What Is Technical SEO?
If you own a small business, chances are, you’re obsessed with doing all you can to maximize your search engine optimization (SEO). You’ve probably filled out your content with all the possible keywords, added metadata and title tags, and done all these regularly during the week. But, your company still isn’t showing up as the top few suggestions on Google. You’re pulling your hair out and wondering why this is so. Haven’t you done enough?
Well, it might be that you haven’t done your technical SEO right. What’s technical SEO? Well, that’s why we’ve made this post – we’re going to give you a short introduction and guide to Technical SEO.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the other half of content SEO. This deals with the technical side of websites and it’s basically all the technical characteristics that a website must have for it to rank high on a search engine’s result page. This might sound intimidating as you might think that this means that you’d need to learn how to program and code stuff for your technical SEO to be great. Don’t worry you don’! And if there are any parts you don’t get, that’s what this guide is for. We’ll be explaining them to you so that you’d know how to deal with it.
To put it simply, technical SEOs have four main components. We’ll refer to this as your technical SEO checklist. It’s the four main things that you’ll have to manage well to ensure that your technical SEO does great.
What’s On My Technical SEO Checklist?
So to put it simply, the four components are, firstly, website navigation and the site’s architecture. Secondly, it’s the speed that your site loads. Thirdly, your website’s indexability and finally, your site’s content. These are the four players that make up your technical SEO. We’ll go through what they individually mean and how you can manage them better to maximize your technical SEO.
Website Navigation and Site Architecture
This component is basically about how easy it is to navigate around your website. This is where your site’s architecture comes into play – how are you various pages organized? Are they simple to access? Or do you need to click through many pages to get to a page? These two different setups are known respectively as flat site architecture and deep site architecture. Deep site architecture is frowned upon as it means that you have many inner pages and require customers to click through many different pages just to get to their needed page. This is bad as it takes up more time for your customer. Consequently, it is also ranked lower by search engines.
According to Search Engine Journal, a user should only need a maximum of three clicks to get to any page within your site. Any more than that is bad and users may click away. Therefore, you should try and organize your site to have flat architecture. This will be appreciated by your customers and it will also boost your technical SEO. If you aren’t sure if your current site has flat architecture, you can use Ahrefs Site Audit tool to check. Alternatively, you can check it yourself. The best way to have flat architecture is by having a good menu bar that allows you to access your site’s main pages. Too many subcategories aren’t a good thing, surprisingly.
Speed of Your Site
Another factor for whether a user stays on your page is how fast your page loads. According to Google, 40% of consumers click away if your page takes longer than three seconds to load. When this happens, the Google algorithm takes note of it and pushes your site down in SEO ranking. In other words, you’d want your site to load quickly in order for your technical SEO to be boosted.
To allow your site to load quickly, you can try out different tricks. Firstly, images often are one key reason why a page loads slower. Therefore, you should also optimize images for the web when placing any on your page. You can also host your page on a fast server to ensure that loading speed is at optimum. Lastly, you should also remember to optimize your site for mobile viewing too. In recent years, people have taken to using their mobile devices for online browsing more and consequently, Google has also begun to prioritize mobile SEO.
Site Indexability
The way that search engines decide if your page deserves to rank high is by having bots crawl through your pages. By doing so, they are able to look at and store the information your site provides in an index. You’d want your website to be in this index because that’s how the search engine will suggest your page when someone makes a search. All in all, Google does this crawling and indexing rather quickly. This is especially so if you have flat architecture. Pages can be quickly looked at by the bots. But if you have a deep site architecture, it will be harder. There are more pages to crawl through and some pages may be missed. This would mean that your page won’t be indexed.
In other words, the best way to ensure your site has good indexability is by firstly, having a flat site architecture. From there, you might also want to submit an XML sitemap to the Google Search Console. This would include a list of all your webpages and information. You would speed up the indexing process by doing this!
Site Content
For technical SEO, content matters less. However, what we’re discussing under this section is a specific type of content – it’s duplicate content. It’s good to post frequently however, this might mean that you’re frequently posting about the same thing. When that happens, the search engine might not know how to rank these pages. Therefore, all these pages might end up being ranked lower. That’s when you’ll lose out.
How can you solve this issue? Well, the easiest method would be to simply review all your content. If you find duplicate content, delete it. If your business has several sites, you might also want to delete them and only keep one site. This would mean there’s less conflict within your own content. In other words, you won’t be fighting with yourself. This will then help boost your site’s SEO.
Conclusion
SEO is an important part of building a business. It helps make you relevant on search engine pages and ensures that your target audience is able to find you! With this short guide, we hope that you are better able to deal with your site’s technical SEO and channel better views to your page!
