Technical SEO is an aspect of on-page SEO and refers to the process of optimising the technical side of a website to enhance crawlability, indexing and ranking in SERPs.
It's basically improving the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Optimised technical SEO is important because it has a huge impact on your website’s performance.
1. Improves UX
Making sure a website is mobile friendly, with fast loading pages and content that matches its meta data improves UX (User Experience) meaning lower bounce rate and higher dwell time.
2. Increases Crawlability
Optimising a website’s technical SEO will enable the Google Crawlers to navigate the site more easily, which increases crawl budget, helping the bots to find and index new content more quickly. This means more traffic and higher ranking in SERPs.
3. Directly Impacts Traffic
Technical SEO like meta descriptions and meta titles hugely influence whether or not a searcher will click on a web page. They also impact how Google perceives a website’s level of relevancy and authority.
What Are Some Aspects of Technical SEO?
There are a range of different aspects to bear in mind when you are seeking to optimise your technical SEO. Some of these include:
There are a range of ways that websites can optimise their technical SEO.
1. Increase Your Site Speed
Google is aware that slow page speed is not conducive to a good UX, because users will spend less time on a page if it takes forever to load. Therefore the faster your page speed, the higher your website ranks in SERPs.
2. Make Your Site Crawlable and Easy to Navigate
This is important, because Google Crawlers can get lost on a website if there are broken internal links or orphan pages. Ensure you have an XML sitemap and direct the bots to the right places with robot.txt and canonical tags.
Include breadcrumbs to show page hierarchy, and aid end users with navigation.
3. Ensure Pages Are Optimised For Mobiles
This has become increasingly important in recent years. Websites will lose traffic and rank lower in SERPs without it. So, for mobile usage, compress images, use AMP, and enlarge font for better UX. Here, website’s should use viewport tags.
4. Optimise Meta Data
This is key. Title tags should be tailored to each different web page and 55 characters long. Meta descriptions should be interesting, insightful and around 150-165 characters long. Both should include target keywords.
Images should be optimised with alt text and include target and long-tail keywords.
Essential Technical SEO Tools
There are tools on the web, both free and paid for that will help you improve and optimise your technical SEO. Below are some of the best:
SEMrush provides some technical SEO tools that can be used to assess website health and analyse its interaction with Google. Firstly, there’s a high-speed crawler that examines a website for issues and, within minutes, provides actionable insights on what to improve. Additionally, users can leverage the Log File Analyzer. This software evaluates how Google’s crawlers behave on your site, and it can help pinpoint structural and navigational issues that may affect ranking. SEMrush also offers recommendations on how to improve link building, search engine results page (SERP) feature targeting, and technical SEO on individual website pages.
BrightLocal is an SEO tool that focuses solely on local search, helping businesses rank higher on location-based search results. The software offers some features that improve SEO and ensure websites meet the technical requirements of search engines. Users get superfast and fully automated audits that highlight prevalent issues and provide tips on how to boost search visibility. Over 300 SEO data points are evaluated to produce deeper insights and a comprehensive overview. BrightLocal’s audits are fine-tuned for local search, with customised reports focused only on the metrics that matter to your business.
Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform, and it offers a tool for technical analysis and reporting. In one click, users can find errors that affect website ranking. The software ranks these errors in order of severity, and an SDO Score estimates how well your website meets the technical requirements of search engines. Tips are provided to help you boost page load speed for desktop and mobile, and Serpstat lets you schedule automatic audits. Furthermore, when you fix a bug or make some adjustments to improve technical SEO, you can carry out a quick audit on any page of your website to measure the impact of your changes.
MonsterInsights is a WordPress plugin for Google Analytics, and it can be used to carry out technical SEO checks for WordPress sites. The tool highlights technical SEO issues, how they affect Google ranking, and what can be done to improve performance. You can also assess the structure of your website and how easy it is for crawlers to navigate and find relevant pages. Users get recommendations on how to boost site speed, improve internal linking, and optimize technical SEO metrics for individual pages.
Other tools include: Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, WebPageTest, W3C Validator, Ahrefs, Moz etc.
How Can We Help?
Does your technical SEO need an overhaul? Give us a call today and we can offer you a free strategy session.
If you like what we have to say - we’ll match you with a recommended marketing team to apply your personalised strategy.
If you already have the team but want some pointers in the right direction, go to our training courses to get a refresh on the current and best SEO techniques that we use ourselves.
