How Does Technical SEO Help Your Website Rankings?

SEO

Have you ever been a wallflower?

You might not know what I’m talking about, so I’ll elaborate.

A “wallflower” used to be the term used to describe someone who is overlooked – particularly as a dance partner in a ball. These individuals would quietly stand around the edges of the room, gazing at the swirl of glamorous dancers whirling around the room, hoping for people to notice them.

Technical SEO is a bit of a wallflower.

It’s “technical” and therefore a bit complicated. And it’s very unsexy. It doesn’t have the glitz of web design, nor the clever seduction of website copy.

Instead, it involves lots of fiddly things – like numbers, letters and data.

But, like most wallflowers, once you get to know it, you realise that it’s actually the most helpful, interesting and useful part of SEO.

So, let me introduce you to the wallflower of the SEO world with an aim to demystify it. Because it really is fantastic for helping your website generate enquiries. Let’s find out how.

What is technical SEO?

Firstly, let’s start with a definition. Technical SEO is the term used to describe all the data on your website that search engines use to crawl and index your content. In other words, it’s about Google spiders being able to find, understand and appropriately catalogue your pages.

Why Technical SEO is important  

1.     It helps clients find your services

You could have the best product available in the world, bar none. You could have a good website with great content and masses of well-researched keywords. You could even have a great link-building strategy.  But if search engines can’t see that website – and therefore your product – then all your effort is in vain.

This is because your potential clients use search engines to find services that they need. If your website cannot be “seen” by those search engines, then there is no chance of them finding your brand or service.

2.     It helps clients find your services on the move

Also, what if all that snazziness doesn’t translate well to say, a mobile phone? Around half of all searches are now done on a mobile, so if your site is not optimised for mobile use then you are potentially losing out on a huge proportion of available traffic. This is an example of the “user experience” side of Technical SEO.

3.     It helps your website rank high on the results pages

Once search engines can find your site, they can decide how high you should rank on the results pages. The higher you rank, the greater the chance that your clients will see your services.

Ensuring that your technical SEO is outstanding – that there are no errors – ensures you have the best chance to rank highly. 

This is why Technical SEO is so fundamental to your online marketing approach, even though it may not feel like marketing at all sometimes.

But why wouldn’t search engines be able to crawl and index your website properly?

As we’ve said, search engines can’t crawl what they can’t see.

Now the world wide web is aptly named because everything is linked together like a spider’s web. Search engine bots cannot jump from one strand of the spider’s web to another. They have to crawl along one strand until they come to a junction that – in turn – will lead them down another strand.

Let’s imagine there was a different mini spider’s web located just to the side. They could not jump to it, a link would have to be formed between one of the strands of their existing web, to this new one. Then they would be able to crawl every strand of this new web in turn.

Google spiders, it turns out, won’t work too hard for a small payoff. They have what’s called a crawling budget. There is only so much time that they will spend trying to crawl your site. So, make it easy for them.

Take all the obstacles out of their way, make it clear which URLs to crawl first (the important ones), make it a nice place for a hard-working little Googlebot to spend some time…and they might just up the crawling budget next time around as well!

How can you ensure that your technical SEO is good?

If you wanted to find out what state the company finances were in, you’d probably start with an audit. Finding out about any technical issues affecting your website’s SEO is no different.

1.     Start with an audit

An audit can show you some of the most common tech errors on your site. You can find out more about website audits here. Once you know what your errors are, you can form a plan of action to deal with them.

3.     Make sure you index the pages you want

Now there are some pretty big own goals around site indexing to watch out for. Let’s take this one for example. You hire a company to re-design your website. During the development phase, they will probably use a “noindex” on a subdomain on their own site, to avoid the dummy site being crawled and indexed by Google. All seems fair enough so far.

But would you believe that sometimes they forget to remove the “noindex” tag once they migrate it over to your site? Meaning that, no matter how great the content, the Google spiders are never going to be able to find and index your website. Make sure all the pages you want search engines to find are indexed.

4.     Make sure your website is secure

Also, only the secure version of your website should be crawlable (HTTPS). A secure website increases trust and Google does reward this with a small boost in rankings. Trust is especially important for e-commerce sites. Make sure any non-secure versions of your site (HTTP) are re-directed to the HTTPS.

5.     Check loading speed

Site loading speed is a BIG one. Did you know that 50% of users will abandon a page if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load? Loading speed is crucial!  Google’s Page Speed Insights tool can be great here.  The slow loading speed can be caused by a slow web server or un-optimised HTML code. Consider something as simple as reducing the file size of your images and just better compression in general across all your media.

6.     Be mobile friendly

Google itself has indicated that mobile-friendliness is going to be expanded as a criterion within its rankings, so this is another big fish. Is your website as easy to read and use on your phone as it is on your laptop? If not, it absolutely should be! No overlapping elements or wonky fonts. Again, Google has a handy help tool for this.

7.     Fix broken links

Broken links are potentially a big problem as well. Not only will they frustrate your existing subscribers/customer base, but they will also have a massive impact on growth because new customers can’t get to your content. Not to mention the reputational impact they will have with those spider-web masters (get it) at Google.

8.     Organise your site

You’ll also want to make sure that your site makes sense and is siloed correctly. This means organising content into the correct “departments” to allow our little Google spiders to make sense if it more easily.

Anything else we can do to speak Google’s love language?

In a word, yes. There are a couple of big things we haven’t covered yet. Metadata and schema markup! They require a little more discussion, so let’s dive in. Let’s start with schema.

What is schema?

Schema is a universal computer language, developed so that all search engines can understand the really important parts of your webpage. If you use Schema markup, it’s like jumping up and down, waving a red flag at our old friend the Google spiders and saying “over here, over here…this is the REALLY important bit.

Metadata, what is it?

Why metadata matters

For the purposes of SEO, we’re looking specifically at title tags (page name), URLs and meta descriptions (the first few lines that appear describing your website in the search results). This metadata communicates your website’s identity to search engines and really boosts your ranking if utilised properly.

If this metadata is also keyword-dense, that’s another boost to your position immediately. Because you can optimise every page on your website in this way, as well as doing the same for headings, subheadings and images…it all adds up to be of huge value in search engine optimisation. 

The rabbit hole goes on and on and a good SEO agency can help you exploit every tunnel in the warren! This is why metadata is important.

So, what about metadata vs schema

If metadata is so good at aiding in SEO, why bring schema into it at all? One key reason is something called Rich Snippets. Rich snippets are the extra pieces of information we sometimes see on some of Google’s search result listings that tell us the important headlines about a website without us having to click on it. These can have a massive advantage click-through rate-wise, which in turn will boost your SERPS ranking.

For local SEO and smaller enterprises, spending time and energy on really good metadata is often where the real payoff will come from.

Technical SEO: helps your business grow

A website has many purposes, but one of the biggest ones is generating enquiries for your company. New leads, means new business for you.

And the foundation of that functionality is outstanding technical SEO. By sending the right information to search engines, your website will be ranked well, and you will get the right users visiting it.

Don’t neglect your technical SEO. Get it right and you’ll definitely feel the benefit.