Good SEO reporting is tough. There’s so much conflicting and outdated advice in our industry that in many cases, SEOs tend to focus on buzz terms rather than good actionable advice. I’ve seen hundreds of SEO reports throughout the years and I often have hard time walking out with a good plan of further action when it comes to making a website better optimized. But it’s not the point of this article. What I’d like to start here is an open-ended discussion: Which SEO issues do you include in your SEO audits that others don’t? Inspired by some recent SEO audits, here are three important SEO issues that I notice are often overlooked: 1. Trailing slash / No trailing slashOne of the most under-estimated issues with structuring URLs is double-checking whether your URLs work with and without a trailing slash at the end. Read my old article on the issue which, despite being published all the way back in 2009, still holds true. To summarize:
To diagnose the issue, I tend to use the free website crawler from SEOchat. For some reason it catches these issues more often than other crawlers. You can also simply run a couple of random URLs through a header checker to see that no link power is being leaked and no users are being lost. Further reading: There’s another guide explaining problems and solutions when it comes to a trailing slash.
2. No H-subheadsA long time ago, we used to call those h2-h3 subheadings “semantic structure”, and we’d recommend using them to give keywords higher prominence.
Other than that there was no obvious tangible benefit to using them. These days, everything has changed because using H2 tags and including your keyword in them can get you featured! Image taken from my Featured Snippets FAQ on Content Marketing Institute, where I explain how <h2> tags can help you get a featured snippet The featured snippet algorithm is being changed daily, so it is going to be harder and harder to get featured. So far, though, they work like a charm and thanks to that, you have a very obvious reason to convince your clients to start using these tags: They can help you get featured! Netpeak Spider is an excellent tool to diagnose H-structure of the whole website. It gives a detailed report containing content and number of H1-H6 tags, missing tags, and more: 3. Thin contentHow do we define thin content?
Everyone talks about thin content in our industry, but an alarming number of SEO reports fail to include it. Why so? I see two reasons:
When it comes to diagnosing, I’d like to direct you to the awesome audit template from Annie Cushing. It does include thin content diagnostics and even explains how to find it. As to explaining the issue to clients, the problem with thin-content pages is that it can negatively affect the whole site. If a search crawler finds a high percentage of thin content on a website, it may decide that the whole site is not of much value either. That’s the essence of the Panda update (which is now part of Google’s algorithm). For more context, check out this video by Jim Boykin:
That being said, thin content may be a reason of your client’s website slowly but surely losing its rankings. It’s very tough to diagnose:
Like duplicate content, it’s not right to call this a penalty. Even though thin content may be dragging your site down, it’s not a penalty. It’s part of Google’s effort to keep its results higher-quality. What other SEO issues do you consider often overlooked in our industry? Share your insights! from https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/22/three-seo-issues-that-your-seo-report-needs-to-include-but-you-probably-overlook/
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ABOUT MEPleasure to introduce myself I am Gillian 32 from Calgary, Canada. I am working as social media expert and have helped many clients with their social media marketing. Archives
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