A Series on SEO Site Health - Site Technical Issues

The other day I started a series of posts talking about how to tune your website if you are starting to sense that you are losing SEO ranking. Our sites stagnate over time and without replacing the car’s oil and changing out the air filter, your site is guaranteed to drag. Today is the second post in the series - and we are going to focus on the technical issues that will dramatically drop your ranking.

As a reminder, I consult with organizations and I’m giving away the tips and tricks of how I engage with companies and organizations just like yours. In the last year alone I’ve worked with bespoke food delivery companies in Seattle and Denver, Homeless shelters, Soup Kitchens, and international aid organizations. And if you’d like help with your organic search rankings, I’d be happy to do a free consultation with you.

Technical issues! GAH! The dreaded bane of all existence. Sure, keywords. Sure, evergreen content. But CODE? And while doing a fullon scrub under the furniture might require coding, there are probably some really significant things that you can do without a developer.?

Issue #2 - Technical Issues

Let’s check a few things before we have a break down and find ourselves in a sobbing mess. Shall we? Do you have any broken links throughout the site? HOW CAN I KNOW I HAVE 500 pages of content! Do a one time scan of your site over at deadlinkchecker.com. What about your SSL certificate, is it in valid working order? (When you go to your site is it https:// and does it have a padlock?) What about your header tags on all your pages? You need to be using only 1 H1 tag for the main title, followed by a logical hierarchy of H2 tags for primary sections of the content, H3’s for subheadings… etc. And yes, this makes a difference.

And what about page load times. I could depress you with terms like time to first contentful paint or time to interactive… but forget all that, is the page loading quickly - are your Google Lighthouse or Pagespeed scores RED? Here’s a screenshot of the site I’m currently working on. Newsflash, 20 seconds for the largest contentful paint is not good. (This one is easy - It’s a massive video…)

But take a deep breath. This is doable. Please notice we haven’t started paying a developer $250 an hour yet, so please get your kleenex and let’s keep going.

90% of the speed issues that I see can be easily fixed by these three magic tricks:

1. Lazy Loading
2. Image Optimization
3. Caching

I’m not going to explain each of these - Google each one and then install a plugin within your CMS that does these things for you. I will say just how sad it is that no one knows how to image optimize for the web anymore. That 800 pixel wide 400k jpg can be flipped into a 25k AVIF or even WebP file. Your content editor needs to learn how to optimize an image correctly. It’s not critical to the load time of your site, it’s critical to your search rankings…?

Let’s summarize:?

• Slow Page Speed: A website that loads slowly, especially on mobile, can significantly hurt rankings.
• Broken Links: Internal or external links that lead to 404 pages create a poor user experience.
• Missing HTTPS: Not having an SSL certificate (e.g., your site uses HTTP instead of HTTPS) can reduce rankings.
• Poor Mobile Optimization: If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, Google will rank it lower, as mobile-first indexing is now standard. (next post)
• Improper Use of Meta Tags: Missing or poorly optimized title tags, meta descriptions, or headers.

Alright, let’s check back in on our list of the ten things that we should be focusing on in order to overhaul our website and get it running quickly again:

1. Low-quality Content - CHECK
2. Site Technical Issues - CHECK
3. Mobile Unfriendliness??
4. Weak User Experience
5. Non-existent Backlinks
6. Terrible On Page SEO
7. Lack of Freshness
8. Competition
9. Poor Engagement Signals
10. Poor Keyword Targeting

With that, you have made it through two days of SEO optimization cheats and crib sheets. Onward into the breach dear friends.