There are now so many different issues that can hinder an SEO strategy and the overall success of your site. You should start by checking if there are critical SEO errors on your site with a free tool like the Siteimprove SEO website checker. This can then help you pick up any issues you may have, with three key issues now very common and that should always be considered. These being whether the site is mobile-friendly, the inbound links, and finally the content quality.
Mobile Friendly
Ensuring your site is mobile friendly is now such an important role in SEO and this is also only increasing. Google now has a mobile-first index, so you need to ensure your site is accessible from mobile devices and this can also be checked through the google test page that they offer.
Inbound Links
Another very important factor is through inbound links. Creating newsworthy content and also creative options such as infographics can be a great means of picking up high-quality backlinks to your site. On top of this, you should also identify bad links, so should regularly be doing backlink checks for your site.
Content
Quality content is also of great importance and it is an issue that is always worth looking into. Creating high-quality content now plays a meaningful role in SEO and providing high-quality content, it can also help with earning some great inbound links.
Negative SEO
There are also many issues to look out for when it comes to negative SEO that can affect your rankings. This usually comes when third parties are using a number of different tactics in order to ultimately sabotage a competitor’s site rankings on purpose. This is also a tactic that has become more common in recent years. There are a number of red flags that can be identified that your site may be suffering from this. They could include lots of new spammy backlinks, de-indexing of the site, DDos attacks, or other means of hacking taking place on the site. If this does occur it can be really damaging in terms of SEO and really time-consuming in order to sort it out. This further shows why it is important to use the tool mentioned above, in order to pick up on these errors.
Another common problem can be through black hat SEO tactics, on top of algorithm updates that can result in Google penalties. These can be picked up for a whole host of reasons such as bad backlinks, duplicate content, keyword stuffing, scraped content, anchor linking, hidden links, hacking and irrelevant content.
Finally, another common issue to identify comes through low ranking due to keyword cannibalization. This is when multiple pages on a site are all targeting the same keyword, which will therefore reduce the chances of any single page ranking for that keyword. Also, another catalyst of this may include the site creating duplicate pages instead of redirects.
Negative SEO, google penalties and keyword cannibalization that was mentioned above can all be prevented. Sites must ensure they are identifying issues within their SEO strategy to ensure nothing like this happens moving forward, whilst keeping on top of changing algorithm updates.
