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Technical SEO – The Foundation to Build a Successful SEO Campaign Upon
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a term which refers to the process of optimising the infrastructure of your website to enable search engines to efficiently crawl, accurately index and correctly serve your content to searchers via SERPs.
But what does this really mean for your business?
Without a strong technical SEO strategy, your overall SEO performance isn’t going to reach its full potential. This is because technical SEO is concerned with optimising the discoverability of your content. So, if search engines are unable to access your webpages, you aren’t going to be appearing in important SERPs regardless of how high quality, relevant and interesting your content is.
Technical SEO also encompasses factors including mobile-friendliness and site loading speed. If your website isn’t accessible to mobile users or its webpages are slow to load, visitors are going to get frustrated and look elsewhere for the answers to their questions. Search engines look for user behaviour signals when organising rankings, so your content may not rank as highly as it would with a robust technical SEO strategy.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Let’s look at a specific example to really see why this matters so much. Imagine that you’ve just created and shared an in-depth blog post that you’re really proud of. It’s been written well, it contains the right amount of well-researched and well-placed keywords, and you’ve optimised it to drive maximum conversions. You’ve hit the publish button and you’re not seeing any of the outcomes you’d planned for.
The truth is that if your content isn’t appearing in Google SERPs and getting clicks, the time, effort and resources you put into the creation of that piece of content simply wasn’t worth it. However, this disaster can be avoided with a considered technical SEO strategy.
How Technical SEO Differs From On-Page and Off-Page SEO
You may be familiar with the different types of SEO, however it’s important to understand how they differ to ensure that you’re covering all bases.
On-page SEO is focused on the structure of your content and the information it contains. The focus of off-page SEO is firmly on your brand’s reputation and authority, ensuring that your site is optimised to secure as many social media mentions and high quality backlinks as possible.
As we’ve already seen, technical SEO is focused on your performance and site infrastructure, shaping how search engines view, interpret and serve your content. All three of these types of SEO are essential to driving success in competitive online spaces, however only technical SEO is at all concerned with ensuring that your content is being seen.
Unfortunately, too many businesses get caught up in creating great content and fail to invest in the strong technical foundation that will ultimately drive success.
How Complicated Is Technical SEO?
The honest answer to this question is: it depends. And we say this because although the fundamentals of technical SEO are relatively simple to understand, there are many moving parts to consider, which can very quickly start to complicate things if you’re not familiar with the processes, approaches and strategies. For this reason, many businesses opt to work with a technical SEO agency to ensure they’re driving the most value from the investment.
Technical SEO’s Impact On Discoverability
Some elements of technical SEO are geared towards shaping how search engines discover your content. Discoverability is the first step you’ll need to traverse when it comes to getting your content to appear in SERPs.
There’s a lot of content online and you need to know that you’re doing everything required to enable search engine crawlers to find yours. Google discovers content in several ways, including by following links from other webpages it already knows exist and through processing XML sitemaps.
So, if you don’t want your content to essentially fail to exist, you need to ensure that Google can find it and index it properly.
What Are The Most Important Technical SEO Factors?
When implemented correctly, technical SEO is a robust framework which will continue to work hard in the background to support your ongoing success. Each of the following factors has an important role to play within that framework to ensure that it continues to work seamlessly.
- Optimise Your Crawl Budget: Search engine spiders have a crawl budget, which is the number of pages that will be crawled on your website within a particular period of time. If these spiders are spending too much of this crawl budget on pages that aren’t especially important, your more impactful and valuable content might not be crawled or indexed. Avoiding this is key to ensuring that you’re optimising your rankings and your potential to generate revenue.
- Use HTTPS: HTTPS encrypts the data that is being exchanged between your server and the user’s browser. As well as offering greater security benefits than HTTP, it also provides SEO benefits because Google actively uses it as a ranking signal. Without HTTPS, you risk lower ranking positions, a loss of referral data, and trust issues.
- Find And Remove Duplicate Content: Duplicate content can be highly confusing to search engines, as they won’t know which is the most relevant. As this can lead to lower SERP rankings, removing duplicate content where possible is key. However, there are other tactics that can also be employed to communicate to search engines which version you want to be indexed, including canonical tags and noindex tags.
- Optimise For Core Web Vitals: Core Web Vitals are markers which evaluate key elements of user experience to determine how healthy a website is. There are several metrics to focus on here, including responsiveness, loading performance and visual stability.
- Use Structured Data: Structured data enables Google to understand certain types of webpages by utilising clearly defined and standardised data organisation formats. Utilising structured data can help to increase your click-through rates (CTRs) and enable the generation of rich results such as featured snippets, which may boost your search visibility./li>
- Build A Technical SEO Audit Schedule: SEO is not a one-time activity and to continue enjoying the benefits of your optimisation efforts, it’s essential to audit your website frequently and consistently. As well as determining how often the auditing process should happen, you should create a checklist of actions to be taken and ensure that you’re carefully analysing the data you collect.
Your technical SEO specialist will likely recommend auditing your site at least quarterly for maximum impact.
Benefits of Technical SEO
When done well, technical SEO brings an array of benefits that your business will continue to experience long into the future, including improving the indexation and ranking of your content, improving the security and overall trustworthiness of your most important digital asset, and enhancing the experience your visitors will have when they land on your site through factors including mobile responsiveness and fast page loading times.
Investing in technical SEO services will ensure that your website continues to make an impact even as marketplaces become more competitive, providing strong foundations that can be further built upon over time as algorithms evolve and new tactics emerge.
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