What Are The Critical SEO Issues You Should Be Aware Of?
There are a lot of SEO matters that every business has to deal with but what are the critical SEO issues you should be aware of? Not every company has the resources to deal with all the tasks that you could have on your SEO to-do list. When you work in website design you need to be aware of the priorities and importance of the various aspects of search engine optimization so that you work on or monitor the most important items first and get to the rest when you can.
So with that idea in mind we have comprised a list of the critical SEO issues we feel every business should be aware of and should focus their time on first.
Critical SEO Issues
There are three basic categories we will slot tasks into: engagement, technical and mobile. Most people spend time and money on engagement, which makes sense as visitors and clicks help drive your businesses profitability. However, you cannot ignore the importance of technical aspects of SEO along with how mobile factors into the game when creating your list of important issues to be reviewed.
Engagement Issues
- Conversion Rates – Conversion rates are often the bread and butter for a site. If people aren’t converting at a reasonable rate then your site has some leaks that need to be fixed. Often content is the problem because when people come to your site looking for something they either aren’t finding it or don’t like what they find. Your content needs to help fill the need a customer has and if it isn’t then your conversions suffer.
- Social Shares – Social shares tend to be related to conversion rates because they are similar indicators on different platforms. If people aren’t sharing your content on social sites often that is because there is a low perceived value in it. That means you need to review topics, writing style, headlines and more to ensure that not only are you putting content out there people want or need, but also that it is done in an engaging manner that gets people interested and talking about it.
- Interface Issues – Are your call-to-action buttons and social share buttons on display and easily found? Related to the two above points, sometimes the user-interface can be the culprit because bad web design can create issues with both conversion rates and social shares. People need to be properly directed on a website to see what needs to be seen and be able to find what they want. If your site suffers from the above issues you should review metrics like time on page and bounce rates to try and determine when and where users jump ship. It might be a design flaw on your site versus the content.
Technical Issues
- Site Speed – Speed kills and in the case of websites it is slow speeds that kill your rankings. Google has been very clear that site speed is a ranking factor and that is related to the fact that faster sites have better engagement metrics. If your site takes longer than three seconds to load then it is time to make some changes.
- Duplicate Content – While there currently aren’t penalties for having duplicate content, it still can affect rankings as you have multiple pieces of content competing for rank.
- Site Indexing – Search engines need to be able to index your entire site because you want all content and links taken into account for your rankings. There are a few technical issues that can get in the way of a complete crawl like tag issues, problems with the robotos.txt file, or even server problems.
- Link Issues – When you have improperly configured redirects there can be issues that cause lower rankings and loss of traffic. When new pages are added, old pages are removed, or you move things around issues can occur. A site audit might be in order to ensure everything is working properly and you have not created unnecessary redirect or looping issues. You also want to check on broken external links.
- Tag Issues – Many sites have issues with duplicate Meta descriptions, missing Meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, missing title tags, multiple H1 tags, missing H1, and even duplicate content in H1 and title tags. These tag issues can add up to bring you down.
Mobile Issues
- Mobile Friendly Site – Google has said that a mobile friendly site will rank better and they mean it. You need a site that is optimized for the mobile world and you need it now otherwise Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative will cause your rankings to drop.
- Mobile Friendly Content – Along with your mobile friendly site, mobile geared content is a must. Typically this relates to the user interface and navigation because with a smaller screen it is harder to tap buttons or links and images and other media needs to be considered from a small-screen perspective. If people can’t digest your content on a mobile device then they will go somewhere that they can.
The bottom line is that they are a ridiculous amount of SEO factors to keep track of. These are the critical SEO issues you should be aware of and should monitor at the minimum. However you also need to remember that SEO changes just as peoples wants and needs change so you need to keep up-to-date if you want to continue to be successful.
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