What are the most common technical SEO issues that lower your search engine rankings?

1 Broken links

Broken links are links that lead to non-existent or inaccessible pages, either internally or externally. They create a bad user experience, increase your bounce rate, and signal to search engines that your site is poorly maintained or outdated. To avoid broken links, you should regularly audit your site using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, or Ahrefs, and fix or remove any links that return 404 or other error codes.

2 Slow loading speed

Loading speed is a crucial factor for both user satisfaction and search engine ranking. Users tend to abandon sites that take too long to load, and search engines penalize slow sites in their algorithms. To improve your loading speed, you should optimize your images, minify your code, use a caching plugin, enable compression, and choose a fast and reliable hosting provider. You can measure your loading speed using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom.

3 Duplicate content

Duplicate content is content that appears on more than one URL on your site or on other sites. It can confuse search engines about which page to rank and how to distribute the link authority. It can also lead to content cannibalization, where your pages compete with each other for the same keywords. To prevent duplicate content, you should use canonical tags, 301 redirects, noindex tags, or parameter handling, depending on the source and type of duplication. You can identify duplicate content using tools like Siteliner, Copyscape, or Moz.

4 Missing or poorly written meta tags

Meta tags are snippets of code that provide information about your pages to search engines and users. They include the title tag, the meta description, the heading tags, and the schema markup. Missing or poorly written meta tags can affect your click-through rate, your relevance, and your ranking. To optimize your meta tags, you should follow the best practices for each tag, such as using your target keywords, writing unique and compelling descriptions, using the right length and format, and adding structured data.

5 Mobile unfriendliness

Mobile unfriendliness is the lack of responsiveness or usability of your site on mobile devices. It can harm your user experience, your conversion rate, and your ranking, especially since Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it prioritizes the mobile version of your site over the desktop one. To make your site mobile-friendly, you should use a responsive design, avoid pop-ups and intrusive ads, use legible fonts and buttons, and test your site on different devices and browsers. You can check your mobile-friendliness using tools like Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google Search Console, or BrowserStack.

6 Crawling and indexing issues

Crawling and indexing issues are problems that prevent search engines from accessing, reading, or storing your pages in their databases. They can result from errors in your robots.txt file, your sitemap, your HTTP status codes, your site architecture, or your server configuration. They can cause your pages to be missing, outdated, or incorrectly ranked in the search results. To fix crawling and indexing issues, you should verify your robots.txt file, update your sitemap, use the right status codes, improve your site structure, and monitor your server performance. You can diagnose crawling and indexing issues using tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Screaming Frog.