What is technical SEO?
Strap in for a lengthy guide on technical SEO.
Grab some coffee. You’re gonna need it.
Technical search engine optimisation (SEO) on its own is a tough topic to tackle, even if you’re from an IT background or you’ve been in business for some time.
In fact, sometimes, having a solid foundation in IT can actually hinder your SEO efforts because you think that it’s all technical and so you spend days wasting your efforts when you could be working on the rest of your business.
SEO can feel like a dark art.
Changes take a while to come to fruition.
SEO itself seems to occupy that area between business operations, marketing, and digital presence.
When I talk about technical SEO, I differentiate it from the non-technical SEO practices.
Non-technical would include content writing, social media posts and website copy. Link building sits between the two.
Tackling your technical SEO makes up roughly 50 percent of your SEO efforts.
By understanding technical SEO not only can you choose the right strategy for your business, but a general comprehension can make sure that you're not getting ripped off by that Indian guy in South America with 3 heads, who insists you reply to his garbled emails by sending him vast sums of money.
I’ll start by breaking down two of the known techniques to start you ranking properly on Google. Yes, other search engines are available, but solidify yourself on Google and then if your audience is of the older generations, start to rank on Bing (it’s the default search engine on windows laptops and can carry better conversions for certain businesses).
Blackhat VS Whitehat techniques
Blackhat is a term used in IT to denote that shady side of technology that isn’t ethically sound.
Whitehat is the opposite.
Want short term success in SEO rankings as quickly as possible?
Just use blackhat techniques.
Then come crying when Google realises what you’ve done and stomps you so far down their results that you’ll need a search team to find you.
Making sure you understand what technical SEO is and how to get it right can be crucial to your online success, especially if you’re looking to grow not only your presence but online sales and conversions.
The best part about technical SEO is that once it’s set you won’t have to tinker with it again for a while.
So enough already, what is Technical SEO?
Technical Search Engine Optimisation
This refers to how search engines crawl and index your website, and how to improve your website so it can be indexed far more clearly.
Imagine you own two shops.
In one shop, you don’t care how you present your signage, labels or goods. You bang any old items in the window and just heap a bunch of products in the aisles without presenting them properly.
Customers won’t know what you sell, or what they should choose - you’re not guiding the shopping experience or making your products readily available.
Your second shop has your bestsellers in the window. You organise your aisles to guide the shopper through the best experience and have solid point of sale items placed near the tills.
Shop one is your currently disorganised SEO efforts - Google is struggling to interpret your digital presence so the last thing it will do is send more people there.
Shop two means that Google knows exactly what your website or online store is all about. It will send people to it more readily, and those people who get there will have better user intent. But wait, why should you care about user intent…..?
User Intent - the only thing that matters?
It’s no good that you just send 1500 people a week to your website.
If all 1500 bounce off of your website in the first 5 seconds (called your bounce rate) then you’ve converted exactly 0 customers.
Would you rather have 1500 customers landing on your website that don’t want to buy from you, or 1 customer who is sat ready with their debit card details already loaded into Google pay?
Exactly.
What an SEO expert does is look at the best way of ranking in Google based on USER INTENT.
Still with me? Still want to take a deep dive into the world of SEO without becoming a specialist consultant…? Ok!
Technical SEO optimises your website’s infrastructure.
Technical SEO, excluding content optimization and link building, relates to all SEO activities. In simple terms, it covers the requirements of search engines to enhance crawling. To keep up with the search engines, which are getting more advanced each day, these specifications are continually shifting and becoming more intricate. So, we can say technical SEO is in a constant state of refinement. To build the appropriate foundation that provides your material and links with the unique available marketing environment, technical SEO needs to be optimized so that you can shine without any hurdles in the search engine results.
Why does technical SEO matter?
For a few factors, you can optimize the technical SEO of your website, including:
Site loading speed
Image compression
Image optimisation
Image tags
Header Tags
Metadata Tags
Amount of copy (words) on your pages
The number of pages
The relevance of your content
The quality of your copy and content
In search results, Technological SEO affects your rankings as follows:
Technical SEO impacts the actions and decisions of your visit to the website.
Technical SEO affects the conversion rates, lead generation, and sales of your website.
Technical SEO lets the company cope with rivals who use SEO as well.
