Common Technical SEO Issues & How To Fix Them

Technical SEO is an under-represented aspect of SEO management. It is usually considered to be far less exciting than content, and less tangible than links. However, it can have a significant impact on your SEO and your Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), which involves improving your visibility in answer engines including Chat GPT, Perplexity and Copilot.

There are many types of technical SEO issues that your website might have, but there are some common technical SEO issues that we come across. Understanding the most common technical SEO issues and how to solve them can support your SEO and AEO efforts and help you gain all-important organic visibility with your target clients/customers. While it is often not possible to fix all issues, attaining a good technical SEO health score will help drive your business forward.

In ten years of delivering professional SEO consultancy services, I have come across many technical SEO issues, from broken links and duplicate content through to missing meta descriptions and slow page load speeds. In this article, I share the top five issues that I come across, explore the impact they could be having on your business and its website behind the scenes.

The top five technical SEO issues we come across are:

1. Broken links
2. Duplicate content
3. Missing meta descriptions
4. Slow page load speed
5. Missing or broken sitemaps

What Is Technical SEO And Why Is It Important?

Technical SEO refers to SEO that affects a website’s crawling, indexation, and user experience. While many technical SEO issues are largely invisible to website visitors, they can prevent a page from being crawled or indexed by search engines or answer engines. Furthermore, technical SEO issues can impact conversions when they prevent your website visitors from easily navigating or using your website.

Common Technical SEO Issues

Even the most well-established businesses can be awash with technical SEO issues. As they are rarely visible on the front-end of your website, they can be easy to overlook and their detrimental impact on a website is often underestimated.

Most technical SEO issues are minor. However, if left unresolved, the impact inevitably accumulates and becomes a major issue. Much like a leaky pipe, a seemingly small problem can cause real damage over time.

Broken Links

Broken links are undoubtedly one of the most common issues that I come across. Whenever a page or post on a website is removed and not redirected, it creates a broken link, as that information no longer exists in that location. This is much like moving house without redirecting your post. All of your letters and subscriptions will continue to go to your old address, so you probably won’t receive them. Broken links are often caused by website structure changes, content audits or new website launches.

What Causes Broken Links?

Website structure changes including creating new pages and updating link structures often result in broken links when not managed correctly. For example, if you are a solicitor providing family law services and change the link or URL of your family law page from /services/family-law to /services/family-law-solicitor, this has the potential to cause at least one broken link (potentially more), especially if you have sub-pages under family law like /services/family-law/divorce.

Similarly, content audits that result in the removal of pages and posts on a website can also cause broken links – potentially at scale. While removing irrelevant content is often necessary, it is always worth considering whether there is an alternative page that the deleted page/post can be redirected to. This prevents broken links and preserves a good user experience for your clients/customers. For example, if you are a local estate agent who has deleted your landlords page but has landlord information on your lettings page, it would be worth redirecting the landlords page URL to your lettings page.

New website launches are another cause of broken links. This is commonly due to changes to link structures or moving from one CMS to another. If you are launching a new website, it is important to plan for these changes in advance and look to implement a website link mapping plan to define which links are changing, where redirects are required and when they will be implemented.

The Impact Of Broken Links

Whatever the cause of broken links, their impact is clear – they confuse search engines, answer engines and website visitors. Pages with broken links are likely to be removed from search engines and answer engines, resulting in lost visibility for your business. Broken links also have a negative impact on your potential clients/customers. If they encounter broken links, will they always take the time to find what they need on your website? Or will they give up and look elsewhere? Surprisingly, that can be all it takes to drive them towards a competitor, which can have a significant impact on your business.

Duplicate Content

No one wants to read the same content twice, but duplicate content can cause exactly that. Duplicate content issues are created when the same content is used more than once on your website with little or no variation. It comes in two key forms: intentional — where the same content is deliberately used twice to save the time and resources required to create unique content — and unintentional. In the case of unintentional duplicate content, it is most often caused by there being two versions of the same page/post and there not being the relevant canonical tags or redirects in place to ensure that only one version of the page/post is indexed.

Intentional Duplicate Content

Intentional duplicate content is usually relatively easy to fix as it simply involves either creating entirely new replacement content, or slightly adapting one version of the content. In both cases, using a combination of AI tools and human input can help you to create exceptional and unique search engine friendly content. It is often possible for businesses to resolve this in-house. However, working with a specialist SEO consultant can help you to resolve the duplicate content issue and improve your content to make it more suitable for search engines and answer engines.

Unintentional Duplicate Content

Meanwhile, unintentional duplicate content can be more challenging to resolve as it can be caused by a range of different issues, ranging from the configuration of your CMS, human error, or even your SEO setup. The best way to resolve this type of duplicate content issue varies depending upon the specific cause. Although duplicate content caused by human error can be easy to resolve, if it is caused by the configuration of your CMS or your SEO setup, consulting an SEO and website specialist is highly recommended. Attempting to resolve these issues without the right expertise could cause significant damage to your SEO and could have a detrimental impact on your website.

The Impact Of Duplicate Content

The impact of having duplicate content on your business website can be significant, especially if it is at scale and the content has multiplied over a period of time. It has the potential to confuse both search engines and answer engines while impacting the discoverability of your content. Search engines and answer engines may decide not to index content at all if it’s found to be duplicated, or they may index the wrong version.

Fortunately, the impact duplicate content has on potential clients/customers is less significant than broken links. However, few people will want to read the same content twice, so having duplicate content can cost you the attention of your website visitors. They may visit fewer pages on your website, which could cost you valuable conversions including valuable leads or sales.

