How to Catch & Fix 4 Common SEO Issues Before It’s Too Late

Taking a proactive stance in your SEO processes will help you catch and resolve problems before they impact your rankings. Here's how you can do it.

As an SEO professional, it’s your goal – and responsibility – to ensure that you can do what’s necessary to keep things running smoothly and stay up-to-date with your website’s content. 

On September 23, I moderated a sponsored Search Engine Journal webinar presented by Steven van Vessum, VP of Community at ContentKing.

He shared how to finally take a proactive stance in your SEO processes as you catch (and resolve!) problems before they impact your rankings.

Search engines never sleep. They are continuously crawling your site to update their indexes. SEO mistakes can happen anytime. 

You need to fix them before they impact your rankings and bottom line. About 80% of SEO issues go unnoticed for at least four weeks. 

An average SEO issue can cost up to $75,000 in lost revenue. But with the right tooling and processes, you can mitigate these issues.

But, What About Existing Tools? 

Google Search Console and Google Analytics are every Local Seo Company go-to tools of the trade. But they’re not enough if you want to take a proactive stance in your SEO processes. 

While Google Search Console does send notifications, they are delayed and limited. And when the alerts you’ve set up in Google Analytics are sent, your organic traffic has already taken a hit.

4 Common SEO Issues & How to Prevent Them 

Let’s cover the most common SEO issues we come across, and discuss how to prevent them from happening. 

1. Client or Colleague Gone Rogue 

You don’t really see this one coming. Quite a few SEO professionals might have experienced any of the following scenarios from a client or colleague: “The CMS was telling us to update it, so we did – including the theme and all of its plugins.” (And they did it directly in the live environment.) 

“We tweaked the page titles on these key pages all by ourselves!” “These pages didn’t look important, so we deleted them.” (Yes, those were the money pages.) “We didn’t like the URLs on these pages, so we changed them.” 

These scenarios are frustrating and can lead to a decline in your traffic and rankings.

How to Prevent It 

Take these steps to prevent rogue clients or colleagues from damaging your website’s SEO unintentionally. 

Track changes: You need to know what’s going on with the site. 

Get alerted: When someone goes rogue. 

Limit access: A content marketer doesn’t need access to functionality to update a CMS. 

Set clear rules of engagement: Everyone needs to know what they can, and can’t do.

A tool that has a change tracking feature like ContentKing comes in handy in these types of situations. 

The platform tracks what pages were added, changed, redirected, and removed. You essentially have a full change log of your entire site. 

You also want to get alerts – but you only need them for issues and changes that matter. Alerts need to be smart. 

You don’t need to receive an alert if the page title changes on some of the least important pages, but you want an alert when changes are made to your homepage.

2. Development Team Gone Rogue 

This happens when there is no proper coordination between developers and SEO team. In one example, the development team of an ecommerce store didn’t include SEO specialists in selecting and testing a new pagination system. 

They went with one that heavily relied on JavaScript, which caused big delays in the crawling and indexing processes because all of the paginated pages had to be rendered. 

Because of this, it was much harder for search engines to discover and value new product pages – not to mention re-evaluating the value of existing product pages. 

Another example is when changes to the U.S. section of a site were approved, but they were hastily shipped across all language versions.

How to Prevent It Similar to the first issues, you also need to: Track all changes. Get alerted when someone goes rogue. Set clear rules of engagement. More importantly, do proper QA testing.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-catch-fix-seo-issues/382374/