Organic search is still the best way to secure leads. In theory, getting 3x more traffic also means getting 3x more sales. Perfecting the technical side of SEO is the key to climbing higher in the SERPs. But exactly what aspects of technical SEO should you focus on? Here’s everything you need to know.
Understanding Technical SEO
Google crawls millions of websites daily to obtain information for search results, so its spiders can only spend a limited time on your site. It’s your job to make it easier for those spiders to get the right information from your website—information that can help you rank higher. This is where technical SEO comes in.
Covering The Basics
There are four things you need to do to help Google crawl your website more effectively:
- Fix Your Structure – For Google to quickly and efficiently index your pages, you need to keep your site structure simple and logical. If users can navigate your website easily, then it’s easy for Google, too. This raises the chances of getting more of your pages indexed.
- Add Metadata and Labels – Make it easier for Google to understand the content on your pages by labeling each part with descriptive words, like ‘footer’, ‘navbar’, and ‘article.’ Use alt tags on images, charts, and graphs to describe them, and write an appropriate page title with a meta-description.
- Keep Your Website Secure – Obtain a security certificate. Your URL should start with https://.
- Speed Up Your Website – Improve your website design and make it responsive so that page’s load quickly on any device.
If you are about to build a website, be sure to get all these basics right from the very start. These four tips together create a stronger foundation for technical SEO. Remember that every search engine has a limit to what it crawls. Technical SEO will ensure they can crawl your site more efficiently.
Improving Your Traffic and Conversions with Technical SEO
Whether you want to create a website from scratch or enhance your existing site’s performance, follow these six essential steps:
Pick A Reliable and Secure Host.
Choose an established web hosting service that can provide a secure address that can help you rank higher. Your host must also ensure optimum uptime, as downtime can badly hurt your rankings. If Google crawls your website and it’s down, you lose your chance to rank better and risk dropping two ranks. And if Google’s spiders are consistently unable to access your website, they will visit your website less. This can be difficult to recover from—and this is why it’s essential to select a hosting service that has minimal downtime to prevent this issue.
Improve Your Google Core Web Vitals Score.
Google uses Core Web Vitals to understand the quality of a user’s on-site experience. You can improve your score by improving on these metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint – Users should be able to see most of the content on your page in 2.5 seconds or less.
- First input delay – Your website should respond to the user’s actions in less than 100 milliseconds (or a tenth of a second).
- Cumulative layout shift – Cumulative layout shift refers to when text and images take a long time to load and appear in their intended positions on a website. Google does not like this, and it can negatively impact your ranking. Make sure that all elements on the page are in the correct position within 0.1 seconds of loading.
You can improve your Core Web Vitals score by using a content delivery network, compressing images, removing unnecessary plugins, and giving page elements specific dimensions.
To minimize your first input delay times, you can use less JavaScript or at least delay its deployment. And if you want to reduce your Largest Contentful Paint time, use lazy loading—that is, loading images only when the user scrolls down to make them visible on the screen.
Ensure That Your Website Is Responsive.
Data from Statista reveals that mobile devices are responsible for a majority of US web traffic at 51.42%. This is why mobile responsiveness has become essential from both an SEO and user experience perspective. Verify that your website is mobile-ready by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
Streamline Your Site Architecture.
Categorize your content by ensuring that all pages are only a few clicks or taps away from your homepage. Using silo architecture can also improve the speed at which Google crawls your website and helps all search engines, in general, to understand the content and relationship between your pages.
Remove Duplicate Content.
Having the same content on multiple pages on your site can harm your rankings. Check your website for duplicate content using Siteliner.
Eliminate Site-Crawl Errors.
Google cannot search and index pages on your website when there are crawl errors, such as incorrect and broken links.
Strengthening Your Technical SEO
Even if you invest a lot of time and resources in creating high-quality content and obtaining authoritative backlinks, you will not be able to fully optimize your investment if you ignore technical SEO.
Having a well-established technical SEO foundation is crucial for your website’s long-term traffic generation strategy.
Start by getting a technical SEO audit from SEOValley. We can quickly identify and fix any technical elements that may be preventing your site from achieving optimal visibility. You will receive a full report on all issues along with professional advice regarding how to address them properly.
