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Guidance on seriousness of technical issues raised in Semrush audit?
Greetings! I have a website with 250 pages of content Ive created over many years. 65 posts rank on page 1 of google…and yet the site cant seem to ever get more than 8k a month in traffic.
I just did an audit of the site on Semrush and these technical issues were identified. Can I get a reality check on whether these could be catalytic once addressed by my developer?
1) duplicate H1 and title tags
2) low text-HTML ratio
3) 286 links have no anchor text
4) 199 links have non-descriptive anchor text
5) 159 URLs with a permanent redirect
6) 21 resources are formatted as page link
7) 6 pages are blocked from crawling. One of these is my author page. Should this page in particular be indexed?
I would be most grateful for some input on how big of a deal these issues are and what the order of priority should be to fix them.
Thanks!
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1 Reply
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We love SEMrush over at Primary Position but the Health Report can go a bit overboard. Focus on errors: broken links, 404’s, broken images, page load, HTTPS vs HTTP, other error codes.
Health is a best practice guide – its not the most critical issue and Google is very forgiving with mistakes. But 404’s can cause bad UX experiences, can lose inbound authority from external links, expands your footprint (authority:site size) and its just good housekeeping.
>I just did an audit of the site on Semrush and these technical issues were identified. Can I get a reality check on whether these could be catalytic once addressed by my developer?
Did you mean catastrophic? None of these look catastrophic or that you need a web developer to fix them all, if you have access to your content management system.
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duplicate H1 and title tags
You should just have one H! per page and both the H1/Page title “should” be unique and match the page they rank on. If these pages were manually created, just go customize them. If they are machine generated, just create a better page title algo that makes it more unique to the content (this is common in listing-style sites)
>low text-HTML ratio
This is actually an issue that u/SEMRush invented and isn’t real. You could legitimately have an FAQ about your product that is 1 sentence long (e.g. Q: Does your product contain gluten? A: No, it doesn’t). And you could have a lot of HTML in the page – it doesn’t stop it from ranking, there’s no such mention from Google. It just seems obvious to them and so this myth persists.
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286 links have no anchor text
Do you have links to positions in those pages that are meant to have anchor points?
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199 links have non-descriptive anchor text
159 URLs with a permanent redirect
21 resources are formatted as page link
6 pages are blocked from crawling. One of these is my author page. Should this page in particular be indexed?
That’s really only a question you can answer?
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HTH – The Primary Position SEO Team
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**First of all**, you need to fix the troubles with H1 and Title tags, cause there are one of the most important ranking factors.
The **second thing** you should fix is pages that are blocked by robots.txt
It’s a very significant point to have a good crawl budget.The **third one** is 301 redirects. Remove all “redirected pages” from sitemap.xml. Be confident that all pages in the sitemap.xml have 200 server responses.
These 3 points are the most important.
But, of course, you have to fix all of them asap. -
One thing to remember with any of these sort of audit tools is they are notifying you of things they found. Those things may or may not be a problem, but they are just bringing them to your attention.
Out of the things on this list…
1. I’m assuming this means that the title tag matches the H1 tag on the page. If that is the case, I would ignore this one. That’s totally fine.
2. Non-issue. Can be useful sometimes to browse through just to make sure you recognize the URLs. This can sometimes be a sign of a site being hacked. Some hacks will create pages where a lot of the content gets inserted with an iframe or there will be a lot of other additional code that will trigger a “low text-HTML ratio” warning.
3. This would be concerning to me. Links with no anchor text. What in the world is causing that? Only thing I can think of is image links, and this would indicate that they probably have no alt text.
4. I would look through this list. Sometimes these make sense. For example, a lot of blogs will use something like “read more” as the link to the full articles. Those are fine. On the other hand, if you are using a lot of generic anchors like “click here” in the body of content on pages, I would fix that.
5. May or may not be an issue. I would look through the redirects and see what you find.
6. Not sure what this one means. I would need to see more information about it.
7. If your site has one author (you), there is no need to index author pages. If there are multiple authors, it might be worth considering. I probably wouldn’t do it unless the authors are known personalities in the industry. -
1 & 2. Not even real SEO issues.
3 Probably image links. Do they have alt attributes? That would be treated as your anchor text. This is a little more complicated because not every image even needs alt attributes.
4 Sounds like this could be improved. You may want to just do it for pages you care more about.
5 That’s fine.
6 I don’t even know what that means.
7 Author page indexed is up to you. Some do it, some don’t.
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u/SEOPub u/PrimaryPositionNYC u/patrickstox u/WebLinkr you who were kind enough to weigh in on the 286 links with no anchor text, I have deduced these are the thumbnails on category pages that link to their respective posts. These thumbnails are in fact images. Would it be beneficial for seo and/or necessary (ADA) to give these alt tags or anchor text (what is the difference?)?
Thanks for your guidance!
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