How to Troubleshoot SEO Issues for Small and Medium Companies in Singapore

Contributor: SEO Team

Ten years ago, when we started NEO360 as a digital marketing agency, a hair transplant clinic in Singapore was one of the first SEO clients we managed. Back then, ranking keywords with high search volume and intent were effortless, such as “hair transplant Singapore” in Google.

But now, as Google’s algorithm evolves and new clinics join the industry almost every year, the goal of maintaining SEO performance for our medical clients has never been an easy task.

As a team, we’ve faced many SEO-related challenges, including being outranked by competitors and coming back on top in Google search results. In addition, we’ve also encountered the dreadful experience of being removed from Google search results due to crawling and indexing issues.

This post aims to share our SEO experience working with medical clients and eCommerce stores in Singapore, and providing solutions to common SEO issues or challenges we encountered.

Disclaimer: Not all solutions apply to your current SEO problem; thus, we recommend a full SEO audit before solving any SEO-related issues.

We know that identifying and solving common SEO can be overwhelming. To help you get started, we offer complimentary, comprehensive FREE SEO Audits to share our thoughts on improving your overall organic search visibility & website conversion.

Here are 9 common SEO issues and the respective fixes we recommend. Let’s get started!

SEO Issue# 1. “We are having difficulty tracking SEO performance.”

Tracking SEO performance can be complex, particularly for small and medium business websites. The process requires monitoring multiple metrics and analysing data over time to identify trends and areas for improvement. This can be time-consuming and requires a certain level of expertise.

However, with free tracking tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, small and medium businesses can easily monitor and analyse website performance.

Proposed Solution:

a. Set up Google Analytics properties (e.g. UA and GA4 properties)

Google Analytics allows tracking website traffic, user behaviour, and conversions. It also provides data on where your website traffic is coming from, such as search engines or referral sources.

Metrics:

Website Traffic:

• No. of Sessions
• No. of Users

Behaviour Data:

• No. of Returning Visitors
• No. of New Visitors
• No. of Count Sessions

Goals and Conversions:

• Form Submission e.g. Contact and Newsletter Forms
• Whatsapp Chat Conversation

b. Set up Google Search Console (GSC) and Bing WebMaster Tools

While Google Analytics can help you track goals and conversions easily, Google Search Console (GSC) is another important SEO tracking tool to measure and monitor SEO performance. GSC provides insights on how Google crawls and indexes your website, including any crawling errors and security issues. It also allows you to see the search terms and queries driving traffic to your website and the specific page ranking for those queries.

Below are the vital SEO metrics found in Google Search Console:

Metrics:

• Organic Search Impressions
• Organic Search Clicks
• Organic CTR
• Average Keyword Ranking
• No. of Brand vs Non-Brand Search Queries

c. Set up website goals and conversions correctly

Without clear goals, it can be challenging to determine whether your SEO efforts positively impact your business. By setting up goals, such as increasing website traffic or improving search engine rankings, you can track progress towards those goals and make data-driven decisions about optimising your SEO efforts.

SEO Issue# 2. “Our staging website is appearing in Google search results.”

Proposed Solution:

a. Add a login password to your staging website to ensure search engine crawlers cannot access your staging websites.

John Mueller, a Google Search advocates commented about this issue in one of Google Search Hang out. According to John:

“Ideally, what you would want to do is provide some kind of server side authentication on the server so that normal users when they go there they would get blocked from being able to see the content; that would include GoogleBot.

And you can do that on an IP address basis, you can do it with a cookie, you can do it with normal authentication on the server.

Anything where you have to prove that you’re the right person and you can actually look at that content. I think that’s generally the best approach for staging servers…”

“…it’s something that means you don’t have to change the normal settings on the site itself, in particular robots.txt but also noindex meta tags for example.”

SEO Issue# 3. “Why is my website not showing up on Google?”

Proposed Solution:

a. Check your website’s robots.txt to ensure you are not blocking Google from crawling your website.

For Example, the Robots.txt command that blocks Googlebot:

User-agent:

Googlebot

Disallow: /

or User-agent: *

Disallow: /

b. Review your meta robot tags. Make sure you are not restricting search engines to index your page.

Example of meta robots tags that block Google crawler index your page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

SEO Issue #4. “Our preferred website version is not showing in search results; instead, Google ranks the version we don’t want to show.”

Proposed Solution:

a. If you have an existing Google Search Console Account, use the URL Inspection Tool under the Page Indexing section, and check the User-declared canonical and Google-selected canonical.

b. Make sure the Google-selected canonical is the same as the URL you are checking.

c. If they are different, you need to set up canonical referencing to force Google to acknowledge your preferred website version.

SEO Issue #5. “Our website homepage is not showing for brand queries.”

Proposed Solution:

a. If your homepage is not ranking for your brand query, the Google bot has difficulty crawling and indexing your website.

b. There are many reasons why these things happen. For instance, in one of the cases we came across with our client’s website, we discovered that the Translation Website plugin generated multiple redirections on their homepage URL, which confuses the Google bot. As a result, the bot decided not to crawl or index their homepage.

SEO Issue #6. “We are having difficulty ranking for any of our targeted keywords.”

Proposed Solution:

a. Review your existing content in the context of Google’s Helpful Content Guide.

b. Update or create new content

c. Implement topic cluster strategy

SEO Issue #7. “We’ve created a website for our local business and want to get organic traffic leads. Is it possible? What should we do?

Proposed Solution:

a. Create and Optimise your Google Business Profile.

We recommend completing the business information section:

• About
• Contact
• Location
• Hours

b. We also recommend adding unique photos of your business. Avoid using stock images.

SEO Issue #8. “We are a new website and would like to rank on any of our brand keywords. What should we do?”

Proposed Solution:

a. Create social media assets that are relevant to your niche or business. For example, create a Pinterest business account using your official Brand Name if you are into the real estate business.

List of Social Media or Websites you can start creating:

• Google Business Profile
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Pinterest
• Quora

Note: You need consistent information on the following:

• Company Name
• Profile URL
• Company Logo
• Company Address
• Company Descriptions

We recommend updating all relevant social media assets regularly. In our experience, your website will appear for your brand query after three months of consistent organic social media posting.

SEO Issue #9. “We own two identical websites competing for one topic/keyword in Google Search results. What should we do?”

Proposed Solution:

a. You need to choose which website you want to keep.

b. We recommend conducting a 301 redirection mapping and redirecting relevant URLs from the non-preferred version of the website to your preferred version.

Get a technical SEO assessment of your website for Free!

We know that identifying and solving common SEO can be overwhelming. To help you get started, we offer complimentary, comprehensive SEO Audits to share our thoughts on improving your overall organic search visibility & website conversion.