Technical SEO
When people think about digital marketing, they often think about content, local presence, and backlinking. But what about technical search engine optimization (SEO)?
Technical SEO targets a website’s infrastructure to help search engines find and index your webpages. Without the proper technical backbone, your site may struggle to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs), regardless of how well-written and relevant your content and local presence may be.
Optimizing your website’s framework is crucial to bolstering your digital marketing strategy. When you commit to improving your site’s technical structure, you not only improve your ranking potential, but also user experience (UX). In a competitive arena like digital marketing, it is crucial to roll out the red carpet to potential customers and clients from the very beginning.
What Makes Good Technical SEO?
Many different components contribute to a website’s technical SEO capabilities. Because SEO is a continuous process, it is important to always monitor your website (and mobile site) and make changes to stay ahead of the curve.
Some of the most critical components of technical SEO include fast loading speeds, optimizing crawlability, minimizing dead links, and maintaining security.
Fast Loading Speeds
Page load speeds can make or break UX. From the user’s perspective, a long load time may not be worth the wait, no matter how good your content is. In certain industries, long load speeds could mean a potential client switches to a competitor’s website.
From Google’s perspective, the search engine looks to send users to sites they will want to interact with. If your site is slow to load and has a high bounce rate, Google may devalue your website in the search rankings.
Easily Crawlable
Simply put, if Google cannot crawl your website, your SERP rankings will suffer. To help the bots, it is critical to ensure that your website has an easy-to-follow link structure and maintain a robots.txt file for easy crawling.
Additionally, look for—and quickly eliminate—duplicate content. Duplicate content on a website can cause keyword cannibalization: when two or more pages on a website compete with one another for search rankings.
If Google cannot determine the best page on your site to rank for a particular keyword, the search engine may direct potential clients to a competitor. By ensuring that each page is unique and provides value in a different way, you can avoid keyword cannibalization.
At BluShark Digital, our technical team can help to implement and maintain these critical technical components.
Few (if Any) Dead Links
Similar to Google’s ability to crawl a site, broken links affect how well the search engine is able to find and index content for result pages. Neither a Google bot nor a regular user wants to come across a broken link. For the bot, it may be more difficult to organize website pages and index them. For a prospective client, they may want to leave your website immediately.
To avoid these issues, your site needs to be monitored continuously. It is also crucial to use URL redirects when content is deleted or moved, and all of these changes should be considered from both the bot and the user’s perspective.
If you eliminate these type of dead ends, you can improve both your website’s quality and UX.
Strong User Security
When considering user experience, Google wants to send users to secure sites. To ensure this security, it is helpful to install tools such as a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to your site, so that user data cannot be intercepted between the browser and website. Doing so will give your site an HTTPS identifier at the beginning of your URL.
In 2014, Google announced the search ranking algorithm prioritizes HTTPS sites over non-secure sites. Now, this is likely a standard ranking component, which means any digital marketing effort could be useless without the proper safety credentials.
How Does Technical Optimization Improve Rankings?
Proper technical SEO can help search engines crawl your website, find your content, and add it to their index. Since prospective clients will not see what the Google bot sees, technical SEO may be thrown to the wayside in many SEO plans. What is essential, however, is that Google knows that you have done the hard work to help both the bot and users properly navigate your site.
Google and other search engines want to provide the best user experience for search engine results. If a site takes too long to load or is not secure, search engines may be reluctant to show your content on the SERP. By investing in full-scale technical SEO, you can optimize your website for the user and make a better first impression.
Start Implementing Technical SEO Today
With the proper planning and maintenance and technical assistance, your site can avoid common technical SEO errors that affect search rankings. Search engines appreciate when websites go the extra mile to make their job easier and improve user experience. Even if your rankings do not improve, upgrades in technical SEO can reduce bounce rates, improve session times, and generate clicks.
To learn more about how to optimize your website, call to schedule a consultation with BluShark Digital today.