By Praminder Bhuller | SEO | social media agency london | June 2, 2022

How To Troubleshoot Common SEO Problems?

There are about 1.17 billion websites across the globe, out of which 17% are active and 83% are inactive.

When the world is overflowing with websites, what are the possibilities of your site getting even noticed? Fat chance.

You try many SEO tactics to rank your business website on top of the search engine result page. However, you cannot see desired results.

To enhance your SEO strategy and results, you need to find and fix errors to get the outcomes you seek. However, you don’t have to do it all by yourself because a proficient SEO agency in London can help rectify every SEO problem.

Some common SEO issues and how to fix them

Duplicate content

Google does not generally penalise for duplicate content. However, if you duplicate your content to manipulate the search engine result page rankings, it definitely will.

When Google crawlers visit different URLs on your website and find similar information, you lose the crawlers cycle. Because they will not have new content. Hence, it is necessary to rectify duplicate content problems to keep your SEO metre upsurging.

How to fix it?

Use Canonical tag:

You can use a canonical tag if you have similar content on different pages or think backlinking sites and randomly sharing links can lead to duplicate content issues.

For this, you need to add a line of code (link rel=“canonical”) to your original and other identical URL versions. So, when the bot visits your page, all the links to similar pages are considered authentic as it sees the canonical tag.

Hence, you retain SEO value from all the links.

However, applying all these technical SEO strategies can be daunting but can be a cakewalk for professionals who provide the best SEO services in London.

Referral Spam

If a website sends traffic without linking to your page, it is spam referral traffic.

Often, websites get spam or irrelevant traffic that does not stay for more than a few seconds on your site. More often than not, they are not even real visitors but spam bots.

Moreover, when such bots are reported in your analytics report, they make the data inaccurate and also multiply the bounce rate of your website.

Though you cannot erase the old spam data, you need to block the spam referral every time you see it.

How to fix it?

Google Analytics has the option to block hits from known traffic bots, which can be found in-

Admin → View settings → Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.

Though this is not cent percent effective, it will save a lot of spam referral data from entering your reports.

Another way is to create filters to eliminate spam traffic. However, if the filter configuration goes wrong, it might cause a disservice to your website.

Hence, to avoid further damage, hiring a professional SEO agency in London is ideal.

Offering thin content

Google considers thin content as low-quality. According to Google, thin content is much more than fewer words. It is also the content that offers no value or is just a revised old material available elsewhere.

Types of thin content:

  • Automatically generated content: it is the content generated by programs and will be recognised by Google.
  • Scraped content: It is the content that you republish from other websites or a little altered content that is republished. Google can penalise you for this.
  • Boilerplate content: When Google finds the same product descriptions across the whole affiliate network, it considers it boilerplate content that adds zero value to customers.
  • Doorway pages: It is created to rank for a specific query or keyword and when you simply want to lead users to the intended CTA page. If your page does not provide any value to users, it will be seen as a doorway page by Google.

How to fix it?

Google actively works to improve the user experience and provide value to visitors.

Hence, it is essential to offer insightful and well-researched content to users. However, if you cannot generate good quality content, hire professionals to avoid penalties from Google.

Broken links

Broken links are the links added to a website but have one of the following issues:

  • The destined page does not exist
  • The destined page has been moved
  • The provided URL is incorrect

A few broken links among hundreds of pages cannot be a problem, but it is when it is the other way around.

What happens when you have so many broken links?

  • Users do not consider your page qualitative.
  • They can do a disservice to your crawl budget because when they find so many broken links, they leave your pages un-indexed.
  • The Authority of your website decreases.

How to fix it?

Click on ‘Crawl Errors’ under the ‘Crawl’ option from the left navigation pane in the Google Search Console. Here, you will find which pages are returning 404 errors and fix them.

Also Read: 4 ways website design affects content marketing

The site is not mobile-friendly

47.3% of online traffic in the UK comes from smartphones.

When around half of the citizens use smartphones to search their queries, it is imperative to make your website mobile-friendly.

Not having a responsive website design is one of the biggest SEO issues. So, hire a well-known and competent SEO agency in London to rank on top of the search engine result page.

How to fix it?

Take up Google’s Mobile-friendly test to check how your site appears for mobile users.

  • Choose a mobile-friendly theme
  • Optimise your images
  • Alter button size and placements
  • Use readable fonts
  • Remove unnecessary pop-ups

However, to avoid all the hassle of doing it yourself, you can appoint a professional and solve the issue.

Final words

SEO is fundamental to improving website rankings. Though it takes time, it gives organic and high-quality outcomes. However, implementing correct SEO strategies and rectifying common errors is critical.

To develop practical SEO tactics and address issues in its implementation, hire an efficient and experienced SEO agency in London. Their team of skilled professionals can help rank your website on top of SERP.

To make the most of your SEO, you can promote your business on social media or hire a company that gives social media marketing services.

Praminder Bhuller / About Author

I started work as a freelance Graphic Designer for print-based media. This moved over to Graphic Design for the Internet. I have now moved over to online marketing. This includes working with Graphic Designers, Website Developers, SEO Marketers and many more experts. This journey has been going for 20 years.