4 Common SEO Issues: How to Detect & Troubleshoot Them Before It’s Too Late
It’s not just the job but also should be the goal of every SEO professional to make sure they do everything necessary to keep things up and running and stay current with their site’s content.
Search engines never rest. They constantly crawl websites to update their index.
SEO mistakes can occur at any moment. However, you must resolve them before they begin affecting your search rankings and bottom line.
The majority of SEO issues go undiscovered for at least a month, and even an average SEO issue can result in a massive loss in revenue.
However, with the right tools and processes in action, you can quickly alleviate these issues.
What About the Existing Tools?
Now, you might be wondering – but what about the existing tools?
Google Analytics and Google Search Console have become the go-to tricks of the trade for every SEO professional.
However, if you wish to take a bold and dynamic approach in your SEO processes, these tools are just not enough.
Even though Google Search Console sends you notifications, they are limited and delayed. On the other hand, by the time Google Analytics sends you the alerts you have set up, your organic traffic has taken a hit already.
4 Common SEO Issues and Ways to Prevent Them
Let’s dive into the details of the four most common SEO issues that we have encountered and discuss ways in which you can prevent them.
- Client or Coworker Gone Rogue
There’s no way you can see it coming. Several SEO professionals may have encountered one of these situations from a client or a coworker.
- “The content management system told us to, so we updated the theme and all the plug-ins.” (Yes, in the live environment directly!)
- “We did a little tweaking on these page titles of all these main pages on our own.”
- “These web pages didn’t appear really important, so we removed them.” (Yes, the money pages!)
- “We changed the URLs on these pages because we didn’t really like them.”
These situations are annoying and can result in your site rankings and traffic dwindling.
Ways to Prevent It
Taking these measures will help you prevent the rogue clients or coworkers from unintentionally harming the SEO of your website.
- Track changes – Stay up to date with what’s happening on your website.
- Become vigilant – When somebody goes rogue.
- Restrict access – For example, the content marketing team does not need access to the process of updating the CMS.
- Lay down a clear set of rules – Communicate clearly to everybody about their do’s and don’ts.
A tool with the feature of tracking changes on your website can come handy in scenarios like these.
There are plenty of tools available in the market that tracks when somebody adds, changes, redirects and deletes any page on your website. Meaning these platforms can provide a complete changelog of your whole website.
You would definitely want to receive alerts but then only for changes and issues that actually matter. So, the alerts have to be smart.
Now you don’t need to get notified if the page title was changed on some page with the least importance on your site. But you do need to get alerted when even a minor change is made on your homepage.
- Web Development Team Gone Rogue
Poor coordination between the web developers and the SEO team can lead to a situation like this.
Let’s take a look at this example. An eCommerce store’s development team went out to select and test a new pagination system all by themselves without involving the SEO professionals.
The team went with the system that relied on Javascript heavily, causing too many delays in the crawling and indexing processes because every paginated web page had to be delivered.
All these made it really difficult for the search engines to explore and value their site’s new product pages, let alone to reassess the existing product pages’ value.
It is pretty easy and likely to face situations like these when your development team and SEO team are not in sync.
Ways to Prevent It
Just like the first issue, here also you have to take some similar measures as the previous ones to prevent your web development team from going rogue.
- Track every change taking place on your website.
- Become vigilant when somebody goes rogue.
- Lay down a clear set of engagement rules.
- Make sure you carry out a proper QA Testing.
- Releases Gone Corrupt
For starters, let’s take a look at a typical scenario. During a release, the staging robots.txt deviate unintentionally, preventing the search engine spider from accessing.
Similar to this, we can often see the same thing happening with the robots meta tags and the much harder to spot X-Robots-Tag HTTP Header.
This robots.txt can make or break your site’s SEO performance. Therefore, you need to keep an eye on them.
When issues like these occur, it can be hard to identify manually. The SEO team will keep wondering when this page will rank while it isn’t even accessible to the web crawlers in the first place.
Ways to Prevent This
The best way to prevent this is by putting an automated quality assurance testing into action before release, during release, and after release.
Having a monitoring system or third-party software is not just enough; you also need to have the right processes at work.
For example, if a release goes terribly bad, you should be able to react to it quickly. Tracking every change and getting notified if anything goes wrong will also be helpful.
- Buggy CMS Plugins
Buggy CMS plug-ins can give you a tough time. They are quite tricky to handle.
Often, security updates are applied against your will, and when they have bugs, these are brought in without you even knowing.
Over the course of time, there have been several instances where buggy CMS plug-ins altered the SEO configurations of multitudes of websites in just a single update.
Almost nobody thought this could ever happen, and were all taken by surprise when it did.
Ways to Prevent It
Turning off all automatic updates will keep this issue away. However, you would also want to track all the changes and receive alerts in case something goes wrong.
Conclusion
It is crucial to track every change on your website to make sure you get alerted as soon as possible and fix the issue. However, tracking it 24/7 is not possible manually.
If you conduct your weekly crawls every Sunday and let’s suppose something goes wrong on Monday, then you wouldn’t know it until the next Sunday, and by that time, the search engine would have already spotted it.
It’s not about if something goes wrong; it’s about when.
When anything goes wrong, you have to know it instantly and troubleshoot it before the search engine notices it.
Putting monitoring and proactive alerting tools in place will help you take a proactive approach in your SEO processes.