Technical SEO is all about looking under the hood of your website, and how it’s coded and served to a user – it’s an essential building block of any successful website. It is a continuous process that focuses on optimising website infrastructure so that it can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines. 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, meaning it’s imperative that your website is easy to be crawled and indexed by search engines.
If a business neglects the technical SEO aspect of its website it can lead to detrimental consequences such as a dip in website lead generation opportunities, decreasing conversion rates and sales – meaning it’s vitally important that your website is continuously monitored for improvements.
When it comes to improving the technical aspect of your website, it can be overwhelming of knowing where to start, with this in mind, we’ve listed some of the key elements to consider in finer detail.
Mobile-friendliness
If a website isn’t considered mobile-friendly, this can have a raft of knock-on effects. If the website isn’t easily useable on a mobile device, this can cause user frustration and could lead them to bounce away from your website and go to a competitor. The majority of people tend to utilise their mobile phone when it comes to search, so with Google’s Mobile First approach to it’s indexation, those who have a mobile-friendly site tend to be favoured and rank higher.
Page speed performance
If your website is slow, again this can cause a user frustration and may lead them to bounce away from your website and go to a competitor. If a page takes too long to load, it could be that Google’s crawlers may decide this page isn’t important enough to read and rank.
Information architecture
If your content isn’t easily surfaced either via the navigation or through internal linking, you could be missing out on a big opportunity for Users (and crawlers) to find your content. If your content is unlinked, Search Engines may deem it less important and may choose to rank your competitors higher for targeted keywords
Structured Data
Utilising structured data is like speaking to a search engine in its own language. By utilising structured data you’re helping a Search Engine further contextualise and understand your web pages, whilst also allowing you to potentially gain additional SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features on your natural listings. These can be review stars, prices, sitelinks, etc.) These additional features could be the deciding factor when a user is selecting from the organic listings that have been curated for them
404 links
As websites grows and site structures are reviewed and changes made, having a list of broken (404) links is inevitable. If these are traffic-driving pages that have been removed, that’s when things can go wrong. You want to ensure you’re giving your users a great user experience, so it is essential that their experience isn’t interrupted via a broken link. In addition, you will want to make sure you’re moving across any gained authority from the broken page to an appropriate page. Both of these elements can be addressed by implementing 301 redirects.
If you would like to discuss a Technical SEO tune-up for your website, get in touch with our award-winning Digital team today.