Technical SEO is essential to the success of your SEO strategy. It helps to ensure that search engines can crawl and index your site effectively, as well as ensuring your customers can find the information they need quickly and easily.
Whether you’re new to SEO or have been doing it for a few years, technical SEO can often seem overwhelming and confusing. It’s full of complex-sounding acronyms and terms you’ve never heard of - it takes a deep look at your site to help improve your organic rankings.
Technical SEO is often considered one of the more advanced aspects of SEO, but this doesn’t mean there aren’t some fundamentals that every marketer should be aware of. Knowing the basics of technical SEO can make a massive difference to your site’s performance in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this guide, we’ll cover what SEO is, why it’s important, and the 6 aspects of technical SEO that you need to understand to help your site rank better.
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Put simply, technical SEO refers to making changes to the technical elements of your site to improve its organic rankings. This involves optimising your website, typically through a technical SEO audit, to make it easier for search engines, like Google, to find, index, and understand.
The goal of technical SEO, like other aspects of SEO, is to improve your site’s ranking in search engines. Technical SEO can greatly impact your website's performance on Google and other search engines. Without technical SEO, your site won’t be easily accessible to search engines. It will be unlikely to rank well in the search results, even if you have high-quality SEO-optimised content.
Technical SEO also includes aspects such as page speed, which can impact user experience (as well as rankings). If your page loads slowly, users may become frustrated and leave your site. A website should be easy to navigate and fast to load. Improving your site’s technical SEO means your site is better for both search engines and users.
Read on for our 6 essential aspects of technical SEO that will help boost your site’s organic rankings.
Nowadays, it’s more important than ever for pages to load quickly. In fact, recent research has found that 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website if it takes more than four seconds to load. People don’t want to wait for pages to load; they’ll just leave your site and move on to another site (likely a competitor’s).
Google knows that users are impatient and slow sites offer poor user experience, so they prefer pages that load quickly. Since 2021, page experience (which includes page loading time) has been an official Google ranking factor.
Site speed is an integral part of SEO and is one of the easiest aspects to check. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your website’s current speed. The tool will give you a performance score from 0 to 100, with 100 being the optimal result. It will also give you some tips on what you can do to improve the page speed.
Site security is another essential element of technical SEO. It’s crucial you make your site safe and secure for users to guarantee their privacy.
One of the key aspects of site security is implementing HTTPS. This ensures that no one can intercept the data sent between the site and the browser. For example, it keeps login data safe and secure. To implement HTTPS, you’ll require an SSL certificate.
Google uses HTTPS as a ranking signal to acknowledge the importance of secure sites, so you must ensure you implement this on your site. If you’re unsure, you can quickly check by looking for the lock on the left-hand side of the search bar (in most browsers).
Making your site easy to navigate (or crawl) by search engine robots is another important aspect of technical SEO. When crawling your site, robots follow internal links to find site content. So, a well-thought internal linking structure will help search engines make sense of your site and understand which content is most important.
You can also guide robots by blocking them from crawling and indexing a particular page or telling them not to show a specific page in the search engine results. This is done through the robots.txt file. However, this should be done with care - if you make a mistake, you could block search engines from viewing (and ranking) important pages of your site.
You can also guide robots using the robots meta tag - a hidden piece of code that tells robots what they’ll find on the page and what they should do with it. For example, you can use this code to tell robots to crawl a page but not to follow the links on the page.
An XML sitemap acts as a roadmap to help search engines view your site, which will help improve your page's rankings. It lists all the pages to ensure search engines won’t miss any important pages or content.
If your site has an effective internal linking structure, it shouldn’t strictly need an XML sitemap. However, it’s always a good idea for your site to have a sitemap to guarantee that search engines can easily navigate your site.
Much like slow-loading pages, a dead link can be incredibly frustrating to visitors. If a link leads to a web page that doesn’t exist on your site, users will receive a 404 error page. This can have a hugely negative impact on user experience.
Search engines also follow links to discover all the content on your site. They’ll follow every link they find, making it easy for them to uncover dead links. The good news is that you can use tools, such as SEMrush, to uncover and fix dead links. This will help improve your site's technical SEO and user experience.
Structured data is an important part of technical SEO. This is what helps search engines to better understand your website and content. For example, you can use structured data to tell search engines what kinds of products or services you sell. You can even provide details about those products or services.
There is a standardised format for providing this information so that search engines can easily find and understand it. Implementing structured data can help search engines have a more thorough understanding of your site’s content. It also makes your content eligible for rich results. These special SERP features are intended to highlight key information on your pages and include product star ratings or image thumbnails.
Technical SEO is one of the most challenging elements of a successful SEO strategy. Making changes to your site to improve your rankings can be a scary and confusing process.
If you’re unsure how to approach technical SEO, a specialist technical SEO agency will have the experience and expertise to help.
Logica Digital has over 15 years of experience providing technical SEO services. Our approach starts with a comprehensive SEO site audit to assess your website’s current performance in search engine rankings. We’ll then make any necessary changes to boost your site’s ranking and ensure no technical issues are stopping your site from getting the result you want!
We also offer a free digital marketing audit - we’ll look at your overall marketing strategy to assess which digital marketing activities will best help drive results for your business. If you’re interested, get in touch with a member of our team today to find out more about what we do and our previous results.
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