On the latest episode of iGaming Daily, the show’s resident SEO expert, Ivana Flynn, was joined by Warren Sammut, Head of SEO at Leapsquare, and Natalia Witczyk, CEO of Mosquita Digital, to share some of their SEO horror stories. 

The trio all agreed that technical issues are often the root cause of SEO problems, although they are not always the first thing checked when a website is not ranking well.

“It could be something that is quite serious like accidentally blocking a Googlebot,” explained Sammut. “It has happened a few times in my career, and it’s quite funny when that happens because it’s not immediately the first thing that you would typically check. You’re typically checking SEO-specific things.

“When it comes to indexation, some websites have heavy JavaScript. They’re very bloated websites and have a lot of useless pages that are not really there for the user and which get little to no traffic. Eventually [they] slow down the whole system and that slows down the whole website.

“Tech is the foundation of any SEO activity that you’re doing. Once tech is sorted, then you need to go into your content strategy or off-page strategy.”

Staying on the theme of indexing websites, Witczyk shared her own SEO nightmare of a time-consuming mistake she made early on in her SEO career.

She said: “I was migrating a dot net website and I prepared this beautiful redirect plan manually. At that time in my career, I didn’t understand that I could use syntax to take multiple IRLs and redirect them through a path. I was doing it one by one. 

“And then it turned out that all my manual work to put together a beautiful Excel file that accounted for every single URL was such a waste of time, both for me and the developers. That’s how I learned the hard way that you should automate any patterns you can find in URLs and do it by folders.”

To conclude the episode, Flynn summarised what steps SEOs can take to solve the issues they are facing and ensure that their websites are performing correctly.

She said: “If your website is not ranking very well, look into your technical issues, that is the first place [to look]. Review your content and backlinks, that is also a no-brainer.

“As well, stay on top of changes that are going on with Google and with your competitors. If you want to win in this extremely difficult and saturated industry, you need to be on top of your game.”