regional-specific content for every location.
• Identify the best-performing content, then consolidate and redirect the other copies to this page.

     2. Broken, Missing, or Dead Links: Monitor and Fix Them

Problematic links, such as 404 errors and redirects, harm your SEO efforts. It leaves visitors stranded on an unhelpful page, increases the bounce rate, and decreases the overall time spent on your website. Most of all, you miss the chance to boost the rankings of your other pages.

How can you avoid these? Try these link-building strategies:

• Regularly review website content and links to ensure accuracy.
• Establish a process for removing outdated or dead links from your website.
• Update the sitemap when removing old links or modifying some of them.
• Use 301 redirects for permanently removed pages or content.
• Link to orphan pages.

     3. Poor Crawl Budget Management: Streamline Links and Direct Bots 

A crawl budget is the number of pages search bots attempt to visit and index on your website, depending on its popularity and size. Usually, it is not a concern if your site is small.

A mismanaged crawl budget spells trouble once you have hundreds of pages. Search engines cannot keep up and eventually stop indexing valuable content.

To manage this better,

• Optimize page speed and reduce server response time, as slow-loading sites hurt crawl budget optimization.
• Use HTML sitemaps or robots.txt to direct search bots to the most important pages and skip those you do not want to be indexed.
• Structure your website in a way that reduces the deep nesting of pages.
• Avoid excessive internal redirects for linking, as search bots have a limited time to visit each page.

     4. Poor Site Structure: Create an Optimal User Experience

Both search engine spiders and users depend on your site’s structure to understand your niche, navigate several pages, and locate the most important information.

In other words, site structure is necessary for the best user experience and proper indexing.

But how do you build an ideal one? Consider these tips:

• Create an easy-to-navigate website with a clear hierarchy and relevant categories for content. Design silos, for example.
• Include a breadcrumb navigation system in product pages or blog posts, so that users can quickly return to the main page.
• Use schema markup to define the content structure and make it easier for search engine crawlers to access and understand your pages.

     5. Unsecured Website: Ensure It Is HTTPS

Can you run a site using the HTTP protocol? The answer is yes, but you do not want that. First, HTTPS is a ranking signal. Second, many users are smart enough to avoid accessing a less-secure website.

The best way to avoid an HTTP page is to get an SSL certificate for your website and install it. This adds a layer of data encryption to protect visitors’ information, which improves security.

     6. Slow Site Speed: Compress and Streamline Content

Users only take a few seconds to leave your site if it loads too slowly. Worse, because site speed is a ranking factor, a slow one means possibly not getting on the first page of search results.

You can prevent these problems by maintaining a page load speed of no more than three seconds. Here is how to do it:

• Compress images to reduce their size.
• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files to reduce the number of requests sent to your server.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN) to cache static content on different servers worldwide.
• Optimize for mobile devices with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
• Test your site speed with tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

     7. No Site Updates: Implement New Search Engine Guidelines ASAP

Many marketers take the wait-and-see approach when search engines, especially Google, roll out new algorithm updates. Often, this is not the most ideal strategy.

Bouncing back from the negative impact of these changes can take a long time. It can also cost you a lot to reverse the situation.

To prevent this:

• Stay up-to-date on search engine changes and tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.
• Trust only credible sources for updates.
• Perform regular SEO audits and analyses to ensure your changes match the recommendations.
• Analyze competitors to see what works for them and apply it to your website.
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict algorithm updates.

Summing Up

SEO is challenging, and you can definitely expect to make technical mistakes. However, with the right strategies and tools, you can avoid them, quickly fix them, and get back on track to improve your rankings.

The tips mentioned above should help keep your website in better shape. You can also work with Digital Authority Partners (DAP). We ensure your website’s technical structure is optimized for the best possible user experience and results. Call us today to get started.