Common Technical SEO Errors That Are Killing Your Website’s Performance and How to Fix Them

A website that is technically sound is important to SEO. Even great websites, with great content, can come to a standstill in the rankings because of technical SEO and/or backlinking. In fact, some technical problems with your website are not as obvious, such as slow load times, broken links, duplicate content, etc. When you have these issues, search engines may just ignore your website altogether, and visitors may just leave frustrated.

As an SEO company in Vancouver, at BrandsMartini CA we’ve seen the impact of small technical mistakes cost websites traffic and rankings in more than a few scenarios. In this post, we’ll identify 15 common technical SEO mistakes, their importance, and how to resolve them so your website performs better.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the various things that are “done behind-the-scenes” of a website that help search engines crawl, index, and help to understand the content on your website. This includes site speed, mobile friendly, security, structured data, URL structure and so much more.

Good SEO services in Vancouver will begin with performing a technical audit, to be confident the foundational elements are strong before a company even considers content or backlinks.

15 Common Technical SEO Errors, Why They Matter, and How to Fix Them

1. Slow Website Speed

Issue: Pages are slow to load due to unoptimized images, too many scripts, or a bad server.

Significance: Increased bounce rates, poor visitor experience, and lower ranking on google.

How to fix:

• Compress and resize images
• Implement browser caching
• Minify CSS, JS, and HTML files
• Use CDN (content delivery network)
• Lazy-load off-screen images (load images on scroll) and defer loading non-critical script files

💡 Fact: 1 second delay translates into a 20% drop in conversions.

2. Broken Links and 404 Errors

Issue: Links are pointing to pages that don’t exist anymore.

Significance: Frustrates visitors and wastes crawl budget.

How to Fix:

• Discover broken links using the Google Search Console or Screaming Frog and fix
• 301 redirect removed pages
• Update internal links going to deleted pages

A professional SEO company in Vancouver can help identify and fix broken links quickly to ensure your website remains crawlable, user-friendly, and optimized for better rankings.

3. Duplicate Content

What is wrong: There are many pages within the site that have the same or very similar content.

Why it is important: It creates confusion for search engines about which page to rank and dilutes the ranking power over numerous pages.

How to Fix:

• Implement canonical tags to specify the preferred page. 
• Combine pages that are similar into one page. 
• Use distinct meta titles and descriptions for each page.

4. Missing XML Sitemap

What is wrong: Search engines have difficulty finding your important pages.

Why it is important: This slows the indexing of your newly published or updated content.

How to Fix:

• Use a plugin or a site like XML-sitemaps.com to generate a sitemap.
• Submit the sitemap to Google Search Console.
• Remember to update the sitemap whenever you add or remove a page from the site.

Partnering with an experienced SEO company in Vancouver ensures your XML sitemap is properly structured and regularly maintained, helping search engines index your website efficiently.

5. Poor Mobile Optimization

What is wrong: Pages are not responsive, text is small, or buttons are difficult to tap. 

Why is this important: Mobile-first indexing gives preference to mobile usability in ranking.

How to Fix:

• Use a responsive design.
• Test a number of your pages with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. 
• Do not use pop-ups or overlapping elements that obstruct the page and are intrusive.

6. Improperly set up robots.txt 

Problem: Key pages are disallowed from crawling.

Why it matters: If crawlers don’t get to crawl pages, then they won’t be shown on search.

What to do:

• Review your robots.txt for any disallow rules
• Allow pages with importance to the site to be crawled
• Test at Google Search Console robots.txt tester

7. Absence of HTTPS

Issue: Websites using HTTP or a combination of protocols are not secure.

Why it’s important: You can lose trust from your users. Google prefers secure websites.

How to fix:

• Get an SSL certificate.
• Redirect all HTTP pages to HTTPS.
• Make sure all internal links and canonicals are using HTTPS.

8. Not Using Structured Data

Issue: Website does not have schema markup associated with content type (products, reviews, articles).

Why is important: You’ve lost out on a potential rich snippet in search results that may have encouraged clicks.

How to fix:

• Use JSON-LD schema to mark up products, reviews, articles, or business information.
• Test the structured data using Google’s rich results test.

