The 5 Most Important Technical SEO Mistakes To Avoid

The best search engine optimization (SEO) strategy relies on the success of three crucial elements: usability, relevance, and authority. Technical SEO can help with all three of these elements. A website becomes less crawlable and less able to provide a good user experience (UX) without it.

A technical SEO agency ensures your optimization tactics are sound by avoiding these huge mistakes:

1. Incomplete or poor technical SEO audit
2. Content problems
3. Slow page speed

A tighter technical SEO plan often leads to higher rankings and better organic search traffic. Read below for more ideas on how to do it right. Let’s go!

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

1. Incomplete or Poor Technical SEO Audit

Optimization problems and their effects take a while to manifest. Thorough technical SEO audits would have revealed them early, but not many people put in the up-front effort to find them. This means the issues become more complex, costlier, and take longer to fix, usually leading to missed revenues and tighter cash flow. 

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has discussed the technical SEO audit basics. This article cites the most critical elements it—and you—should focus on and why they matter:

With a meticulous technical audit, you proactively uncover the most impactful website issues, fix them before they worsen, and enhance your search position.

2. Content Problems

The new search engine algorithm updates boil down to one reason: these sites want you to make good content. A robust content marketing plan handles that. 

However, you might already have a technical optimization issue if they are still not converting or you fall down the ranks despite following the best practices. Usually, content problems happen due to the following:

• Duplicate content 
• Thin content
• Indexing of AI chat conversations

Let us discuss each below.

     a. Duplicate Content 

Duplicate content happens when two or more pages share similar or exact content. Here are a few common examples:

• A professional services site offering the same services uses almost the same content for its location pages, tweaking a few keywords and the locations’ names. 
• An affiliate or dropshipping company copies the same product descriptions for their offers.
• A growing business builds a more brand-centric website by copying all its existing pages. 
• An enterprise website creates different language versions for its pages. 

Technically, search engines do not penalize duplicate content unless their reviewers believe there is an intent to manipulate the results. For example, Google might initiate manual action if several pages look identical. 

However, you still want to avoid such types of content because they contribute to lower search rankings and poor organic traffic. Search engines might rank the poor-converting pages instead of the pages you want to promote.

If not, you dilute your rank, spreading the search position of your content among multiple pages. Duplicate content also often introduces technical SEO problems, such as keyword cannibalization. 

Fortunately, you have many possible solutions besides canonical tags and 301 redirects. These include the following:

• Consolidating similar or identical pages in favor of the best-ranking one
• Deleting the poorest-performing version
• Creating higher-quality, more unique content
• Giving each page a unique URL structure
• Avoiding creating separate mobile and desktop site versions

     b. Thin Content

Thin pages have little unique value, meaning they have almost no SEO benefit. They contribute to poor UX because users spend more time searching for good information. It also breeds distrust in your brand and search engines, which does not bode well for your businesses.

For these reasons, thin content often results in lower search ranking, organic traffic, and conversions. 

A technical SEO agency resolves this problem similarly to duplicate content. It also works closely with your content marketing team to produce high-quality content. These pages follow industry guidelines, such as E-E-A-T.

     c. Indexing of AI Chat Conversations 

Recently, eagle-eyed Google users discovered that the powerful search engine showed Bard results to queries. Bard is Google’s generative AI bot and a direct ChatGPT competitor. 

Although it makes digital marketing easier, leaked chat conversations could cause several ethical questions and industry violations. Imagine if your chats included personally identifiable information or classified data. 

Because the issue is new, neither Google nor veteran marketers provide the best solutions. The search engine strongly recommends checking for public links through https://bard.google.com/sharing.

Additionally, choose a technical SEO partner who integrates AI well into your digital marketing workflow and keeps themselves updated with industry news.

3. Slow Page Speed

Inattention or a poor attention span happens for many reasons such as age differences. For consistent online users, the internet’s accessibility is a culprit, meaning you have less time than ever to catch their attention. 

Want to know the latest trends and news? They go to social media. Does your page load slowly? Your target audience simply closes it and proceeds to your competitors’ sites.

Good content converts, but optimal page speed puts your site’s foot in the door. The problem is that you have three seconds or less to do that. How do you meet it? 

A technical SEO agency first checks your data via an audit:

• Do you have poor server infrastructure? 
• What are your core web vitals and page speed insights?
• Does your site contain pages that steal the crawl budget?
• Are your assets, such as image files, large?
• Does your code have unnecessary characters or scripts?
• Do you have malware? 

The next steps then depend on the results of the audit. For example, edge computing is a revolutionary approach to delivering content faster to your audience. Processing data closer to where you generate it decreases latency, improves application interaction, and offloads more of your server’s workload.

PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals also offer recommendations to enhance page speed and performance. These include compressing large media files or loading the most critical elements or contents first. 

Summing Up

An effective technical SEO strategy requires avoiding the common mistakes above. Working with an experienced technical SEO agency allows you to repair these issues sooner and reap the long-term dividends of an optimized campaign. 

A complete audit reveals problems that could drag your ranking down. Fixing duplicate content allows you to improve your brand’s authority and enhance conversions. Meanwhile, increasing page speed boosts UX.

DAP is an award-winning digital marketing team that helps you build a solid optimization foundation. We tighten your technical SEO to unlock more organic search visibility through higher rankings and better crawlability. 

Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn more about our strategies.