Different ways to identify technical SEO problems on your website

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves making changes to the content and to the structure of your website in order to improve the performance of your website on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The ultimate aim of this is to increase organic traffic to your website, by raising your profile online and increasing click throughs. Technical SEO plays an important role in this, but what are the problems that can occur? And what are the different ways to identify technical SEO problems on your website?

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is an important part of any optimisation process for your website. This can help to improve your website for search engines, ensuring that it’s not only user-friendly but also easily understandable by search engine crawlers. 

Occasionally, technical SEO issues can become apparent, and these can cause your website traffic to drop, subsequently impacting on your sales and sign ups. But how can you identify these issues? And how can improvements be made?

What are the different ways to identify technical SEO problems on your website?

There are a number of different steps you can take to identify technical SEO issues and to resolve these, to improve the performance of your website and increase online sales and sign ups. These include:

1. Identifying aspects to audit

Technical SEO is a broad umbrella so it’s important to choose the right aspects of this to audit. Broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags are some of the most common problems, and auditing these can allow you to address the issues systematically.

2. Understanding Google Search Console

You should consider using Google Search Console to access valuable insights directly from the search engine. This will provide important information about the indexing status, crawl errors, and keyword performance of your website. In addition, this can and should be used regularly, as monitoring Search Console alerts will help you to identify potential issues as they emerge, so that you can stay proactive. 

3. Analysing the site speed

Slow-loading pages can have an adverse impact on both the user experience on your website, and your search rankings. As such, you should consider using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to assess your site’s speed. Some key areas to be aware of include optimising image sizes and using image compress to reduce the size of image files, as well as excessive HTTP requests, or inefficient coding to enhance loading times.

4. Mobile-friendly testing

Ensuring the mobile website users have the same experience on a website as a desktop user has been an important factor for Google for several years. As a result, as part of your technical SEO you will need to consider mobile friendly website builds. As the standards for this changes it’s important to keep up to date and to use tools like  Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check how well your site performs on mobile devices, and to identify areas for improvement.

5. Testing structured data

Implementing structured data can enhance the appearance of your content in search results, and so it’s important to ensure that this is correctly implemented and error-free.

6. Identifying duplicate content issues

It’s an important part of your technical SEO maintenance to ensure that there are no duplicate content problems, and to ensure that canonical tags are implemented correctly. This is because proper canonicalisation helps search engines understand the preferred version of your content. As such you should regularly check for canonicalisation errors using tools, or by manually inspecting your site’s HTML.

9. Robots.txt 

If you’re looking for a technical SEO issue it’s important to not overlook the basic potential problems. You should be sure to examine your robots.txt file and meta robots tags to control search engine crawlers’ access to different parts of your site. This will involve making sure that important pages are not inadvertently blocked.

10. 404 Error Pages

404 errors are another factor that can easily catch businesses out. To improve your technical SEO you should identify and fix broken links leading to 404 error pages. You should also regularly monitor and update your website to prevent users and search engines from encountering dead ends.

For help or advice with any of these aspects of web marketing and SEO, why not ask the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design? We are Preston’s leading web design and web marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester.