The 6 Top Technical SEO Challenges (+ What To Do About Them)

When it comes to digital marketing, you could have the most compelling, beautiful content the universe has ever seen, and it might not matter one bit. It might not do a thing for you. 

Because for that content to do any good, the universe has to actually see it.

Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes workhorse that ensures search engines can find — and then show users — all that quality content you’re making. But technical SEO can get complex, and it’s easy to make a few seemingly minor mistakes that tank your rankings and render your content all but invisible.

That said, these are the top technical SEO challenges that trip up many brands — and how to address them.

1. Indexing the website

Indexing is part of how search engines like Google and Bing identify individual pages on a website and understand what those pages are about. 

Indexing is vital because, if a page isn’t indexed, it won’t appear in search engine results, period. No matter how compelling the copy, no matter how fine-tuned the content SEO strategy, that page just isn’t going to rank.

When all goes well, indexing happens automatically. You publish a new page, and a Google bot eventually crawls that page, analyzes it, and indexes it. If the change is especially urgent or time-sensitive (or if the robots aren’t finding it quickly enough), you can also manually request indexing in Google Search Console and push indexing to Bing via IndexNow.

But sometimes, a particular page (or lots of pages within a domain) isn’t getting indexed, even if you take those manual steps. For professionals without technical SEO experience (or the bandwidth to slow down and solve the problem), this can be incredibly frustrating.

Often, the cause isn’t obvious, and while you can always resubmit your page for indexing after making some changes, the feedback isn’t instant. You might be left guessing, making small change after small change as you try to find whatever the search engine index is objecting to.

Finding the cause of indexing issues can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack:

• Maybe you have a theme that negatively affects load time — so Google “discovers” your page but sees the quality issue and doesn’t index it. 
• You could have exclusions in your source code or robots.txt.
• Your XML sitemap might have errors or be out of date, confusing the robots.
• Pages that you want indexed could be flagged noindex, causing the robots to skip them on purpose.

All of these causes take some technical prowess and time to diagnose, communicate to your developers, and get fixed.

How to avoid indexing issues

The simplest way to avoid indexing issues is to create and maintain a sitemap that search engines can read. If crawlers can’t easily see how your site is structured, they can miss important details and fail to index some pages. 

How to fix improper indexing

The best way to fix improper indexing is to look at everything, then look again, checking for issues like:

• Technical problems, such as 3XX (redirect), 4XX (page not found), and 5XX (server) errors
• Slow page load speeds 
• No sitemap in robots.txt file or Google Search Console
• Crawl depth issues

If you’ve reached the end of your technical SEO expertise and haven’t resolved your site’s indexing issues, then it’s time for an audit of your website. 

At this stage, it’s wise to partner with an agency like Ten Speed that focuses on search engine optimization, including technical SEO. We’ve found and solved indexability issues for dozens of clients, and we have the expertise to uncover and address indexing issues for your business.

2. Making the most of a linking strategy

If you have experience with on-page SEO (content SEO), you already know that links matter. Maybe a lot, maybe a little — it depends on who you ask— but they do matter.

On the technical side, internal links (links to your own content or other web pages on your domain) help the crawlers move through your site, while external links (backlinks) help bolster your site’s authority.

But getting the most value out of links within your content takes more than just sprinkling in a few links here and there. It requires a strategic approach and the right technical execution.

Some of the most common site-linking issues we come across are:

• Too many / not enough links
• Using nofollow links instead of dofollow links
• Hyperlinking the same phrase (like a main keyword) to different resources in the same piece of content
• Broken links that affect website crawlability
• Internal links that lead to redirects
• Hyperlinking too much text (e.g., a whole sentence rather than just a term or phrase)

When a website is full of problems with its hyperlinks, search engines may become confused or interpret the technical problems as signs that the site is lower in quality. Pages fail to get indexed, and search engine rankings and organic traffic drop or stay lower than they would otherwise have been.

How to avoid link issues

Checking and double-checking links when you first create a new page or piece of content is a great place to start. A typo or other minor error is easier to catch and fix while in production.

You can’t control what happens on other domains, which means your external linking strategy will always require closer attention. But you can take several steps to avoid some types of link issues or greatly reduce their impact:

• Build a logical site structure and keep it consistent. If you don’t change URLs, you won’t end up with broken links and redirects.
• Set most links to dofollow.
• Ensure the linked text accurately reflects what you’re linking to.
• Use unique phrases for each link.
• Choose external links to websites with high page authority (but not to competitors!).

How to fix broken links

Trying to deal with link issues manually is a “what you don’t know can hurt you” situation. Someone running a simple website with a handful of pages could conceivably check them all manually. 

But if you’re a growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) company with dozens, if not hundreds, of pages that already have numerous links, this manual approach just isn’t going to work.

The good news is that there are tools that can do this for you. We recommend running a crawl in Screaming Frog both before and after assessing your internal linking strategy and making fixes.

Be prepared: That crawl will likely turn up a lot of results — so many that it might seem overwhelming. Start by working on the issues that are likely to have the biggest impact, and save the minor improvements for later. 

Focus on the pages that are intended to drive revenue, as these are more valuable in search than other content (like company updates, product launches, and team spotlights). 

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3. Maintaining the user experience

Creating a seamless experience across devices and browsers is another challenge that can create technical SEO problems.

More web traffic now comes from mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) than from desktops. That’s why Google now uses mobile-first indexing, crawling and evaluating mobile pages to determine rankings.

These days, it’s not hard to find a content management system that automatically creates responsive pages. Still, creating content that actually works responsively can be especially challenging in SaaS SEO, where the products and the problems they’re designed to solve are more complex. 

For example, a company with a detailed desktop-only web app might have a more challenging time designing responsive content. It won’t be easy to get and format a screenshot of the product that displays well and is legible on mobile devices.

Common user experience (UX) issues here include:

• Broken, cluttered, or illogical navigation 
• Menus that can’t be fully viewed on small screens
• Oversized screenshots or images that either destroy mobile formatting or shrink down to be illegible
• Pricing pages that don’t actually include pricing

How to avoid a poor user experience

Most companies will benefit from using a CMS that automatically creates responsive pages. But look for one that also gives you the flexibility to modify and correct if the responsive behavior is omitting or obscuring important information. 

Also, pay close attention to your site’s navigation. It’s the roadmap of your site (for robots and human users alike), so be sure to use clear and concise language, along with a logical structure.

How to fix UX issues

When it comes to UX problems, the best way to start is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and look at your website objectively. If you were browsing this site, looking to make a buying decision, what impression would the design, layout, and formatting give you? 

• Does it have easy navigation that makes it simple to move around the site and find what you’re looking for?
• Are there formatting inconsistencies that indicate the brand doesn’t pay attention to the little details?
• Does the mobile site feel like an afterthought?

The more custom your site, the more time and work it will take to address any issues you uncover. On the other hand, when you control the site, you won’t get hamstrung by a CMS that won’t allow you to make granular changes.

If you reach the end of your technical depth or bandwidth, it makes sense to work with a web development partner to fix UX issues.

4. Avoiding broken pages

We’ve all come across that classic “404 page not found” error, and you’ve probably seen its second cousin, the 503 server error.

These two categories of errors (often called 4xx and 5xx, since there are others in the same families) are broken page or server errors. When those errors occur, users can’t access the given page — at all.

When a user (or a Google robot) can’t access a page, that page isn’t going to accomplish anything for the user journey or SEO, so it’s a pretty important issue to fix.

4xx errors occur when there is no page to load at a given URL. You can see this for yourself: Go to the address bar on this page, delete any three letters (after tenspeed.io/), and press enter / tap go. 

Since you’ve submitted a URL that doesn’t match any of the pages on our site, you get a 404 page not found error. (Seriously, try it — our 404 page is actually kind of fun!)

Users can encounter these errors by mistyping a URL, clicking a link that was mistyped when created, or clicking a link that points to a page that has been removed or moved without a redirect.

5xx errors, on the other hand, are server errors that most often occur during an outage of some type or when your server is too slow to handle the volume of requests it’s receiving. 

