10 SEO Issues That Really Matter & How to Fix Them

Surprisingly, the ones you see the most aren't necessarily the ones you should be losing sleep over. They may be worth fixing, but definitely not putting on the top of your list.

For instance, we found that meta descriptions were missing on 72.9% of studied sites. But these don’t impact rankings, and Google will generate one for you in that case, anyway. Conversely, a serious issue of a canonical page pointing to a broken page was found on only 2.6% of sites.

So if you want to fix issues that can seriously impact your rankings, here’s a better idea. You can use the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console to see if your site is affected by any of the nine issues we listed in this article.

Read on to learn why these issues matter and how to use the tools to find and fix them.

Update: In February 20226, Google updated its documentation clarifying that Googlebot crawls only the first 2 MB of supported file types, including HTML. Any content beyond that limit is ignored. It's unlikely to affect most sites, but it's a critical problem wherever it does occur—so I've added it to this list.

Indexability is a webpage’s ability to be indexed by search engines. Depending on the issue, Google will index the wrong pages or won’t be able to display it in the SERPs (and you won’t get any traffic to these pages).

Here are some examples of these issues:

Three requirements must be met for a page to be indexable:

Sign up for a free account of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and set up your project (you can do it in a few clicks). Next:

For canonicalization issues in this report, you will need to replace bad URLs in the link rel="canonical" tag with valid ones (i.e., returning an “HTTP 200 OK”).

As for pages marked by “noindex” issues, these are the pages with the “noindex” meta tag placed inside their code. Chances are, most of the pages found in the report should stay as they are. But if you see any pages that shouldn’t be there, simply remove the tag. Do make sure those pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt first.

Click on the question mark on the right to see instructions on how to fix each issue. For more detailed instructions, click on the “Learn more” link.

Broken pages are pages on your site that return 4XX errors (can’t be found) and 5XX errors (server errors). These pages either won’t be indexed by Google or will be dropped from the index; either way, you’re potentially missing out on traffic and creating a bad experience for your visitors.

Furthermore, if broken pages have backlinks pointing to them, all of that link equity goes to waste.

Broken pages are also a waste of crawl budget—something to watch out for on bigger websites.

In AWT, you should:

In the report showing pages with issues, it’s a good idea to add a column for the number of referring domains. This will help you make the decision on how to fix the issue.

Now, fixing broken pages (4XX error codes) is quite simple, but there is more than one possibility. Here’s a short graph explaining the process:

Dealing with server errors (the ones reporting a 5XX) can be a tougher one, as there are different possible reasons for a server to be unresponsive. Read this short guide for troubleshooting.

With AWT, you can also see 404s that were caused by incorrect links to your website. While this is not a technical issue per se, reclaiming those links may give you an additional SEO boost.

An internal link is any hyperlink leading to the page or resource on the same website. They can affect rankings by:

In the worst case scenario, pages that you want to rank won’t have any internal links. These pages are called orphan pages. Web crawlers have limited ability to access those pages (only from sitemap or backlinks), and there is no link equity flowing to them from other pages on your site.

A more likely scenario is that some pages could rank higher or rank for additional keywords if they had more relevant links.

An orphan page needs to be either linked to from some other page on your website or deleted if a given page holds no value to you.

As for internal link opportunities, AWT identifies these automatically:

Focus on the columns labeled "source page," "keyword context," and "target page" in your documentation. These columns will guide you on which webpage to link from, which webpage to link to, and the specific location on the page where the link should be added.

For example, there are a few relevant internal links we can add to our list of SEO statistics:

Having a mobile-friendly website is a must for SEO. Two reasons:

Here are some examples of these issues:

In Ahrefs Site Audit, look for these issues under the Usability and performance category.

Next, click on the question mark next to the issue name and use the instructions to solve the issues for affected pages (they will require some web development work).

For example, if the tool finds pages with a font too small for mobile devices, you will need to make sure that the viewport tag is set properly and make the font at least 12 px.

Google uses HTTPS encryption as a small ranking signal. This means you can experience lower rankings if you don’t have a TLS certificate to secure your website.

But even if you do, some pages and/or resources on your pages may still use the HTTP protocol.

Assuming you already have an SSL/TLS certificate for all subdomains (if not, do get one), open AWT and do these:

Finally, let’s check if any resources on the site still use HTTP:

The quickest way to fix this is to add this short code in your .htaccess file or server config.

This configuration ensures that whenever a browser requests a page or resource from the server, it will automatically convert any HTTP requests to HTTPS for enhanced security.

Google's Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a set of metrics designed to gauge a website's user experience, mainly in terms of loading and responsiveness speed. They are part of Google’s Page Experience signals, impacting search engine rankings.

