Study: Image-Related Issues Top List of On-Page SEO Shortcomings
A new study from Raven Tools shows marketers are facing many SEO-related issues that could be negatively impacting their site’s search visibility, with images being at the core of the complications.
The study, which analyzed more than 4 billion on-page SEO issues over 200 million page crawls between February and June 2015, revealed that the most common SEO problems involved images. Images with missing title attributes and images with missing ALT attributes accounted for the majority of the hindrances.
“Google image search receives over 1 billion page views every single day. It’s safe to say, image search is part of many searchers’ daily Internet activity. The higher your images rank in image search, the more likely people will visit your pages through image search,” the authors of the study wrote. “Despite the opportunity, image optimization is still an untapped resource for many websites today.”
Other common SEO shortcomings were links with no anchor text, meta descriptions missing or the wrong length, and pages with duplicate content. Roughly half of the crawled pages has either duplicate content or low word count issues.
Broken links were an issue on many sites as well. The study found the average website has 23 broken links; 52 percent were internal links and 48 percent were external links.
Additionally, meta descriptions, a short summary (about 150 characters) of what the webpage is about, were missing in one-third of the websites crawled. Another prevalent issue was meta descriptions that were too long or too short.
SEO underutilized by B2B marketers
A recent study found that B2B marketers’ focus on email and social marketing may be at the expense of other beneficial technologies. The data revealed only half of B2B marketers were utilizing search marketing and just 31 percent leveraged testing and optimization to help achieve their goals.
However, respondents were open to using more technology. The data showed 46 percent of the B2B marketers expected their marketing technology budget to increase in the next year.