Technical SEO
A smart search engine optimization strategy requires a multi-faceted approach for increasing your company’s visibility online. The major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing prioritize providing the best experience possible for their users.
When one of those users is conducting a search relevant to your business, you want your business web page to be the first one listed in their search results pages. However, only those websites offering superior user experience are ranked high enough to warrant the top position on the first page of a user’s search results.
Technical SEO is one component of an overall optimization strategy to ensure that your website meets or exceeds the ranking criteria of all the popular search engines and organically earns higher rankings for maximum visibility.
What’s so crucial about getting placed at or near the top of the first page of users’ search results? It means your website has been deemed most valuable, offering a better and more positive user experience. The result is greater visibility when users search for a product or service you offer.
Today’s fast-paced marketplace caters to online users who want to find the product or service they need quickly. No one has the time nor the patience to scroll through web pages to find what they want. On average, most users get halfway down the first page of their search results before clicking on the link that will satisfy their search and convert to a sale.
To ensure your website ranks high enough to be seen, focus on technical SEO, on-page SEO, and even off-page SEO. If the link to your business website is located on page two or three, chances are very few online users will ever see it. They’ve already found the product, retailer, or contractor they need, and your business is left out in the cold.
A good SEO campaign can help ensure that your business gets the visibility it deserves with higher rankings and a more advantageous position in users’ search results. If customers can’t find your business, they will be happy to give their hard-earned dollars to your competitor with a website that ranks higher and enjoys more visibility.
How Technical SEO Can Help
Technical SEO is the process through which your website is optimized for compliance with the ranking criteria of popular search engines to ensure the best organic position in users’ search results pages. Technical SEO covers all of the technical aspects of your website concerning functionality and design. Issues such as slow loading times, improper loading, errors on multiple pages, or improper coding can negatively impact your website’s ranking. Additionally, problems like duplicate content can also harm your rankings by confusing search engines about which version of a page to index.
Every single other aspect of your website can be perfect, from keyword research to content to meta descriptions, but if it doesn’t work the way it should, or if there are issues like duplicate content, the search engines will determine that it does not offer a positive user experience and ranking will suffer dramatically.
Why is Technical SEO Important for a Successful Business
Your company website is often the first thing customers see when they interact with your business online. Search engines favor websites that offer a more positive experience for users.
These are two very important reasons why you should not ignore technical SEO when developing a well-rounded SEO strategy for online success. A website that doesn’t function properly can be more of a liability than an asset for small businesses trying to compete in a crowded marketplace.
Working with an SEO company like JH SEO can give your business the edge by increasing search engine rankings and providing greater visibility for your website. Our team can perform an optimization audit which will identify any problems in the code and architecture of your website and offer solutions to ensure that functionality and compatibility with all of the necessary components that determine rank are met.
Technical SEO is critical to success because an optimized website is easier to discover and track, increases manageability, and offers a faster, more efficient, positive user experience. When search engines find it easier to navigate and index your website, loading speeds are fast, and pages are compatible with mobile devices, the search engines give your website a more favored placement for users in search results pages.
Consider all of the ways that a website audit can determine if your website has been optimized for technical SEO:
Website Design
A professional website makes all the difference in impressing new customers and keeping them as loyal customers for years to come. But if your company’s website is tough to navigate and doesn’t load quickly or properly, it’s a bad look for your business. Remember, your company website is often the first thing people see when interacting with your business. A bad first impression can be devastating.
Search engines offer higher rankings to websites that provide real value. That value is calculated through the average time a user spends navigating the site. If most users click the link and close it after just a few seconds to a minute, the search engines’ ranking protocols determine the website doesn’t have much to offer visitors.
Website Architecture
Your website’s technical SEO assists search engines in tracking and creating a road map to help define and categorize the organization of pages and internal links on the website. When search engines see that your site architecture is properly defined and formatted, rankings increase.
This includes the correct URL formatting, sitemaps, and internal linkage so the search engine tracking bots can understand which pages have greater authority on the website.
Simply put, it’s all about the precise organization so the site is structured for easier navigation, and the search engines can better comprehend the site and analyze its contents.
Page Load Times
A website that takes too long to load will rank lower than sites with faster loading times. Technical SEO targets site speed as this is a crucial component of the search engines’ ranking criteria. A slow website can reduce its rankings, and you’ll find your business relegated to lower positions on users’ search engine results pages.
The fastest websites load at hundredths of a second. Anything slower can negatively impact user experience, and that will reduce the visibility of your website. A technical optimization audit can be extremely useful in increasing page loading speeds.
Mobile Device Compatibility
Our mobile devices have become more significant than ever before. We do everything on our smartphones, tablets, and laptops. More than half of all online searches are conducted on mobile devices, so it stands to reason that search engines would place a greater emphasis on ensuring the best-ranked websites are fully functional on our devices.
How does Google Search Console help?
Google Search Console is one of the free technical SEO tools provided by Google that helps website owners, administrators, and SEO professionals monitor and manage their site’s presence in Google search results. It provides valuable insights and structured data on how Googlebot interacts with your site, including information on search queries, indexing status, and any technical SEO issues that might affect your site’s performance.
Key features of Google Search Console include:
- Performance Reports: View data on the performance of your site in Google search, including impressions, clicks, click-through rates, and average position for various search queries.
- Index Coverage: See which pages of your site are indexed by Google and identify any indexing issues or errors.
- Sitemap Submission: Submit and manage sitemaps to help Google discover and crawl your site’s pages more effectively.
- Mobile Usability: Check for usability issues that might affect site performance on mobile devices.
- URL Inspection Tool: Analyze specific URLs to see how they are indexed, and request re-indexing if necessary.
- Security Issues: Receive alerts about any security issues on your site, such as malware or hacking.
- Links Report: View the internal links and external links pointing to your site, helping you understand your site’s link profile. This also helps you spot if there are any broken links that need fixing.
By using Google Search Console, you can gain a better understanding of how your site is performing in search results and make data-driven decisions to improve its visibility and user experience.
Does Your Website Need a Technical SEO Audit?
Our technical SEO experts are here to help. We have worked with diverse businesses, big and small, to audit their websites and increase search engine rankings for wider visibility. We can work with you to create a long-term, multi-faceted SEO strategy for getting your website the most favorable placement on users’ search engine results pages.
CALL FOR YOUR SEO AUDIT TODAY!