How to Solve Your Website’s SEO Problems

How to Solve Your Website’s SEO Problems

For most small business owners, managing a website is something they don’t really have the time to do. You’re dealing with customers, hiring employees, making deals with vendors, tracking inventory, inputting data, and everything else. Keeping up with your website is near the bottom of your to-do list. It’s totally understandable, but ignoring common SEO problems could be costing you. Read on to discover six of the most common SEO problems, and what to do about them.

1. There is no image optimization. If the images on your site aren’t optimized, Google, and sites like it, are penalizing you in search result rankings. To fix this, replace all of your broken images with new ones or delete them. It’s better to have no image than a dead one. Remember to add Alt or Title tributes to images you are keeping. If you’re using a WordPress based site, you can edit the images in WordPress, optimizing them in settings.

2. Your site has broken links. This one’s easy, whether you’re a website DIYer or not. Either fix the broken links in your site or delete them. You can do this through your website’s Content Management System (CMS).

3. Your pages contain duplicate content. Again, if the search engine crawlers see duplicate content they will punish you in the rankings. Clean up your site by clearing out duplicate paragraphs, descriptions, and pages. If you need duplicate pages, you may want to link the least authoritative page to the most authoritative page. The crawlers will recognize that you need multiple pages with similar information, as long as you’re not being spammy.

4. Your web pages have no meta description. Including these descriptions can improve your click-through rate (CTR) in Google search results, which could lead to more conversions (sales). Meta descriptions are the short page descriptions you may see under page titles in search results. Adding these brief summaries can help increase CTR. If you’re using WordPress, add meta descriptions to every page that’s missing one.

5. Your site has no microdata. This is especially important if you have a retail, product or restaurant business. Microdata includes important information like customer reviews and star ratings. The easiest way to fix this problem is to use a free Schema creator tool to create custom HTML code for your site. While a lack of microdata won’t hurt your SEO ranking too much, it’s certainly a missed opportunity to let potential customers know how awesome you are.

6. Your headings aren’t structured properly. Be sure you are using one H1 element on any page. Sometimes, more than one H1 element makes sense. Whatever yo do, make sure your H1 implementation is consistent across your whole website to maximize usability. And, if using more than one H1 element, do not stuff them with keywords. Google will punish you for being spammy.

While SEO is an important tool for marketing your business, fixing even these six common issues is rather time-consuming. If you’re not web-savvy, these fixes may even seem daunting. If you don’t want to spend hours inside your content management system, it’s probably time to hire a professional for your website management needs. You’ll free up your time to so you can focus on your business. Hiring a website manager, who can update your site and change your SEO marketing strategy as needed, can provide significant ROI. When more people can find your website, you’ll have more business than ever. Invest in your website. Invest in your business. Invest in yourself.