8 Most Complex SEO Issues & How to Fix Them
In this dynamic and highly competitive e-commerce world, marketing has taken on a new form. Although the physical form of marketing still exists, the focus is on the newest digital form of marketing. This unique and more targeted approach includes a whole arsenal of different marketing techniques such as SEO, affiliate marketing, PPC, and paid marketing, just to name a few.
Among these various techniques, SEO has become one of the most popular digital marketing techniques that helps you generate more relevant and free traffic. While this method is very productive, it is quite difficult to implement. There are many challenges you will have to face when implementing SEO for your digital stores. To sort out these common issues, we need to understand a little bit of SEO and the issues it has. A professional or certified SEO agency can help you out in fixing the issues faced by the eCommerce website and definitely, assures you an effective outcome.
However, the method of fixing those issues is also explained in this write-up. To know, keep on reading!
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a modern marketing tool focused on better brand placement. Better brand placement leads to a better brand image, which helps generate organic traffic for your web portal.
Search engine optimization of a website is done by applying various techniques or methods to increase your popularity through regular search results. Read below to know the importance of SEO.
- Search engine optimization is essential for your website to increase traffic to your website. Optimization is critical to getting more visitors and keeping your website ranked on various search engines. The main goal of SEO is to increase traffic to your website from different sources.
- SEO plays a vital role in online shopping websites. With the right SEO tools, you can generate more traffic and business.
- You can use SEO to build your brand. Since SEO is directly related to Internet marketing and there is a large audience for digital marketing, your brand can get the boost it needs.
- Statistics have proven that an optimized website gets more traffic than a non-optimized one.
- SEO helps the right target audience reach you. This targeting helps to improve the quality of your traffic.
- SEO boosts your platform’s authority and credibility by generating the right traffic for your website.
- This increases your chances against your competitors who may not have optimized their website.
- If your website is optimized, the visitor will be able to more effectively get the information they need, which improves the user experience.
- You can better analyze your growth and results with SEO.
Common Problems Faced with Search Engine optimization
Indexing to Improve Rankings
Facing accidental devaluation in search engines due to minimal avoidable indexing issues is one of the most common problems that websites encounter. These problems can be easily managed if we understand the algorithms used by search engines.
This problem occurs when people just create links and unwanted noindex pages, hoping that they will automatically appear in search results. However, it is not. This is seen in many cases where many pages were found that did not include the noindex tag that should be automatically indexed by Google does not happen. When you place a noindex tag on a page, you want Google to exclude that web page from your crawl index so you don’t have to pay for it.
But the pages are available and paid for by the search engine. Even if you fix the noindex, Google won’t be able to make any changes until it rescans all the data.
Google can usually automatically index 50% of these noindex pages in its search console, but can only provide about 1% of the actual data, resulting in devaluation of most of the website. This means that you are actively paying for pages you don’t want to see. You can fix this problem by reviewing the pages you don’t need to be indexed and removing them from your crawl budget.
Localization of Services
Another common problem customers face is their multilingual support. However, multi-language support is a great way to expand your audience and reach the whole world. But for it to work, it needs to be configured correctly.
When you use the URL structure for localized text, you must configure HREFLang on their website to work properly. HREF Lang codes depend on the country and language you are targeting. You can find out about this country and its location on the Internet. If there are codes that no longer exist or are incomplete, there will be many duplicates that need to be indexed.
There is also a local Open Graph set for en_US, which includes pages that are not natively in English. This is an important setting that provides Google with locale information, which ultimately leads to confusion if configured incorrectly.
Keyword Cannibalization
A common problem faced by users is when multiple pages on their website have the same keywords. When searched for that keyword, these pages will compete with each other for results, causing problems and fewer results, just like cannibalization.
When different pages on the website compete for the same keywords, it affects your Google rankings. You can avoid this issue by following these steps:
Keyword Tracking
Some platforms or SEO service companies provide tools to help you track keywords infrequently. These platforms will search for keywords that are commonly used on your website and provide you with information to correct those keywords. These tools also allow you to track the performance of your keywords.
