When many people start a website, they use drag-and-drop templates that are pre-designed, like those offered by Wix, WordPress, and Shopify. However, what many people don’t realize is that these templates, while great looking, have search engine optimization (SEO) problems.
According to Search Engine Land, a publication dedicated to tech, SEO is the process of improving your website to increase its page rank in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines.
Many people don’t initially think about the SEO issues they’ll need to understand and address to keep their website up and running, ranking high in search engine results pages (SERP), and easy to use. But as time goes on, you’ll start to search for your own business online, as will friends and family. And you may notice that your site isn’t appearing on pages one or two of SERP.
That’s why many businesses turn to digital marketing agencies like us at SEO Design Chicago. We are expert digital marketers who can fix common SEO problems. Here are what we think are the most common SEO problems.
1. Poor XML Sitemap or No XML Sitemap
One false belief people often have is that when they hit publish on a website, Google and people will automatically find that site. But that’s not true. Google won’t include your website in SERP unless Google’s spider, or a crawler, finds it first. The spider crawls over every page on the internet and identifies any page that hits certain benchmarks, which are SEO factors.
Once the spider finds a website, they put it in an index, which is the digital equivalent of a massive filing cabinet.
But Google and other search engines can’t even look for your site unless they know it’s there. And the only way they’ll know it’s there is if you give the search engine an XML sitemap of your website.
XML is short for Extensible Markup Language, a markup language that explains how a website fits in a digital space with all of the other websites out there.
XML is a term usually used by SEO technical marketing experts like us at SEO Design Chicago.
Every website has a computer code behind it, which is called an XML site.
The sitemap is like a user’s manual to your website. In this file, you provide information about how your website works.
Google provides step-by-step instructions on how to build a sitemap. But it’s not the easiest thing in the world to follow if you’re a non-coder.
If you don’t have a sitemap and don’t want to figure out how to do one, SEO Design Chicago can create one for you and submit it to Google.
2. Shaky Website Architecture
You know how buildings have architecture, or beams and floors and ceilings that hold a structure in place? So do websites.
Website architecture is how information is organized, placed and flows through your site.
Website architecture includes:
- The URL structure of each page, like making sure it’s always www.mysiteurl.com/simplelname of page
- How you organize your website menu, i.e. linking the words in your menu to landing pages that then link out to other pages
- How you put up signposts that tell people where to find what they want, i.e the words you chose to put on buttons or menus
- Make sure every page on your site links to one or a few pages on your site, like how these words link to our blog
One common SEO problem is having website architecture that doesn’t have all of these components or unscrewed bolts. If search engines don’t like your website’s architecture, your site won’t rank high in SERP.
At SEO Design Chicago, we make sure that:
- Every URL follows the same format
- Every page has keywords that appear in the browser’s URL
- Submenus are easily found and categorized
- The pages link to each other
- You have large images and boxes that clearly tell people, “If you click here, x will happen.”
3. Broken Links
As your website gets more and more pages, you may delete or update some pages. You may even change the name of your company, which means you’ll need a new URL. The pages that replace them will have different URLs. The original pages will have what’s known as a broken URL that displays a message like “404 error: Page no longer exists.” This happens when:
If search engines notice your website has a lot of broken pages, they won’t rank your site very high in SERP. It’s a common SEO problem. You need to fix all of the broken links with 301 redirects.
A 301 redirect tells a user, “The old page isn’t there. Let me take you to the right page instead.”
At SEO Design Chicago, we are SEO experts and will regularly check your site for broken links, and fix them, so that your site has a better chance of ranking high in SERP. We do link audits, looking for broken links, on a regular basis.
4. Slow Site Speed
The time it takes for a website to load is one of the most important factors that people consider when making decisions about your company.
A survey by Digital.com found 52% of potential digital shoppers will close a website’s browser if they have to wait more than six seconds for a page to load. A lot of other studies have found people make decisions about a company within a millisecond.
Another reason that you want a fast-loading website is that page speed is one of the factors in how an algorithm decides where your website ranks in SERP. Faster websites rank higher in SERP.
For a faster website, you need to:
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Compress the weight of your images
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Control browser caching
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Fix JavaScript
Don’t know how to do this? Don’t worry. We do!
5. iFrame Issues
iFrame code means you can embed cool widgets on your site like interactive images, timelines, 3-E models, and more. The problem is that when search engine bots crawl through a webpage, iFrames can make the page rank lower in search engine results pages (SERP) than the page should be.
Why? Because search engines, like Bing, have issues properly indexing the content within iFrames. the crawling process. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use iFrame content. It means you should use keywords and taglines elsewhere too.
6. Poor Keyword Research
Keywords are the heart and soul of SEO. That’s why we write so many posts about keywords on our blog.
The Google Keyword Planner is a tool that helps you improve your keyword search results.
There are other tools out there too. Or you can just think like your customers think. What words and phrases would they type into Google or Bing to get the goods and services you offer? Remember that they don’t know as much about your goods, services or business. They don’t even know your company’s name sometimes. So get outside of your own head.
Ask your friends, family, and even current customers what words they’d use to find your offerings.
If you don’t think critically about your keywords, or conduct research, you will have the most common SEO problem of them all – pages that don’t rank in SERP at all. Or you’ll have the second most common SEO problem of them all – pages that rank really, really low in SERP. You want to rank on page one.
This common SEO problem can be fixed by conducting keyword research, and then putting those keywords in the title, subheadings, meta tags, and meta description for that page. But you don’t want to put those keywords on a page too much. Google calls this “keyword stuffing.
At SEO Design Chicago, we know how to walk the line between using keywords just enough and not too much.
Here are the other ways we fix common SEO problems.
How SEO Design Chicago Fixes Commons SEO Problems
Our extensive SEO services include:
- Fast turnaround times
- High-quality content based on keyword research
- SEO friendly pages
- Specific industry expertise
- Redesign of pages so they load faster and can be found by search engines
- Fixing iFrames and other tech issues
We start off our talks with potential clients by providing you with a free SEO audit of your site. We’ll tell you if your site has any of these common SEO problems, and how we can fix them.
We have dozens of years of experience, and a whole team of writers, researchers, web design specialists, coders, and visual designers to make your website look amazing, and easy to find online.
Contact Us today!