Working with a trusted SEO company in Vancouver helps ensure your structured data is implemented correctly, giving your website a competitive edge in search rankings.

9. Unoptimized Images

Issue: Page has large images or missing alt text (accessibility). Slow page-loading speeds and not optimizing for SEO.

Why is it important: Slower load time and/or not gaining from SEO juice.

How to fix:

• Compress images without quality loss.
• Use next-gen formats like WebP.
• Add alt text with a clear description.
• Lazy load if possible.

10. Weak or Lack of Internal Linking

Issue: Pages are isolated with few, if any, links to connect the page to relevant content.

Why is it important: Your crawlers can’t get to the page and the link equity is not passed down from the off-page linking. 

How to fix:

• Add internal links from relevant pages.
• Give a description in the anchor text.
• Keep logical hierarchy (main pages → subpages).

11. Insufficient Quality Content

Issue: Pages providing little value or content created strictly for SEO.

What matters: Low-quality pages will rank poorly and provide a poor user experience.

How to solve:

• Another action might consist of expanding content to provide more thorough and useful information.
• Another approach could be to include examples, visuals, and/or relevant keywords naturally, if it fits the content.
• Possible action steps could include merging thin content pages into one more extensive resource, given that all pages share the same topic or perceived topic. 

Partnering with an expert SEO company in Vancouver ensures your website has well-researched, engaging, and SEO-optimized content that attracts both users and search engines.

12. Incorrect Canonical Tags

Issue: Canonicals that incorrectly point to the wrong page, are not in the correct order, or do not exist.

What matters: Search engines might index the incorrect page or get lost, thus losing the ranking potential of another page and/or a canonical page.

How to solve:

• Be consistent and transparent; canonical to the self-referential canonical first to begin.
• Always ensure that the canonical at the bottom of any post, article and/or page points directly at the preferred URL.
• Remove chains and loops; only one page and one canonical address.

13. Crawl Errors

Issue: Server errors (5xx) or DNS errors and or time-outs might have prevented Googlebot from accessing these pages.

What matters: If a page is not crawled, it is not indexed; consequently, it cannot surface in a search engine ranking and or page visibility. 

How to solve:

• Monitor crawl errors in Google Search Console;
• Assure there are not significant problems with the DNS, server or if the server can respond;
• Always assure there is a proper status response (status 200) to requests and ensure it is done for other crawlers as well.    

14. Poor URL Structure

Issue: Lengthy, unattractive URLs often featuring random letters/numbers/symbols.

Importance: Unreadable and not shareable for users; keywords could be ignored.

Solution:

• Use short, descriptive URLs that include keywords (for example, /seo-services-vancouver) 
• Use hyphens to separate words
• Try to keep URL depth low

A professional SEO company in Vancouver can help you optimize your website’s URL structure, ensuring every page is search-friendly and user-focused.

15. Missing or Duplicate Meta Tags

Issue: Pages that do not have a title or meta description that are unique.

Importance: Could drop rankings, cause a drop in CTR, and confuse search engines.

Solution:

• Audit all pages for missing or duplicate meta tags.
• Write the title tags concisely and make sure to be unique in less than 50-60 char max.
• Write the meta description tags in 120-160 char max including relevant keywords in a natural way.

Why BrandsMartini CA?

We don’t just fix your technical SEO issues at BrandsMartini CA, we put everything in place to make sure your site is performing the way it should be. No other Vancouver SEO company is more suited to handling all 15 of these errors than we are, meaning you can relax knowing all errors and your site will be made better from working with us.

Our Vancouver SEO services, like any technical audit, speed up your site, mobile responsive, add in structured data and more, set you up for a better chance of higher rankings, more traffic, happier customers converting in their goals and having a better well-remarks site when you work with BrandsMartini CA.

Final Thoughts

Technical SEO is the foundation of your website’s performance. Don’t make the mistake of ignoring these 15 oversights. Each of these mistakes affects your rankings, your traffic, and the user experience. By identifying and correcting these mistakes, you can improve the speed of your website, rankings, and user experience.

If you need professional help with the technical SEO of your website, please reach out to BrandsMartini CA, your local SEO agency in Vancouver.