Missing Meta Descriptions

While not quite as important as they once were, meta descriptions remain an indirect ranking factor, and they often help to convince potential customers that your website offers exactly what they are looking for. Meta descriptions are described as a short summary of the contents of a page/post, SEO & AEO best practice is to include relevant keywords and themes in a natural way. They provide a useful overview of a page/post’s content and can help search engines to best understand not only the content but also its wider context.

When they are missing from your pages/posts, search engines will take an excerpt of text randomly from your website page that they feel best matches the query. Although search engines are advanced, the excerpt that they choose may still not be relevant. So, it is generally better to craft something that is tailored and targeted to your ideal clients/customers.

It is important to note that even if you do specify a meta description, search engines may decide to display other text from the page/post in its place. Despite this, it is better to prepare something targeted and have a chance of it appearing, than rely solely on search engines to extract something that will capture the attention of your potential clients/customers.

Fixing Missing Meta Descriptions

Resolving missing meta description issues can be relatively straightforward as it does not typically involve too much technical skill. If you know your audience well and prepare descriptions that are up to 160 characters each, you will be in line with most SEO best practice.

However, if the issue is significant and it affects a high number of pages and posts on your business’s website, it may be more cost effective to outsource their creation to an SEO specialist as part of an SEO management service or one-off SEO project. Also, if you are unsure of the most relevant keywords and topics that relate to the products/services that your business provides, working with an SEO specialist who can guide you with keyword research may be best.

Slow Page Load Speed

Page load speed has been an important ranking factor for some time, and its impact on user experience is significant. Everyone wants to find the information they need quickly, and no one wants to wait an age for your website to load. When a website is slow, the risk of a potential client/customer choosing to visit a competitor’s website that is faster remains high, as does the chance of them becoming frustrated and choosing not to complete a valuable action such as phoning or enquiring with your business. A speedy website is often a successful one!

The Ideal Page Load Speed

As long as your website loads within 2 seconds, it is likely to provide an exceptional user experience across most devices. For the vast majority of websites, it is often the case that they will have a fast page load speed on desktop devices and a much slower speed on mobile devices. As mobile devices often connect to the internet using a slower and more unreliable internet connection, the need for speed here is far greater.

Gaining an understanding as to how your website performs in terms of page load speed is an important first step. If your website has not undergone an SEO audit recently, you may be unaware as to whether you have a page load speed issue or not. Fortunately, it is relatively easy to find out with website speed tools like the Pingdom Website Speed Test and Google Page Speed Insights. If your website is flagged as having a specific page speed issue by Google Page Speed Insights or is measured as having a page load speed of over 2 seconds, you could benefit from improving it.

Improving Page Load Speed

Unfortunately, in most cases improving your page load speed can be quite an involved and technical task. However, it depends on the cause of your slow page load speed and the platform/CMS that your website is built with.

If your website is built in WordPress, there are a number of speed optimisation plugins that may be able to help including WP Rocket, WP Fastest Cache and W3 Total Cache. Sometimes installing and configuring one of these plugins can be enough to improve your speed to within an acceptable range. However, these plugins do need to be used with care as they have the potential to break elements on your website and may require some tweaking to configure the settings in such a way that they do not affect the functionality of your website.

However, if your website is built in Wix, Squarespace or something similar, your options for improving your page load speed are often more limited and you may need to take a different approach to driving improvements. Looking at website elements such as image compression, disabling un-used elements where possible and plan upgrades can be a good starting point.

For businesses with a custom CMS, your approach to optimisation is likely to be similar to that used for Wix and Squarespace websites. Starting with image compression and disabling un-used elements is often a great starting point. Once this has been done, you will then need to consult with your website developer to see what improvements can be made behind the scenes in the backend. Common improvements include code optimisation & streamlining and website functionality changes.

Missing Or Broken Sitemaps

Sitemaps are very much like a sat nav. They indicate where and what the pages and posts on your website are to search engines to make them more discoverable, so they get indexed. If your website’s pages and blog posts are not indexed, they will not be visible to potential clients/customers. This can significantly hold back your website SEO and limit its effectiveness.

If your sitemap is missing or broken, it can leave search engines confused as to the structure of your website and its content. The most significant impact of this is that you will then have to wait for search engine bots to manually crawl through your website and identify new content. This slows down the SEO process, especially as search engines are currently taking significantly longer to identify and index new content.

Fixing A Broken Or Missing Sitemap

Fortunately, fixing a missing or broken sitemap is relatively straightforward. Many CMS platforms including WordPress, Wix and Squarespace automatically generate sitemaps. Many other platforms have sitemap functionality, which sometimes needs to be enabled. If you have a custom CMS, you may need to use a sitemap generator to create one and upload it to your website. This does of course present another issue in that the sitemap will not automatically update as you add new content to your website. In this case, the best practice would be to decide on a set interval at which to manually re-generate the sitemap and upload it.

Improve Your Technical SEO On Your Business’s Website

While finding and fixing technical SEO issues is far from the most exciting area of SEO, it can make a significant difference to how visible your website is and how well it works for your business.

Investing in SEO management services or a one-off SEO management service for your business is an effective way to not only improve your technical SEO but also optimise it for search engines and answer engines. As a chartered marketer and experienced SEO specialist with 10 years’ experience of helping businesses in the UK and internationally with SEO, I can help you get your website performing at its best so it is well placed to attract leads and sales from your ideal clients.

Find out more about the services that I deliver including B2B SEO services, SEO management services and SEO in Hampshire for Hampshire businesses that are looking to gain visibility and attract their ideal clients.

I also offer a free no-obligation digital marketing consultation to businesses that are considering my services. Book your free consultation today.