Your website looks great. You paid for good design, the branding photos are gorgeous, and you’re proud to send people there.
And yet the pageviews—and therefore inquiries—aren’t coming.
When that happens, the culprit is almost never your design. It’s SEO problems sitting underneath the surface, quietly keeping your site from being found in the first place. Nobody can book you if they never see you.
Here are the five technical SEO issues I run into most often, and how to fix them.
The Most Common SEO Problems Hurting Your Website Traffic
These issues come up in nearly every SEO audit I do. None of them are super dramatic, but that’s exactly why they can go unnoticed for years.
1. No Clear Target Keywords
When a website tries to speak to everyone, Google can’t tell who it’s for. Your homepage says you serve Florida couples. Your services page says you serve Orlando couples. There’s no consistent signal about what you actually want to rank for.
But real keyword research fixes that, and it usually turns up surprising insights. There are phrases your dream clients type constantly that you’d never guess on your own. You don’t need expensive software to start finding them, either. Ubersuggest is a keyword research and SEO tool that I love and personally use, and it offers a free version that tracks one website in detail. You can see search volume and difficulty, identify SEO problems, and do competitor research there.
Another free way to do keyword research is Google’s own search bar autocomplete function, which shows you what people are actually typing. The “People Also Ask” and “People Also Search For” sections on any results page are full of real questions from real searchers which can be great clues for long-tail or question-based search phrases.
2. Missing or Generic Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
This is one of the most common technical SEO issues I find, and one of the easiest and quickest to fix.
Your page title is what shows up as the clickable headline in search results. Your meta description is the text underneath it. When those are blank, Google writes its own version by scraping whatever’s on the page. Sometimes that’s fine. Often it’s a mess, and it’s a wasted chance to say something compelling to someone deciding whether to click.
Check yours right now. If your homepage title is just “Home,” you’ve found your first fix. Add a target keyword and your location (for local businesses) to each of your main page titles, and you’ve already accomplished a huge SEO win in about 5 minutes.
3. Thin or Duplicate Content
Pages with very little text struggle to rank because there’s not enough there for Google to understand. For creative businesses whose work is visual, this can be a big challenge. It’s easy to think of your website as an image-based portfolio, but here’s my challenge: make sure each page has at least 500 words of written content for Google to read. Introduce yourself on each page. Talk about the pain points of your ideal client, and how you solve them. List some of the big-name partners you’ve worked with or places you’ve been featured. It’s not as hard as you think!
Duplicate content causes its own trouble, and it’s more widespread than most people realize. Semrush studied 100,000 websites and found duplicate content was the single most common issue, showing up on half of all sites analyzed. For service businesses, this often happens accidentally: gallery pages that you duplicated from another, or location pages where only the city name changes. Make sure each page says something genuinely different whenever you’re copying one page from another.
4. Images With No Alt Text or SEO-Unfriendly Filenames
Photographers, this one’s for you especially.
When you upload IMG_4739.jpg with no alt text, you’ve given search engines nothing. Rename files before uploading so they describe what’s in them (think “venue-name-city-state-wedding-business-name-1.jpg”). Write alt text that genuinely describes the image without stuffing in keywords, because its first job is accessibility for people using screen readers. The search benefit follows from doing that well.
5. No FAQ or Structured Content for AI Search
More and more of your potential clients are asking ChatGPT or Claude for recommendations instead of scrolling Google results. AI tools love clearly structured question-and-answer content. Adding a real FAQ section, with each question as its own heading and a direct answer underneath, makes your content far easier for them to pull from and cite. For more tips on this, read my how to optimize for AI search.
What to Do If You Spot These SEO Issues on Your Site
If you’re the DIY type, start with your page titles and meta descriptions. They’re the fastest win on this list. My step-by-step guide to writing an SEO-friendly blog post walks through how to address the rest of your page content. Want a second opinion before you dig in? Booking a Content Strategy Power Hour gets you an hour of my eyes on your specific site, with concrete steps to implement yourself. I’ll study your site and content plan ahead of time so we can really dig into review during the call.
If you’d rather have your optimization handled start to finish by an expert, that’s what my Website SEO Refresh in a Week is for. In just one week, I’ll completely overhaul 4 main pages on your site, including a full-site audit, detailed keyword research, and competitive analysis before I begin.
Ready for a Second Set of Eyes on Your Site?
You don’t have to guess which SEO problems are costing you. Get in touch today and let’s figure out what your site actually needs.
