When it comes to SEO, there is nothing worse than getting all hyped up about writing great copy and then realizing no one gets to see it. Just know that traffic to your website is likely to start dwindling soon. The good news is that many of these stealthy issues can be fixed in just a few hours. If you handle your own website or work with an SEO St. George agency, then this is the helpful guide you need.
Check What Google Can Actually See
To see what is showing up on Google, access your Google Search Console account and go to the Pages report. If a page is marked as “Excluded”, it is probably due to one of two reasons: a robots.txt file might be blocking it, or it could contain a noindex tag. If there is a “Disallow: /” in your robots.txt file, that means your entire website is invisible. If you ask an SEO St. George agency, they will tell you that the single reason that more websites have failed than due to any other algorithm update is this single line.
Repair Broken Links and Redirect Chains
Tools like Screaming Frog can crawl your website to find 404s and broken links. Chained redirects and broken internal links impact crawl budget and user experience, respectively. Ensure that all internal links point to the page you want to direct your users to, and ensure that chained redirects link to the page that best meets the user’s query.
Make Pages Load Faster
No one likes visiting a slow website. Even if they do, that page is more likely to rank lower. Page load time also impacts your site’s conversion rate. One of the easiest ways to improve your page’s load time is to compress the images on your page to WebP. Enable lazy loading, and remove the scripts that you don’t need. If you’re working on an SEO St. George project, you’re likely to see that image optimization is the easiest way to lower page load time.
Eliminate Duplicate URLs
Different versions of the same URLs are generated due to filters, tracking parameters, and even www/non-www versions. They split your ranking signals. To solve this, add canonical tags, set a preferred domain, and apply 301 redirects to the other versions. Duplicate URL bloat is noticeable in almost every site visited by the agencies performing SEO audits for St. George clients.
Keep Your Sitemap Clean
Deleted URLs and redirects have no place in a sitemap. Only indexable and current pages belong in a sitemap. Following any significant changes, submit your sitemap to Search Console.
Addressing duplicate URLs and redirects in your sitemaps can give your content the potential to compete once the basics of Technical SEO have been addressed. Partnering with SEO St. George specialists or tackling the fixes yourself will go a long way.