7 Top Technical SEO Mistakes You Can Easily Avoid or Fix

Search engine optimization (SEO) is difficult because you must choose the correct type. Technical SEO is among the most crucial, which means no business should go without it. So how do you flawlessly apply it?

Here are seven mistakes you must avoid when building your Las Vegas technical SEO strategy:

1. Missing your market's search intent.
2. Neglecting crawling and indexing.
3. Lacking or poor backlinks.
4. Misusing content keywords.
5. Leaving meta tags and schema alone.
6. Creating a chaotic website structure and UX.
7. Duplicating content too much.

There is a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

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1. Forgetting to Match Your Market’s Search Intent

The term “search intent” is more commonly used in the context of content and on-page SEO, but it also has a place in technical SEO. In this case, search intent is a feature of user experience. It also includes how people interact with your content, website, product, or service and what they get from it.

When you learn to match the search intent of your target market (e.g., buying or comparing an item), you make it much easier for them to find your content. It plays into technical SEO by using keywords or phrases that match search intent in your meta tags for easier indexing.

2. Not Being Proactive with Crawling and Indexing

Online search works like this: you create the content, publish it, and then search engine crawler bots go through your website to find and index useful content. This happens over time, but you can speed up the process by making and submitting an XML sitemap to a search engine.

Create a robots.txt file to guide bots through your website so that only the pages that are vital for crawling and indexing are checked. Failing to do this does not hurt your SEO as much as it greatly slows optimization. It is good for Las Vegas technical SEO to have initiative and be proactive.

3. Having an Empty or Low-Quality Backlink Profile

In the context of Las Vegas technical SEO, who you are is tied to who you know, or more precisely, who knows you. The value of a high-quality backlink cannot be overstated because it shows the worth of your content to people who matter in the field — the experts.

A backlink from an authoritative website in the locality, say Fox5Vegas or the Las Vegas Sun, is a powerful marketing tool in technical SEO. If you leave your backlink profile bare or full of spam links, your SEO score takes a huge hit. When that happens, your ranking sinks, and you struggle to attract traffic and leads to your website.

4. Not Using the Right Target Keywords in Content

To expound on the point of search intent, the types and quality of keywords that you use matter since not all of them mean the same to your target market. You need variety to cover as many possible words, terms, and phrases as feasible to get and increase traffic.

Imagine if a surf and turf restaurant only used ‘shrimp’ and ‘fish’ as their target keywords. Even if those are their specialty dishes, they are not likely to attract a wide audience with such broad and generic search terms. Be more specific with your keywords by using a range of types of words.

5. Leaving Your Meta Tags and Schema Untouched

A meta tag is a short line of HTML code that defines the data within your pages and is one of the defining aspects of technical SEO. In a nutshell, it captures the gist of the content. It can also define specific elements, such as the title or URL of the page.

Meta tags are essential in technical SEO because they give search engine bots a better idea of the content they crawl. Meta tags allow bots to index content more accurately, which helps you rank better on search. If bots find your content relevant to user queries, they include it in the search engine results pages. Schema markup, or structured data, is the language that search engines use to comprehend the content on your website. Guidance from Las Vegas technical SEO experts greatly helps with this.  

6. Making Your Website Structure and UX Chaotic

As your business and website grow, your pages will multiply. This can make it hard to coherently and precisely manage them all. However, you must do this because a cluttered website has many issues that impact the user experience (UX).

First, it makes crawling and indexing work against you instead of for your benefit. This is similar to how optimizing page speed for technical SEO is crucial to great UX. A website that loads fast is often simple, organized, and uncluttered, making it able to give the best UX possible. 

7. Keeping Too Much Similar or Duplicate Content

Though duplicate pages have some utility (e.g., having a separate version for desktop and mobile), they are not good for SEO, at least not when you leave all of them exposed. Generally, it is best to remove pages that are too similar to one another in order to keep the content unique.

If you have to keep multiples of the same content, make sure to use the canonical tag on the version that you want to be indexed. This helps search engines identify the page with the latest or most relevant version of the content and helps keep other pages hidden.

Summing Up

Making mistakes in technical SEO is part of the learning process, and you often cannot avoid all of them at once. You can, however, apply best practices from Las Vegas technical SEO experts to ensure that you do it right. You may even hire an agency to take care of your SEO needs.

Steps to better technical SEO, such as using meta tags and schema markup, are challenging when in the hands of a novice. Critical mistakes can be costly but with the right expert guidance, they do not have to be. 

Need help powering up your technical SEO strategy? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.