8 Common WordPress SEO Issues that actually matter

by | Feb 24, 2023 | SEO

8 Common WordPress SEO Issues that actually matter

That may seem like a ridiculous amount of money, but it makes sense when you consider the myriad responsibilities that business owners must frequently juggle, such as keeping their current clientele and developing numerous business listings in reputable local directories.

To effectively drive traffic to your website for search engine exposure, it takes time and work. It’s a continuous process that involves identifying and fixing operational issues before they have a chance to ruin your ratings.

It takes more than great content, expert formatting, and social media marketing expertise to climb to the top of the Google SERPs and stay there.

You also need a firm grasp of technical SEO to maintain your progress.

Top SERP ranks can be attained and sustained by understanding technical SEO best practices and applying them consistently. So it’s essential to understand what potential technical SEO issues to watch out for and how to fix them.

These are a few examples of technical SEO issues.

1. Poor Website Layout

Regarding technical SEO, having vital organic pages buried too deep in the website hierarchy is considered a wrong website structure.

Pages that are nested too deeply (people must click on them more than six times to access them) will acquire less link equity from your homepage, which is probably the page with the most backlinks. This might affect how those pages rank in search results. This is because each “hop” over a link lowers the link value.

SOLUTION

In Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT),

  • Site Audit, Open.
  • Choose the Data table as the data type in Structure Explorer’s Depth tab.
  • Set the Segment to only accept valid HTML sites, then click Apply.
  • Use the graph to look into pages that are more than six clicks away from the main page.

2. Issues with Performance and Stability

Other Page Experience indications that Google uses to rank pages include performance and visual stability.

Core Web Vitals is a unique set of metrics that Google has created to gauge user experience (CWV). These metrics can be used by website owners and SEOs to determine how Google views its website’s user experience.

SOLUTION

In Google Search Console (GSC),

  • In the experience area of the reports, first, click on Core Web Vitals.
  • To see how your website performs, click Open report next to each section.
  • You’ll see a specific area at the bottom of the report for pages that aren’t thought to be good.
  • Use it to identify pages that want your attention.

3. Problems with a Mobile Experience

For SEO, a website must be responsive to mobile devices, due to two factors:

Google indexes mobile-first – It primarily indexes and ranks mobile pages based on their content.
While Google always “promotes” the page with the best content, page experience can be a deciding factor for pages with similar quality content. Page experience markers include mobile experience.

SOLUTION

In GSC,

  • Choose the Mobile Usability report from the experience category.
  • See affected pages by clicking on the concerns listed in the Why pages aren’t mobile-friendly section.
  • This is a link to Google’s guidance for resolving mobile difficulties.

4. Link Breakdowns

Most likely, you have already resolved the broken link issues if you have dealt with broken pages.

Some significant link-related issues include:

Pages that lack internal links are referred to as orphan pages. Web crawlers only have limited access to those pages and there is no link equity flowing to them from other sites on your website (via sitemaps or backlinks). In addition, users won’t be able to find this page in the site navigation.

Internal links on your website that lead consumers to HTTP URLs will probably trigger a warning from web browsers about a non-secure page. HTTPS pages refer to internal HTTP pages. Your website’s overall authority and user experience may suffer as a result.

SOLUTION

In AWT,

  • Visiting Site Audit
  • Dispatch the Links report.
  • Activate the Problems tab.
  • The following issues should be found in the Indexable category. To view the impacted pages, click.

Change the links from HTTP to HTTPS to resolve the first problem, or remove them entirely if no longer required.

5. Broken Pages

Google will not index or send you visitors from pages that return server errors (4XX errors) or can’t be located (4XX errors).

Additionally, if broken pages have backlinks linking to them, all of that link equity is lost.

SOLUTION

In AWT,

  • The site Audit is open.
  • Access the Internal pages report.
  • Look for any broken links on the pages. If so, a value greater than 0 will be displayed in the Broken section.
  • To display the impacted pages, click on the number.

6. Duplicated Materials

When the same or nearly identical content appears on the web in multiple locations, it is considered duplicate content.

It’s negative for SEO problems mostly because it might weaken link equity and make unwanted URLs appear in search results.

Content duplication does not always include the deliberate or accidental development of similar pages. Other less obvious reasons include the usage of trailing and non-trailing slashes, faceted navigation, and URL tracking parameters.

7. Sitemap problems

Sitemaps should only contain the pages that you wish search engines to index.

A sitemap may start to display broken pages, pages that were “indexed,” pages that were de-canonicalized, or pages that have been blocked in robots.txt when it is not frequently updated or when an unreliable generator was used to create it.

SOLUTION

in AWT,

  • Site Audit, Open
  • See the report for all issues.
  • Find impacted pages by selecting issues with the word “sitemap” in the title.

8. Indexing Problems

The ability of a webpage to be indexed by search engines is known as indexability. Search engine results from pages and search traffic cannot be visible on websites that are not indexed by search engines.

A page must fulfil these three conditions to be indexable:

  • The page must allow for crawling. You probably don’t have a problem there if you haven’t prevented Googlebot from accessing the robots.txt page or if your website has fewer than 1,000 pages.
  • There cannot be a no-index tag on the page (more on that in a bit).
  • This page needs to be canonical (i.e., the main version).

SOLUTION

In AWT,

  • Site Audit, Open
  • Access the Indexability report.
  • To view the pages affected, click on canonicalization and “no index” concerns.

Key Takeaway

Examining the top technical concerns – and their related remedies – in this blog article is the most effective approach to enhance your SERP visibility rapidly, and it can have a huge impact on the searcher’s overall experience of your site.

Why Choose Watermark Design?

Using our Website Design Services, we can help you align your brand, business, and behavior.

Our web design and website development services are tailored to each client’s specific needs in order to help them achieve their digital objectives successfully and quickly. We excel at creating responsive and user-friendly websites and applications, digital marketing campaigns that reach the appropriate audience at the right time, and curating branding strategies that develop long-term relationships with your customers. Contact Watermark Design today!

Mark Haugtad
Mark Haugtad

Owner / Web Designer / SEO Enthusiast

Mark, founder of Watermark Design. With over 10 years of experience in Web Design & Development, Wordpress Services, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Web Hosting, and Logo Design. Mark has always wanted to provide better quality service, affordability & support to local businesses. At Watermark Design, he performs in-depth research and collaborates with his talented team to give businesses advice they can trust. When Mark is not working you can find him hanging out with his wife, five children enjoying the Minnesota outdoors; hunting, fishing and camping.

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