Technical SEO as a digital marketing tool maximizes your ROI from SEO.
You want to get the most benefit from it if your company spends its time, resources, and money on SEO, whether you are managing your SEO in-house or with the help of an SEO consultant, including technical SEO optimisations in your strategy is the only way to develop a solid foundation from which to expand.
Technical SEO Tips that are Actionable and Important
Now that you know the fundamentals of technical SEO, here are a few tips that you can use to enhance the technical SEO of your site and increase your search rankings.
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
Let’s start with the technical SEO tip that’s most simple. In 2015, one of the major Google algorithm updates was to give mobile-friendly, responsive websites increased preference. In “Mobilegeddon,” several top websites were penalized for not adopting a more mobile-friendly web template. Currently, it is more important than ever to have a mobile-friendly website.
Page Speed Optimization
Page speed is an ongoing optimization of SEO, and it’s a critical one. You help maximize the load time of a page when you optimize the page speed. For apps, a shorter load time means less idle time. Sooner, they will begin to read your content and connect with your blog, which improves their chances of remaining on your website. Ideally, to meet 80 percent of users’ needs, you want pages to load in three seconds or less. Use the Google Page Speed Insights tool if you’re going to check the speed of your pages.
Boost Your Website
Website speed and efficiency matters. Google will place a minor penalty on your website if your site is slow and takes a long time to respond. That means your website will rank lower in SERPs than it would if your website had faster load times, even if your content is the gold standard for that specific topic. This is an aspect of technical SEO that you simply can’t afford to overlook.
Revise Your Website Architecture
The site’s design refers to how information on a website is structured; for instance, how pages are arranged into categories or the paths used to move between parts of the site. Website design influences how the web is viewed by both human users and search engine crawlers.
For crawlers, logical site design is best because it helps them quickly traverse and index the website. For example, if you are an e-commerce site, consider splitting your product pages into categories that flow into a series of subcategories. This enables site managers to maintain a logical structure and, where necessary, slot new pages into the established system - not only does this improve your user experience (UX) but also leads to more natural conversions when selling products online.
Build an SEO-Friendly Navigation System
If you have a small or big website, take a second look at your website’s navigation. Your navigation also defines your primary navigation menu, which usually appears on your website’s top or left-hand side. However, in some instances, the organization can have extra menus that individuals may use to find additional content.
Keep seven essential menu items in your main navigation.
Make the main menu of your navigation the same across pages.
For navigation items, use keyword-rich anchor text, like “Residential Landscaping Services”.
Organise menu items inside the sub-menus, if necessary.
Think of your most essential pages when deciding which pages to include in your key navigation. These also include pages about goods and services and descriptive pages about the organization and policies.
What to actually do about Technical SEO?
Get an audit.
Yes, I provide them for as the absolute starting point to any SEO project, or even as a standalone service.
This audit will go through all of the above points in far more detail than this post could ever explain, and give you a solid strategy that identifies exactly what holes your digital footprint has, and how we can plug these gaps for you.
Shop around. I only work with companies that want long term SEO results and are willing to put effort, time and a portion of their budget into improving their organic visibility.
You can probably find some guy in Brazil who’s willing to audit you for $5 - let me know how that goes for you! But seriously, a well-structured audit by an expert is the essential starting point to understanding exactly what you need to change. Small changes can bring about big results.
Verdict
In conclusion, technical SEO is not a simple job, but ensuring that your carefully designed content ranks well in the SERPs is essential.
Without the other, one does not function.
In the search engine rankings, it is not enough to write good copy to overturn the competition.
Keep youre website free of errors that commonly occur when users follow a broken link or incorrect redirection, such as 404 “not found.”
Such mistakes will tank the scores. Using 301 redirects correctly and patch your broken links.
There’s a lot more to explore, but this primer should illustrate just why your website’s SEO scrutiny will never deter you.
The most critical aspect of search engine optimization is technical SEO, whether you like it or not. This is followed by on-page SEO, which deals with all types of content, and off-page SEO, which deals with link-building techniques (more on that to follow).
The companies that have embraced SEO for the last few years are the ones that are winning on Google.
Don’t get left behind. If you're not on the first page of Google, you might as well not be there at all.
Want to know more about SEO and what this can mean for your business? Just contact me for more information and I’ll be happy to guide you.
Thanks,
Adam White