Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the foundation upon which on-page and off-page SEO are built. It is behind them, making sure that search engines are able to find your site. This way everything else you are doing for SEO will be effective.
Technical SEO involves the actual building of the website: making sure that the structure of the site works efficiently with the content on the site, to optimize organic traffic.
So much more than just keywords and links, technical SEO is what makes these things actually work.
Why You Need Technical SEO
In order for your website to be found by search engines, it needs to be easy to access and crawl. Search engines send out robots to all parts of the internet to do this. The way it works is constantly changing, as Google wants to keep the best websites ranking at the top of the first page.
Technical SEO, done right, will ensure that it is easy for these robots to quickly access the content on your site. This way, you are much more likely to rank high in search results.
Making Your Site Mobile-Friendly
It is vital that your website is responsive to, and optimized for, all types of devices. Most internet traffic comes from smartphones, but people are still using laptops and tablets as well. In order for your site to be optimized for organic traffic, it needs a responsive design.
This is another part technical SEO plays in optimizing your website. To have a maximally-effective SEO campaign, you need technical SEO to play a big part!
First Step: Audit
As always, the first thing we do when creating a strategy around SEO is to assess where your site is currently at. We use website crawlers and tools such as Google Console and Google Analytics to see how things look and create a plan for moving forward.
If your website has any duplicate content, broken links, or other issues, we will find them and fix them when optimizing your technical SEO.
The Core of Technical SEO
There are several core elements of technical SEO. These include
- Safety
- Speed
- Crawling
- Structure
- International Concerns
Each of these is important to focus on when optimizing your website through technical SEO.
Safety
Security is important for ranking high in search engines. They highlight the websites that are the most secure and value the user’s data.
A security socket layer – SSL – gives your website protection that will make it more secure. HTTPS shows authority so that your website gets more trust. These are a couple of ways to ensure safety, so that search engines will trust and index your website.
A website without an SSL has a much smaller chance of being ranked on the first page of search results. Again, search engines value safety. A vital part of technical SEO is to create that safety.
Speed
We all know how much we dislike a slow website. We want it to load right away, so we can quickly find what we are looking for.
Recent studies show that most users won’t stick around if a website doesn’t grab their attention within two seconds. Two seconds isn’t much time!. A fast website is absolutely necessary for optimal user experience.
We have strategies and tools to speed up your website’s load time, ensuring that your viewers will stay on the site.
The first step is always to audit. We will see what the load speed of your website is, and compare it to that of your competition. Once we have this data, we can speed it up by optimizing image and code size and making sure you are correctly using caching.
Crawling
The robots that search engines send to crawl your website, prefer to do so quickly and easily. As mentioned before, technical SEO makes sure that your site’s infrastructure is built in such a way that this can happen. Having a solid internal lining system is important.
The robot crawlers look for a robot.txt file that works with your XML sitemap. This file must be working properly, or the robots will not be able to crawl your site. This will lead to very poor search results for your site.
After the robots have crawled your website and understood what is there and what you have to offer, they index it. Indexing involves storing the data about your site, so that it can come up when someone searches for relevant information.
Having a website that is optimized for crawling and indexing is another reason that technical SEO is so important to get your ranking on the first page of search engines!
Structure
Building a solid website is similar to building a solid home: you have to start with the foundation, then build a good structure on top of that. You need to have a good architect who can design a home that is easy to navigate and flows well.
When building a website, it is important that everything from the URL used, to the way categories and pages are arranged, is straightforward and simple to use. Think of a positive user experience from the first click.
Internal links need to be working and used in the proper ways. This makes it easy for crawlers to navigate your site. A good XML sitemap creates a nice roadmap for search engines looking at what’s on the website.
International Concerns
If your website has an international audience, it will be important to have multilingual content on the site. Technical SEO involves many facets of optimizing for an international audience. From consistency in URLs to HTML hreflang tags, optimizing for international SEO will ensure that search engines see what they need to see on your site.
How Project Local Downunder Can Help
Optimizing a website for technical SEO is a lot of work. It requires serious skill, real knowledge, and looking at many different aspects of the website.
At Project Local Downunder, we specialize in all facets of SEO. Technical SEO is easy for us, because we have the skill level required.
W would love to create a strategy for you that will help you see amazing results in as little as 90 days. Reach out today to get started
Testimonials
What Our Client’s Say
