Understanding Technical SEO
When most small business owners think of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), focus and emphasis tends to go to keywords, content creation, and backlinks. Working behind the scenes, however, is another aspect of SEO: Technical SEO. It may not sound as crucial as creating compelling content or creating eye-catching designs, but technical SEO is the backbone that ensures your website performs well and is capable of search engine rankings. There are several components that make up technical SEO, each needed to have a website that is ready to rank in search engines.
Technical SEO is essentially the process of optimizing your website’s internal infrastructure, making it so that search engines can easily crawl, index, and rank it. Technical SEO is in essence the foundation of your website. Without a strong foundation, even having the best content with the greatest design may struggle to reach audiences. Technical SEO focuses on the non-content elements of your website. These non-content elements include site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, and security, among others. These non-content elements work together to provide a website that is accessible and secure, and ultimately to better search engine visibility.
Key Components of Technical SEO
While there are many different aspects and components to technical SEO, there are a few that tend to reign as the most important. Missing even one of these can have a significant negative impact on the over SEO performance of your website.
Site Speed
Site speed or load time is one of the most important focuses of technical SEO and even website success in general. Users expect websites to load quickly, ideally in under 2 seconds. If your site takes too long to load, you’ll notice an increased bounce rate, meaning visitors are leaving quickly. Search engines, such as Google, place an extra value on websites that have optimized speed and load time because of the increased user experience it provides.
Improving site speed can be done through things such as optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, minimizing code, and using the best hosting solutions. These optimizations can reduce load times, making your website more user-friendly and search engine-friendly.
Mobile-Friendliness
The vast majority of internet use is done using a mobile device. Therefore, having a mobile-friendly website is not an optional thing — it is an absolute necessity. Having a mobile-friendly or responsive website is a key component of technical SEO. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it predominantly uses the mobile version of your website to determine its ranking position in search results. Translation: the mobile display of your website is arguably more important than the desktop. There was a day that the mobile display would impact the mobile searches and desktop displays could still help the mobile searches. Those days are quickly ending, and mobile reigns as king.
Take the necessary time to make sure your site is mobile-friendly. This will involve creating a responsive design that responds or adapts to various screen sizes, optimizing images and text for smaller device screens, and ensuring easy navigation on mobile devices.
Crawlability
Crawlability is the measure of how easily search engine bots can crawl through and navigate and then index your website. If these bots come across issues such as broken links or blocked pages, your website’s search engine ranking can be negatively affected.
Improving crawlability can be done through creating a sitemap, properly configuring the robots.txt file, and regularly checking for broken links. By improving the crawlability of your site you can increase the rate at which these search bots crawl your site, the number of pages they crawl, and thus your overall search ranking.
URL Structure
While it might not seem like a major factor, the structure of your websites URLs can play a significant role in both user experience and SEO. For search engines, a well-organized URL helps the bots to understand the content of the pages and their relationship to one another. The proper structure can also make it easier for users to browse the site. Any improvement in the user experience can have big payoffs in search ranking.
The URL structure is the line of text that comes after the domain name. For example, a clear and descriptive URL is something like www.yourwebsite.com/services/web-design. It is clear to users and search bots exactly what that page will be about. If a URL structure isn’t established, a more generic line of code could be used, having the URL be something like www.yourwebsite.com/page123. Optimizing your URL structure is a simple yet effective way to improve both search engine rankings and user experience.
Security
Website security can’t be taken lightly. Whether looked at from a technical SEO aspect, cybersecurity, or user experience, website security is a major focus and issue. Search engines don’t just strongly favor websites that use HTTPS, but they don’t even want to rank sites that don’t use HTTPS. An HTTPS website ensures that data shared between the user and the site is encrypted and secure. Along with protecting your users’ information (the primary goal), having a secure HTTPS site also increases your website and businesses credibility.
The good news is, having a secure site and switching to HTTPS is very straightforward and easy to do with most website hosting providers. In order to have a website with HTTPS, all that is needed is to purchase a yearly SSL certificate and have it installed and working on the site. Again, most website hosting providers can do this for you.
XML Sitemaps
Driving anywhere is made so much easier with the GPS options available today. When it comes to navigating your site, an XML sitemap is like GPS for search engines. The XML sitemap helps search bots crawl and index the pages on your website. By submitting an XML sitemap Google Search Console, you can make sure that search engines effectively and frequently find all the content on your website.
This is why setting up a Google Search Console account for your site when it launches is so important. When submitting your XML sitemap, you can submit the general sitemap, as well as one for all the different posts (blog articles) on your site.
Why Technical SEO Matters
Technical SEO is not as visible or flashy as content creation or keyword optimization, but it is just as important – possibly even more important. Without a foundation of technical SEO, your website may struggle to achieve a high ranking in search engines, regardless of how great your content is. By making technical aspects of SEO a primary focus, you can ensure that your website is fast, mobile-friendly, secure, and easy for search engines to crawl and index.
For small businesses, investing in technical SEO is an investment in not just online success, but overall business success. By knowing and implementing these key components, you can greatly improve your website’s search engine ranking and performance, attract more visitors, and ultimately grow your business.
