Adaptify’s 5 Top Technical SEO Blockers We Found from 1000+ Sites

Bethany Freeman

Jul 11, 2024 5 min read

Sometimes when we stop and take a look around, we can start to see patterns all around us. Things like how the stars form constellations or the comforting pattern found in the rhythm of your favorite song. Humans like patterns so when we say we have analyzed thousands of sites and consistently found similar patterns, you can believe it’s true.

Adaptify Minute Mastery: Top 5 Technical SEO Blockers:

1. Site Speed - Specifically Mobile

No one likes waiting, and Google knows that content, even if perfectly written, is not preferred if it loads slowly. Competing to rank on Google with a fast website is like doing SEO on easy mode vs any slower competition. Improving your site's speed, especially on mobile devices, can significantly boost your SEO performance.

How to Start Improving Site Speed:

• Measure: Knowing know how fast your websites are means you know how much faster your website has to be.
• Review all pages that rank on Google: the homepage of a website is not where the majority of your non-branded SEO traffic comes from, make sure the blog pages are fast too.
• Optimize Images: Compress images without losing quality.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML: Remove unnecessary code to speed up load times.
• Reduce Redirects: Minimize the number of redirects to improve load times.

2. Signs of "Authority" on the Website

Search engines prioritize websites that demonstrate authority and trustworthiness. Making sure that your site has these elements helps establish your credibility:

• Services Page: A page that clearly outlines the services offered helps search engines understand the site's relevance to certain queries.
• About Page: An about page provides background information on the company, helping to build trust with both users and search engines.
• Customer Testimonials and Reviews: Positive feedback from customers is a strong signal of authority and reliability.
• Social Media Outbound URLs: An easy win: linking to active social media profiles indicates that the website is maintained by real people and adds to its credibility.

3. Metadata

Metadata is essential for search engines to understand and index your content properly. It’s a one-time setup that can have lasting benefits.

• Meta Description: A brief summary of the page content that appears in search results. Learn More
• Rel=Canonical: Prevents duplicate content issues by specifying the "preferred" version of a webpage. Learn More
• Invalid Robots.txt Configuration: Ensures search engines can properly index your site. Learn More
• Hreflang: Specifies the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. Not just important for multilingual websites. Learn More
• Descriptive Title: Each page should have a unique, descriptive title that accurately reflects its content; when set up correctly, Adaptify does this for your blog pages out of the box. Learn More

4. On-Page Content

High-quality, engaging content is key to good SEO. Adaptify helps ensure your blog content meets these standards, but this list is helpful for every page.

• Rich Media: Incorporate images, videos, and other media to make content more engaging.
• Page Design: A well-designed page with easy-to-read typography and a clean layout improves user experience and dwell time.
• Clear Site Navigation: Ensure users can easily find what they’re looking for.
• Specific Link Text: Replace generic link text like "click here" with descriptive phrases that indicate the link's destination. Learn More About Descriptive Text In Links (see what we did there?)
• Outbound Links: While not a major ranking factor in 2024, a few relevant outbound links can still provide some SEO benefits. However, original content has become far more important.

5. Authors Matter

Ensure that the author of the content is visible and recognizable. Google values content with clear authorship as it adds to the credibility and trustworthiness of the site.

• Author Bio: Include a short bio for the author with relevant qualifications.
• Clickable Profile: Make the author’s name clickable, leading to a profile page with more detailed information.
• Author’s Social Proof: Link to the author’s social media profiles and other publications to establish their expertise.

Want Help Breaking Free from Your Technical SEO Blockers?

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Technical SEO Audit tool. This tool is designed to help you get better rankings and improve your overall site performance. It runs behind the scenes and can be found in the right hand column.

Technical SEO Audit Tool Overview:

• Issue Detection: Highlights important issues like missing blog pages.
• Metadata Check: Lists all metadata issues.
• Site Speed: Provides detailed site speed analysis and optimization tips.
• Signs of Authority: Checks for authority indicators like services page, about page, testimonials, and social media links.
• Broken Links: Identifies and reports broken links on your site.

Graphical Stats Beta is Now Live!

Thought we were done? Of course not!
Your Adaptify Summer updates are just getting started. We are thrilled to announce that as of this week, everyone will have access to the Graphical Stats Dashboard that was previously in beta testing. We want to give a huge shoutout to those who helped participate in beta testing this feature and want to remind you to please fill out your feedback thoughts and send those back to us ASAP.

What’s New:

• Interactive Dashboard: Visual graphs for Articles Ranking, Keywords Ranking, Content Impressions, Content Clicks, and Articles Scheduled/Keyword Plan.
• Exportable Reports: Export visual PDF reports to share with your customers.

These new features will provide powerful insights into your content performance and help demonstrate ROI to your clients.

We are excited to bring you both of these updates and would love to hear your thoughts as you start using them. Don’t be shy with sending us feedback or letting us know what other tools could help make your workflow easier.

As always, we're here to support your SEO efforts. Visit Adaptify.ai to learn more about how we can help you break through those blockers!

Bethany Freeman

Jul 11, 2024 5 min read