What Is Technical SEO?
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:
Technical SEO Best Practices
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.
Make sure traffic is directed to the right places with 301 redirects and get rid of duplicate content.
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:
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.