That said, from an SEO perspective the goal isn't to be the fastest site or the “most usable” one but to score at least “good” in these three categories:

Probably the fastest way to check for CWV for an entire site is to use the free Google Search Console.

Optimizing for CWV may take some time and some web dev skills. This may include things like moving to a faster (or closer) server, compressing images, optimizing CSS, etc. We’re explaining how to do this in the third part of this guide to CWV.

Unoptimized website structure in the context of technical SEO is mainly about important organic pages too deep into the website structure.

Pages that are nested too deep (users need more than 6 clicks from the website to get to them) will receive less link equity from your homepage (likely the page with the most backlinks), which may affect their rankings. This is because link value diminishes with every link “hop.”

Website structure is important for other reasons too, such as the overall user experience, crawl efficiency, and helping Google understand the context of your pages. Here, we’ll only focus on the technical aspect, but you can read more about the topic in our full guide: Website Structure: How to Build Your SEO Foundation.

The way to fix the issue is to link to deeper nested pages from pages closer to the homepage. More important pages could find their place in site navigation, while less important ones can be just linked to the pages a few clicks closer.

It’s a good idea to weigh in user experience and the business role of your website when deciding what goes into sitewide navigation.

For example, we could probably give our SEO glossary a slightly higher chance to get ahead of organic competitors by including it in the main site navigation. Yet we decided not to because it isn’t such an important page for users who are not particularly searching for this type of information.

Instead, moved the glossary only up a notch by including a link inside the beginner’s guide to SEO (which itself is just one click away from the homepage).

Schema markup is code that helps Google understand the information on a page, which can be used to show rich results (also known as rich snippets).

Schema markup is not a ranking factor, and it can’t make you rank higher in text results.

However, schema markup can make your pages eligible to rank in rich results. Google displays these for some search queries in spots that really stand out in the SERPs; some even show up on top of the standard text results.

This is especially important for pages with the following types of content:

There are various methods you can generate and validate schema for free. You can use a tool like Merkle or Schema or semi-automate the process with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is worth highlighting here because it’s able to recognize the relevant type schema for any page. Simply plug and URL if your page is already live or upload the copy if not live yet and ask AI to generate schema. You can use the following prompt:

Next copy the code and run it through Google’s Rich Results Test just to double-check everything is in order.

Finally, apply the code to the page. If you’re using a popular CMS like WordPress or Wix, look for a schema markup plugin/app. Otherwise, you may need to add the code to each eligible page manually.

You can also use AWT to look for any schema issues across the entire site. You will find these issues under the Others section of the All issues report.

Duplicate content happens when exact or near-duplicate content appears on the web in more than one place.

In cases of duplicate content, Google will choose one of the pages to show in the SERPs, but it won't necessarily be the page you want to be indexed.

Content duplication is not necessarily a case of intentional or unintentional creation of similar pages. There are other less obvious causes, such as faceted navigation, tracking parameters in URLs, or using trailing and non-trailing slashes.

First, check if your website is available under only one URL. If your site is accessible as:

… then Google will see all of those URLs as different websites.

The easiest way to check if users can browse only one version of your website: type in all four variations in the browser, one by one, hit enter, and see if they get redirected to the master version (ideally, the one with HTTPS).

You can also go straight into Site Audit’s Duplicates report. If you see 100% bad duplicates, that is likely the reason.

In this case, choose one version that will serve as canonical (likely the one with HTTPS) and permanently redirect other versions to it.

Then run a New crawl in Site Audit to see if there are any other bad duplicates left.

There are a few ways you can handle bad duplicates, depending on the case. Learn how to solve them in our guide.

Googlebot will only process the first 2 MB of a page's raw (uncompressed) HTML. Everything after that is ignored. For most pages, 2 MB is plenty, but unoptimized pages with things like heavy embedded CSS/JS can blow past it without anyone noticing—the browser renders everything fine, but Googlebot quietly stops reading.

That means content, links, and structured data near the bottom of an oversized page may never get indexed.

You can check whether the issue happens on your site with the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Open Site Audit, go to All issues, and look for the "Page size exceeds Googlebot's 2 MB crawl limit".

Get the uncompressed HTML under 2 MB by tackling the most common culprits:

When you’re done fixing the more pressing issues, dig a little deeper to keep your site in perfect SEO health. Open Site Audit and go to the All issues report to see other issues regarding on-page SEO, image optimization, redirects, localization, and more. In each case, you will find instructions on how to deal with the issue.

Some issues, e.g., indexability issues, can be fixed directly in Site Audit using the Patches feature (part of the Project Boost Max add-on). No need to constantly swap windows with your CMS or rely on a developer. Worth considering it if you're working on a big site or managing multiple clients.

For example, here you can see fixing blog post titles right from Site Audit—you can even ask AI for suggestions.

Did I miss any important technical issues? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.