When was the last time you checked your website health? For those of you casually looking at the ground to avoid saying "never," you're not alone. Many people don't give much thought to the health score their website earns, but that number, which is a representation of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, is vital to your website's and therefore your company's success.

Tools, like Semrush, can help you identify hundreds of common issues, recognize their priority and importance, and direct you how to fix them. Top websites in the Semrush platform score in the 90's. If yours isn't quite there, there may be areas of your site that you can optimize.

We work with clients on a regular basis to help ensure that their sites are hitting the mark. Below are some common themes we see across websites along with their fixes.

Errors

As you can imagine based on the word, errors are the items you want to address first when it comes to improving your website's health. While there's quite a laundry list of potential errors that Semrush could flag, here are six of the most commons ones we see in client websites.

Duplicate title tags

Duplicate title tags make it harder for search engines like Google and Bing to determine query relevancy, so this needs to be cleared up if you want to rank in the results.

Luckily, the solution is easy. Just come up with an individualized, short, clear title that includes your target keywords to implement on your website.

Duplicate content issues

Unlike title tags which are flagged at 100%, 85% of identical content is considered the threshold for duplicate content on web pages. Duplicate page content is a major issue for SEO as search engines will generally think you are trying to increase your ranking unfairly and could possibly lower your position or even ban you from their results.

Here are some solutions provided by the Semrush tool based on Google standards:

• Add a rel="canonical" link to one of your duplicate pages to inform search engines which page to show in search results.
• Use a 301 redirect from a duplicate page to the original one.
• Use a rel="next" and a rel="prev" link attribute to fix pagination duplicates.
• Instruct GoogleBot to handle URL parameters differently using Google Search Console.
• Provide some unique content on the webpage.

Missing title tags

Just like it sounds... this error is saying you simply don't have any title tags at all. Add them for a quick SEO win!

To make them as effective as possible, consider these Google best practices:

1. Include a <title> element on every page of your site.
2. Be descriptive and concise.
3. Don't keyword stuff.
4. Ditch the boilerplate text.
5. Brand your titles.
6. Clarify which text is meant to be your main title.
7. Be cognizant of no index rules and robot.txt protocols.
8. Keep your language consistent from page to title (if a page is written in Spanish, the title should also be written in Spanish).

Internal broken links

When website updates occur, sometimes certain pages are sunset. That's all well and good, but there might still be some materials like blogs linking to that page that no longer exists. This leads to a poor user experience and can hurt your SEO.

Luckily (though sometimes it can be time-consuming) this fix process is simple. Just isolate the broken links and either delete them or replace them with something that's live.

Pages have slow load speed

Slow load speed can spell death for user experience. People simply aren't willing to wait for a website to load for very long. In fact, according to the Semrush chart below, three seconds or less is what you should be aiming for if you'd like to avoid your users bouncing.

Whatever is causing your speed to plummet should be addressed fast if you want to keep users interested.

There are several fixes, depending on what's slowing you down. Here are five areas that Semrush suggests working on.

1. Compress images.
2. Reduce HTTP requests.
3. Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
4. Enable browser caching.
5. Use a content delivery network (CDN).

Warnings

After you've cleared your errors, it's time to turn your attention to warnings. While they aren't quite as critical as errors, they still detract from your health score. As for warnings, we regularly flag these six.

Pages don't have meta descriptions

One of the top issues we see are missing meta descriptions, and that's a big problem because those are what pique users' interest beneath your website link on the search engine page results.

To fix that, simply write one. Generally, it should be under 160 characters, but Semrush recommends you consider two factors – character and pixel length. Make sure it's as interesting, optimized, and informative as possible to get the best results!

Pages don't have an H1 heading

Your page topic is defined by the H1 tag you enter and if you leave it blank, search engines tend to dock your ranking. Plus, H tags help your page structure, so without them, it's harder to read for humans and it harms your SEO because of the lack of hierarchy.

To remedy the problem, simply include an H1 for every page that follows the standard rules of concision and relevancy that other elements need to have.

External links are broken

Annnnnd, we're back to broken links again. We addressed internal links above, but external ones are important too because they lead your users to... nothing, but this time off your site.

It's another user experience issue. People don't enjoy being led astray, so to resolve the problem, make sure your broken links click off to a different source.

Pages have duplicate H1 & title tags

It's exactly like it sounds, the same thing in a multiple locations. Be sure to create custom H1s and title tags and you'll be in the clear.

Images don't have alt attributes

Search engine crawlers can't see the way you can. In order for them to understand your images, you need to include alt attributes. As a bonus, providing image context also helps with accessibility for vision impaired individuals and people who might have their images toggled off.

If you'd like to learn more about "focus[ing] on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and is in context of the content of the page.," click the quote and get the inside scoop from Google!

Pages have a low word count

200 words is not a lot, so it stands to reason that Semrush flags pages with 200 words or less as "low word count."

To fix it, just add a bit more context to increase your word count.

Notices

Finally, if you have cleaned up all the errors and issues, now you can move on to your notices. As these are rarely major problems for website health, the list is not commonly addressed. Here is the complete catalog of potential notices:

• Pages need more than 3 clicks to be reached
• URLs with a permanent redirect
• Orphaned pages in sitemaps
• Pages have only one incoming internal link
• Links to external pages or resources returned a 403 HTTP status code
• Links on this page have non-descriptive anchor text
• Page has more than one H1 tag
• Page is blocked from crawling
• Subdomain doesn't support HSTS
• Resource is formatted as a page link
• Page URLs are longer than 200 characters
• Outgoing external links contain nofollow attributes
• Robots.txt not found
• Pages have hreflang language mismatch issues
• Pages blocked by X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header
• Issues with blocked external resources in robots.txt
• Issues with broken external JavaScript and CSS files
• Links have no anchor text

Tools like Semrush are a great way to get visibility into the factors that might be detracting from your website health, but it's just the beginning of actually optimizing your digital presence. If you need help implementing the suggestions from Semrush or a similar platform, or if it's time for a new website that will perform better, let's talk.