The next step is fixing up the technical issues on our site. Some of the issues that we are looking for:
- How crawlable is the site?
- Any security issues?
- What’s the index status of the site by Google?
- Any manual penalties?
- How’s the mobile usability of the site?
- Is the website targeting the right country?
- Any HTML improvements needed?
How crawlable is the site
If Google can’t crawl our site, it’s not going to get indexed. If it doesn’t get index = we don’t get rank. If we are not ranking for keywords = no traffic.
Any security issues
This is a huge one. If this pops up, this becomes our #1 priority to solve.
More details about hacked sites here.
What’s the index status of the site
This goes back to the first point.
If it doesn’t get index = we don’t get rank. If we are not ranking for keywords = no traffic.
Any manual penalties
The website’s security is our #1 priority if that occurs. Our #2 priority is penalties.
“Manual actions are Google’s way of demoting or removing web pages or websites as a whole based. They aren’t related to Google algorithm changes like Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, or the others. They are simply Google manually punishing websites for spammy behavior.”
We won’t get any penalties unless you’re using black hat techniques to rank like building tons of irrelevant low-quality links, user-generated spammy content, using hidden text, keyword stuffing, and more.
Read more: Google manual action penalties and how to recover
How’s the mobile usability of the site
Is the website mobile responsive / can it be viewed properly in a mobile device?
“Google’s official stance on mobile is to create a responsive site. It’s likely that responsive sites get an edge in searches from a mobile device. In fact, they now add “Mobile friendly” tags to sites that display well on mobile devices. Google also started penalizing sites in Mobile search that aren’t mobile friendly.” – Brian Dean from Backlinko
Is the website targeting the right country
This is pretty straight forward. Check if your website is telling Google which country your target users are in.
Any HTML improvements needed
There are three things that Google is looking for here:
- Are there any duplicate meta description? Any super long or super short meta description?
- Are there any missing and duplicate title tags? Any unusually long or short title tags?
- Any content that isn’t indexable?
