You’ve put in the effort to create an engaging website, crafted compelling content, and invested in digital marketing. You believe your website is ready to attract hordes of potential customers. But suddenly, you notice a decline in website traffic, and your search engine ranking isn’t as high as you expected. What could be the issue?
Chances are, you’re facing technical SEO problems that are hindering your search engine marketing efforts. These issues often go unnoticed, as they’re not typically seen as the responsibility of search marketers.
What many fail to realize is that addressing these technical SEO problems is crucial for enhancing your search visibility score. Neglecting these issues can lead to crawling errors and lower audience engagement, making it challenging to convert website traffic into actual sales.
In this post, we’ll delve deep into the realm of technical SEO and help you develop a plan to boost your website’s ranking. But before we get started, let’s get some definitions straight.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO involves ensuring that your website adheres to the latest technical requirements of search engines, ultimately improving your organic page rankings. It encompasses website optimizations that assist search engine spiders and internet bots in crawling and indexing your website more efficiently.
To grasp the essence of technical SEO, it’s important to understand that modern search engines consider various ranking factors. These factors encompass site security, site speed, site architecture, and more. They collectively determine which websites appear at the top of search results, those more likely to build a robust customer base.
Technical SEO deals with the fundamental elements that power your organic growth engine. These crucial components include indexing, rendering, crawling, and more. However, it does not encompass activities like link building, keyword research, analytics, backlink profile building, content optimization, or social media marketing.
In simpler terms, technical SEO focuses solely on meeting specific search engine requirements to enhance crawling and indexing. Crawling involves internet bots delving into the content of your web pages, thoroughly analyzing them. Indexing, on the other hand, refers to storing and organizing the content identified during the crawling process. If a page is successfully indexed, it qualifies to appear in search engine results.
Keeping Pace with Search Engines
Search engines continually evolve and become more complex. Their ranking algorithms and search engine requirements undergo constant refinement. Reports suggest that Google alters its search engine algorithm approximately 500 to 600 times each year. It’s crucial for content creators and businesses to keep up with these changes.
This implies that your site’s technical SEO must undergo continuous refinement to align with search engines’ evolving criteria. By optimizing it technically, you provide your website with the best possible environment for success. You can secure a coveted spot on the first page of search results without unnecessary obstacles.
While the specifics of your site may change, the end goal remains consistent: achieving better search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Facilitating search engine spiders’ access to your content is fundamental to your technical SEO strategy.
The Importance of Technical SEO
You may have a fantastic website with well-crafted, practical content. However, if search engines cannot detect, crawl, and index your web pages, you won’t maximize your content’s potential. Consequently, only a fraction of potential visitors will ever discover your website.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Even if a search engine indexes all your content, it doesn’t mark the end of the journey.
Your site will only be fully optimized for technical SEO when it aligns with search engine requirements. It must be mobile-friendly, secure, free of duplicate content issues, and possess a fast loading time, among other criteria. If your content is easily accessible to search engines, you stand a much better chance of achieving higher-than-average rankings.
How Is Technical SEO Different from Other Types of SEO?
There are three primary types of Search Engine Optimization (SEO): on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing website content and pages, while off-page SEO involves building relationships and links between websites.
Technical SEO, being an internal aspect, is considered a subset of on-page SEO. It doesn’t strive to expand website exposure through external channels. Let’s briefly define each type of SEO before we delve further into creating a robust marketing framework.
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO deals with elements on your website’s front end that enhance your search engine rankings. As a website owner, you have direct control over these components, as they all reside within your website. On-page SEO encompasses internal linking, URL structuring, content formatting, meta descriptions, keyword usage, and image optimization.
- Off-page SEO: In off-page SEO, you must rely on external sources and strategies to improve your search rankings. You employ techniques beyond your website to enhance your search rankings, with quality backlink building being a common strategy. The quality and authority of websites linking back to your pages significantly impact your rankings.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO, much like on-page SEO, falls entirely under your control as a website owner. This facet of SEO revolves around the technical aspects of your website, such as site speed. For instance, if your website loads slowly, it could result in lower rankings compared to competitors with faster-loading pages.
Ways to Enhance Technical SEO
Improving your website’s technical SEO need not be a daunting task. Here, we provide a checklist of essential tasks you can undertake to optimize your site effectively. Following these steps ensures that your site structure aligns with search engine algorithms, ultimately leading to improved rankings.
- Find and Fix Errors: Identify existing site errors and rectify them. Technical errors can obstruct web crawlers from indexing your web pages. Conducting a technical SEO audit is an effective way to achieve this. It involves evaluating your site’s health, pinpointing necessary repairs or fixes, and providing actionable insights. Several tools are available to perform SEO audits, which identify relevant errors, offer downloadable information, and propose potential solutions.
- Revise Website Architecture: Website architecture refers to how content or information is organized within your website, including the arrangement of web pages into categories. Effective site architecture influences how both web spiders and human users navigate your website. Logical site architecture makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index your site efficiently. To enhance your site architecture:→ Ensure your site has an XML sitemap, which contains information about each page on your site, aiding search engines in discovering, crawling, and indexing pages.
→ Organize your website’s URLs logically, avoiding confusion by maintaining consistency between categories and subcategories.→ Optimize URL structures for search, incorporating relevant keywords near the root domain (site name), and keeping URL lengths within a reasonable limit of around 60 characters.
- Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues: Duplicate content issues can lead to confusion for web crawlers, as they won’t know which version of the content is original. This can result in lower search engine rankings. Utilize specific tools to identify on-site duplicate content problems. Some errors may require merely rewriting metadata to appear original, while others, such as entire pages of duplicate content, may necessitate a 301 redirect. The latter redirects human visitors and search engine crawlers to a different URL than the one initially selected from search results.
Additional Strategies for Enhancing Technical SEO
- Improve Site Speed: Site speed is a crucial ranking factor for search engines. It’s essential to ensure that your web pages load quickly.
- Enhance Website Security: Transition to a secure HTTP (HTTPS) connection by obtaining a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. Implement a 301 Redirect from HTTP pages to the new secure versions.
- Implement a Mobile-Friendly Design: Given that mobile users account for nearly half of global web traffic, consider creating a mobile-responsive design to ensure your content is accessible on smaller screens.
- Use Structured Data Markup: Structured data involves systematically organizing site information within a database, making it easier for search engines to analyze data swiftly. Implementing structured data can increase your chances of appearing in SERP features like rich snippets, potentially resulting in higher click-through rates.
Choosing the Right SEO Type to Prioritize
In summary, all three types of SEO—on-page, off-page, and technical—are crucial. To establish a successful digital marketing strategy, SEO should serve as its foundation. To make the most substantial impact on rankings, it’s essential to address all three SEO types for your website.
Our comprehensive SEO services encompass technical intricacies, on-page enhancements, and off-page strategies, ensuring that your website not only attracts visitors but ranks prominently on search engine results pages. With a commitment to staying ahead of evolving algorithms and industry trends, we provide a dynamic approach to SEO that delivers lasting results. Choose Udify Technologies to elevate your digital presence, and let us drive your business towards unprecedented online success.
