If you own a website, then you should know a thing or two about SEO. I’m not expecting you to be a complete expert, but you should be aware that this is one of the most critical elements of every digital marketing strategy. With good SEO, your website will rank well in search engines and drastically increase its visibility. The consequences of this are extremely positive; more traffic, improved brand awareness and better lead generation.

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your SEO, and I’m sure many of you are currently doing them. Structuring your website with proper headings and keyword rich content are two great examples, while link building is another.

However, did you know there are a few seemingly insignificant things that could be killing your search engine optimization? I call these things ‘seemingly insignificant’ as they’re really tiny elements of your website that you probably don’t notice. What’s more, they’re things that you had no idea would impact your SEO so severely. If you carry on reading, I’ll reveal all of these things to you…

Broken links

Broken links are any links on your website that just don’t work. You may be wondering why on earth you have these, but it happens a lot of the time. There’s the obvious reason; you copy the link wrong and create one that doesn’t exist. But, more often than not, broken links occur when you link to an external website that either shuts down or gets rid of the page you linked to. As a result, you’ve now got broken links that are harming your SEO.

Search engines hate broken links as it looks like you’re trying to con them into gaining ranking positions. It’s seen as a type of link building spam, which is heavily penalized. To avoid this happening to you, there are plugins and things you can use to search your site and identify any broken links. This will stop something as small as a broken link from ruining your search engine ranking.

No SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is basically something that secures your website. It means you have a safe connection that protects users who are on your site. This is usually something that we associate with ecommerce sites – or any websites where users will input private information, such as their bank details or home address. However, Google has started to penalize all sites that don’t have an SSL certificate. You can learn more about this online, and see why they’re doing this, but you mainly need to know that it’s happening right now. If your site doesn’t have one, then you’re going to be hit with SEO penalties that see you slide down the rankings.

If you don’t have a clue what an SSL certificate is, or can’t remember whether or not your site has one, then there’s an easy way to figure out if your website boasts this secure connection. Just load it up, then look in the URL bar and see if it says https or just http. If it’s the second option, then you don’t have an SSL certificate and need to get one right away!

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Spelling & grammatical errors

Yes, something as small as spelling/grammatical errors can be damaging your search engine optimization. Obviously, this is something you know won’t reflect well on your business if your website is littered with spelling errors. But, how on earth does this change the way your site is ranked? In essence, it boils down to the user experience. A website that’s full of spelling and grammar errors will be harder for a user to get through. It’s too hard for them to read your content, so they end up leaving your site. This increases your bounce rate, which causes your SEO to suffer.

Likewise, it’s hard for search engine bots to crawl through your site and understand what your content is about when there are loads of errors. As such, they struggle to index your pages, and the ranking deteriorates. To avoid this, run all your content through various editing apps and ensure the spelling and grammar are both perfect!

Blog comment spam

When it comes to things that are seemingly insignificant, the comments on your blog posts are right up there. It’s strongly advised that all businesses have a blog on their website. This allows you to create content that combines SEO keywords with link building, and it will generally improve your search ranking. However, problems arise when people start commenting on your posts. Mainly, it’s spam comments that are the problem. People comment with links to different websites – usually bad ones – and it falls back on you. Search engines can’t determine that you didn’t place these links here, and they assume it was your website. So, you get hit with penalties that really trouble your ranking.

To make matters worse, spammers usually have software that allows them to post multiple comments on multiple blogs. So, you could unwillingly have hundreds of spam links all over your website. There are ways to avoid this, and it starts by deleting all these comments if they’re present. But, to prevent them in the first place, you should make people sign in to post comments. They have to use their email address or sign-in using Facebook to post comments on your blogs. This stops spammers from going to work and cleans up your comments sections.

 

Of course, other things could be killing your SEO. However, most of these are pretty significant and easy for you to recognize. Everyone knows that site speed and mobile optimization are big SEO ranking factors. But, hardly anyone is aware that little things like SSL certificates and blog comments come into play as well! Hopefully, this post has opened your eyes and let you see different things that you need to be aware of.

If your website has been struggling to rank well, despite the fact you’ve been following plenty of SEO best practices, then it may be down to one of these four things.