Over-Optimized Anchor Text
Anchor text is highlighted text that is easily accessible to visitors and helps to increase website traffic. Sometimes websites misuse this anchor text. Some of the categories are listed below:
- Branded – This type of anchor text contains the name of the brand that you represent. The brand name is used directly or in any number of small variations.
- Universal – This method uses everyday words but adds value to them.
- Miscellaneous – Sometimes websites may unknowingly use anchors that are not related to the site. These are usually common names.
- Poor quality – Using fancy characters, foreign characters, or unnaturally long character strings as anchor degrades quality.
- Targeted – Some websites try to use their search words as part of the anchor to help the page get more traffic. But this game can backfire as many filters tend to block this site.
- Relevance – Another common mistake is when you can use terms that are closely related to the topic of interest but do not overlap with them. It might sound like a good idea to use these words, but the ratings disprove this claim.
- URL – Some websites use website addresses or URLs. This use of URLs and website addresses is the worst idea.
Affiliate Content of Poor Quality
Quality content can be the difference between success and failure when it comes to any aspect of digital marketing. The problem SEO faces with affiliate content is that it is often of poor quality without the main keywords that are critical to driving traffic to your website.
Great content can bring more visitors to the website. A customer is more likely to click on a link that shows more relevant information than others. It is generally accepted that a large number of average posts can outperform a small number of posts with quality content.
However, it is not. The website is getting more traffic because it has higher quality content than the secondary content of average quality.
The content you publish should not only be of high quality but also relevant. It should also contain keywords, which are a key driver of traffic flow to your website.
Also, the content must be the perfect length. The most popular posts on Google have an average of about 1,800 words. Also, the inclusion of an image and some external outbound links can be of great help in boosting the ranking of your content.
Reports and Performance Metrics
Since the traffic that visits your websites are people interested in your product, the data generated is critical. The best way to achieve long-term growth is to help drive visitors to your site, rather than trying to get more links and rank in other ways.
Advanced content and better traffic conversions will help you rank higher. Consistent rankings help ensure that your website will drive the growth and expansion of your business by impacting your site’s potential traffic.
Poorly Optimized Meta Description
A meta description is a 160 character summary that appears in search results and on your website. This summary helps viewers understand the relevance of your website by influencing the traffic to your website.
However, it is still unclear whether a properly defined meta description helps in search engine optimization or not. In a statement released in 2009, Google mentioned that meta description does not affect SEO and Google’s ranking of a website.
It’s worth noting that the meta description appears in search results. Hence, the meta description affects the clicks you get on your website. While in theory, the meta description does not affect your website’s ranking and SEO, in practice it does.
While it seems like SEO has been around for quite some time, there are still many mistakes made when defining meta descriptions. Let’s take a look at some common mistakes when defining a website meta description.
- Small meta description (less than 70 characters)
- Too long meta description (more than 130 characters)
- Copied or duplicated meta description
- Irrelevant information in the meta description
- Doesn’t highlight your USP
- Contains no trigger or keywords
- It’s too hard to understand
These are some of the major mistakes that affect your website’s meta description. With these points in mind, you can be confident that your meta description is capable of generating more traffic for your website.
Concluding Remarks
While it’s important to include SEO as an integral part of your digital marketing strategy, it’s just as important to implement it effectively.
One wrong keyword here and too long meta description can disrupt the effective functioning of your website by channeling irrelevant audiences. When it comes to SEO, you have to be careful, but you can use the techniques mentioned above to avoid the most common mistakes.
These mistakes are made by even the most seasoned internet marketers and SEO professionals, so it is imperative to be careful with everything and choose the correct agency to leverage the SEO services.
Let us know how you liked this article. If there are any queries then comment below. We are here to help. Thanks for reading!