Five signs that you have a technical debt to pay off

Websites that have been active for a long time often carry a technical debt that needs to be paid before they can rank well in search engines. This is often a legacy from the past, and it can be difficult for a new webmaster to actually know about it. Here are five signs that you have a technical debt to pay off.

You have a lot of traffic going to 404 pages

Some websites have a lot of traffic going to pages that don’t exist. That’s a clear sign that something was missed at some point in time. There can be other reasons, but often it’s because the site was migrated without proper redirects. What you need to do is get an overview of all pages that have inbound links or traffic and make sure they point to the right place.

If adding content ranks better than the old content

If you publish new content, such as news or blog posts, and it automatically takes good positions while your landing pages never really manage to move up in the search results, then you have a problem. Most likely your site already has the built-in authority Google requires, but your technology isn’t keeping up. You need to do a thorough on-page review and figure out what’s wrong with your platform.

The homepage drives an unusually large percentage of traffic

A homepage often drives more traffic than other pages on a site, both from search engines and other sources. If the share is surprisingly large, however, it may indicate that the site isn’t working as it should in search results. A healthy site has plenty of traffic to its subpages, provided that authority spreads properly within the site and Google is able to index it correctly. Fixing this issue can give a huge boost in traffic.

AdWords is much more profitable than organic traffic

Advertising in search results and search engine optimization reach roughly the same audience, since they both appear in the same search results. Logically, they should be somewhat aligned in profitability. Some differences can exist—competition may vary and AdWords can be much more targeted. But if the gap is large, then there’s something wrong with your site.

Google Search Console gives you an overflow of information

When you open Google Search Console, do you panic at the amount of information? If so, you probably have a technical debt to pay. More or less, Search Console is just showing you different types of errors. The more information you see there, the more issues exist on your site. It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Sometimes this means you have a massive job ahead of you, sometimes it’s not as terrible.

What to do if you have a technical debt to pay

An old site that has gone through a few platform changes sometimes requires a huge amount of work before you can even begin SEO efforts to move forward. It may feel like an insurmountable task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. One important thing to remember is that you do have control over the technology, which means you can actively influence your search results—and that’s actually a positive. You may not need to build authority at all; you might get very far simply by fixing the errors on your site. In my experience, it’s almost always worth making that effort.