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Five Challenges of Technical SEO and How a Technical SEO Consultant Can Help

As a business owner or marketer, you know that Technical Search Engine Optimization (Technical SEO) is crucial for a successful online presence, but it’s also one of the most challenging aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — below are the top five reasons why:

Google Core Algorithm Updates and SEO

Google core algorithm updates can cause unexpected and significant traffic loss and when this happens we need to investigate the site health and performance and make adjustments where necessary as a step towards recovering the lost traffic. This overlaps heavily with Organic SEO however as a first step we’ll need to perform a site health audit in order to ensure that there are no new errors that are directly responsible for the traffic degradation.

Complex Site Structure and SEO

A website’s technical structure can be complex, and unregistered or incorrect sitemaps can directly impact your website’s performance with Google and other search engines if pages are not being indexed. This is more important than it may appear at first glance because, like other problems specific to SEO, the website will continue to function without obvious technical issues, but behind the scenes this invisible problem will, over time, result in a potentially nontrivial loss in traffic. Furthermore once this issue has been identified and fixed, we’ll be forced to wait while Google indexes the missing pages. This is not always a fast process and, in fact, can take a few days or even weeks to start to show impressions in Google Search Console and the process of appearing in search results can fluctuate over the next coming weeks and months as targeted keywords fluctuate positionally in search results.

Internal linking is also an aspect of Technical SEO which sends signals to both visitors as well as search engines that the content on the current page is also related to other pages on the site. Frequently SEO’s tasked with improving site performance will start by focusing on internal linking and improving this alone can have a dramatic positive impact on search performance.

Mobile Optimization and SEO

A significant and growing percentage of visitors access websites from mobile phones and tablet devices and hence it’s important to ensure that a website correctly renders content consistently on desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices.

Websites that do not deliver content that renders correctly on all three devices will have a higher than usual bounce rate where visitors encounter a poorly rendered page or content that has other problems and they wont stay for long. Furthermore these problems will manifest in Google Search Console as mobile usability errors.

Finally, in my experience as a web developer these problems typically don’t just happen on one page — rather it is often the case that if this problem exists in one place, it likely exists elsewhere.

Website Speed Optimization and SEO

Slow website speed can hurt both User eXperience (UX) and SEO rankings — for more information on this specific topic see also my website speed consultant service page and also the article I wrote regarding why technical SEO is important. Similar to other Technical SEO challenges, a slow website is typically an invisible problem in that visitors will be forced to wait while a page loads — if this is bad enough visitors will leave your website and maybe go to your competitor. Furthermore slow page load times will be flagged in the Google Search Console under Core Web Vitals as failing URLs. Website performance is listed as a ranking factor so it’s important that a website 

See also the Search Engine Journal article entitled Seven tips to optimize page speed in 2023.

Indexing Issues and SEO

The process of developing content should be straightforward and generally it is. This process in simple terms involves developing a new post or page and request that Google Search Console index the page or use IndexNow to push notifications to various search engines regarding the presence of new content.

But what if there’s a problem?

If there’s a problem and the page is not on Google, the primary search engine of choice, then we need to figure out what the issues are, fix those issues, and resubmit a request for indexing. We should never just assume a page has been indexed successfully unless the Google Search Console indicates exactly that.

If you know or suspect that your website has problems, get in touch with me now and schedule and consultation and we can take a closer look at your website together and determine a way forward from there.