Sometimes SEO issues do not stem from one large mistake. A website can produce good content, optimize for appropriate keywords and have technically sound pages, yet overlook certain small signals which affect the understanding of the site by search engines.
Some of them are easy to overlook since they happen to fall outside the scope of standard SEO checklist which includes internal and external aspects of SEO, among other things.
Links Between Relevant Pages
In addition to the navigational function, links are used to create connections between various pages.
Sometimes a business publishes a number of good articles on the same theme, yet fails to make them connected to each other. Thus, good content becomes unnecessarily isolated and the structure of the topics on the site becomes unclear.
The Context of the External Link
Backlinks are often evaluated in terms of quantity (number of links), authority of the domains linking to the website and quality (which websites link to the website).
However, this evaluation overlooks one of the most important aspects, a link is included in the content and the relevance of the surrounding content gives the indication about how natural the link is within the source article.
Thus, two links pointing at one and the same page are not equal in the terms of natural appearance. One link might appear in the content relevant to the destination page, while the other might be surrounded by the irrelevant content.
The Relationships Between Published Topics
Publication of content on several topics is not a problem per se. The key is in logical relations between these topics.
If a website develops its topics gradually, each article will become a part of coherent body of information. However, if a website constantly switches between unrelated topics, such relationships become blurred.
Old Content Is Important Too
Most often businesses pay attention only to production of the new content, leaving old pages unnoticed.
There might be many reasons why such pages are outdated, including out-of-date information, references to the obsolete sources and non-existing web pages, among others. While some pages are still relevant, they are simply hard to reach due to the presence of the new content.
Thus, SEO does not involve only the creation of new pages, since some overlooked signals are already present in the existing website.