How to identify page errors

Screaming Frog can help here as well (as can tools from other big SEO brands like Ahrefs and SEMrush). The reports it generates are heavy on information, but within them, you should see page errors like these identified.

How to fix 4XX and 5XX errors

Both of these problems are very much fixable. For 404 errors on pages that moved to a different URL, set up a redirect so that any inbound links to the old URL will still reach the right destination. For pages that no longer exist, remove the link from any current content or replace it with a different one.

Occasional 5xx errors aren’t likely a big deal, but if you’re encountering them regularly, there may be a server problem or configuration issue that needs fixing. It’s time to chat with IT or an outside partner to identify what needs to change.

5. Understanding HTTPS

HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure) is a secure, encrypted version of HTTP. Back in the day, standard websites used HTTP, while those with more sensitive information or functions (like banks) used HTTPS. 

But in recent years, the tech giants have all been steering toward HTTPS for everything. Now, you might even get a security warning when trying to load an HTTP page, depending on your device, operating system, and browser.

HTTPS is a page ranking factor, so not using it can lower your spot in the SERPs. But worse than that, it can erode trust and create usability issues for potential customers.

How to avoid HTTPS issues

Most likely, you’ll only encounter HTTPS problems if your site is brand new and not built in a major CMS like Wordpress, or if your site has been online for many years without a substantial overhaul.

Avoid new issues by making sure any new pages are set to HTTPS, and redirect old pages to closely matched HTTPS URLs as they come to your attention. (You can also find these pages via various crawlers like Screaming Frog.)

How to fix HTTPS problems

First, you’ll need to make sure you have an SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate installed on your website. If so, there should be a simple switch on your backend or in your CMS to enable HTTPS. 

Beyond this first-line fix, things start getting complicated for the average non-technical user. So we recommend working with an expert to resolve the issue if you’re still having HTTPS problems.

6. Minimizing repetitive content

To search engines (and users), repetitive or duplicate content can look like a sign of a spammy website. It can also just plain confuse the search engine crawlers when they find multiple instances of content doing the same job (or even identical copies of pages).

It’s easy to create duplicate content within your own site without realizing it, especially if you’ve been at the content SEO game for a while. Two different high-quality blog posts on the same topic, if similar enough, could get penalized as duplicate content.

Multiple versions of the same page (like https://yourbrand.com and https://www.yourbrand.com) can also trigger duplicate page problems if not set up properly.

How to avoid content cannibalization

Duplicate content can be difficult to spot without tools. Google Search Console will alert you once you’ve been penalized, but it’s better to be proactive. Screaming Frog will identify when content is too alike and could be flagged for duplicate content. 

It’s important to know that, if you have multiple language versions of your site, you will not be flagged — so long as you correctly set up hreflang and your URL structure. Crawlers will understand you’re serving multiple countries or language speakers with these signals. 

How to get rid of duplicate content

When you have multiple identical versions of a page, add rel canonical tags to one and noindex to the others, then use 301 redirects on the noindex pages.

If you’re getting flagged for duplicate content on pages that aren’t exact matches, the fixes can get a little more complicated. You may need to change the focus of one page, consolidate two pages into one, or address technical issues that are confusing the search engines. This is another area where professional expertise comes in handy.

Want to dive deeper? Listen to our podcast episode about common technical SEO issues.

Borrow Ten Speed’s technical expertise to uncover issues and overcome common (and uncommon) SEO challenges

The six issues we covered in this blog post are a great place for SEO experts and marketing managers to start cleaning up technical SEO issues.  

But they aren’t an exhaustive list. There are many more complex challenges that could pop up and keep your important pages from climbing as high as they could on search engine results pages. 

Issues with source code, hreflang, plugins, schema markup, and more can trip up even veteran webmasters — but Ten Speed can help. 

We empower SaaS businesses with strategic optimization, including on-page SEO and technical SEO. Through page and site audits and regular on-page optimization support, we’ll deliver your best SEO experience yet.

Ready to fix your SEO challenges? Start by scheduling an intro call.