Technical SEO can make or break your website’s organic performance. Even the best content and most powerful marketing strategies will underperform if your website isn’t technically optimised. In this article, we’ll dive into why technical SEO plays a crucial role in your SEO strategy and how it can propel your business to greater visibility.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on optimising your website’s technical elements to improve its ranking on search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.). Key areas addressed in technical SEO include:
- Website Crawlability: Ensure search engines can crawl your entire site by optimising your robots.txt file and using the correct meta tags.
- Page Speed/Loading Times: Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to identify opportunities for improvement, including compressing images or enabling browser caching.
- Internal Linking Structure: Implement descriptive anchor text to link related content and ensure all essential pages are interconnected.
By maintaining technical SEO, you’ll support your content marketing efforts and boost SEO performance. As well as this, a seamless user experience can increase your conversion rates.
How Does Technical SEO Impact Your Ranking Performance?
Poor technical SEO can negatively impact your website’s keyword rankings. While content is important, it needs an effective internal linking structure to ensure search engines can crawl and access your pages. Without internal links (e.g. orphan pages), search bots can struggle to index your content properly.
Additionally, slow-loading pages lead to higher bounce rates, which signal poor performance to search engines and hurt your rankings.
How Can You Audit Your Website’s Technical SEO?
Google Search Console offers free insights into your website’s SEO performance, though it can be challenging to interpret due to jargon. While premium SEO tools exist, they often come with high costs, deterring many small to medium businesses from using them.
What Are the Best Practices for Technical SEO?
To make sure your website ranks well, Pod Digital follows these best practices:
- Ensure Internal Linking Across Pages: Avoid orphan pages by linking related content throughout your website.
- Optimise Page Speed: Make sure your website loads quickly to improve user experience and reduce bounce rates.
- Fix URL Errors: Address issues such as 301 redirects and 404 errors to prevent broken links.
- Optimise Images and Reduce Media Size: Compress large images and media files to improve loading times.
- Implement Schema Markup: Add schema markup to essential pages to enhance search engine visibility.
Can Pod Digital Provide Technical SEO Support?
Yes! At Pod Digital, we offer comprehensive technical SEO support through our SEO retainer packages. We recommend combining it with a web retainer service, as both complement each other. During our strategy sessions, we’ll:
- Inspect your website’s internal linking structure
- Identify and resolve any broken pages
- Run your website through premium SEO tools to uncover necessary fixes
How Does Technical SEO Require Web Design and Coding Knowledge?
To implement effective technical SEO, your website’s architecture must be properly built to avoid issues with core web vitals. These metrics include:
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures unexpected layout changes during page loading, affecting user experience.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the loading time of the largest visible element on a page. Slow LCP indicates poor page load speed.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): Measures how quickly a page responds to user interactions. Delays in response can create a laggy experience.
How Much Time Should You Dedicate to Technical SEO?
Spend at least 20-30% of your SEO strategy on auditing and fixing technical issues. SEO is an ongoing process, as changes in your website, such as new content or pages, can introduce new technical challenges. Continuous monitoring and maintenance ensure your website remains healthy, enabling your sales-oriented content to perform optimally.
Maisie Bee (Head of SEO) says that “technical SEO is an important part of your strategy and should not be overlooked. It goes hand in hand with content and conversion rate optimisation”.
Key Technical SEO Tasks:
- Monitor improvements from previous updates
- Audit newly discovered errors and create an action plan
- Implement fixes and document changes
- Track keyword performance to measure the impact of technical fixes
If you’re concerned about your website’s technical SEO and need expert support, contact Pod Digital today. We offer a free strategy meeting to identify hidden issues affecting your organic performance. Our transparent technical SEO audit will provide a clear roadmap for improving your rankings and enhancing your business’s visibility online.
