Imagine you’ve built a fantastic store filled with unique products and staffed with friendly salespeople. But there’s one problem: your store is hidden down a dark alley, with no signage and a locked door. How likely are customers to find you? Your website is similar. You can have fantastic content, but search engines need help finding and understanding it to ensure everyone sees it. That’s where Technical SEO comes in.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the cornerstone of a solid online presence. It involves improving the backend elements of your website to facilitate search engines’ crawling, indexing, and comprehension of your content. 

Think of it as building a highway for your website. By optimizing technical factors, you’re creating a smooth, efficient road that search engine crawlers (spiders or bots) can travel on to find and deliver your content to search result pages (SERPs).

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO is crucial for several reasons:

• Increased Visibility: Search engine optimization can raise your website’s visibility, increasing the likelihood that people will find your material when they search. This is a great way to boost your website’s visibility and get more natural visitors.   

• Improved Search Ranking: Search engine algorithms take technical SEO elements into account. Your website’s rating for pertinent keywords can be raised by taking care of these elements, increasing the likelihood that it will appear on the first page of search engine results. 
• Enhanced User Experience: The user experience is also enhanced by technical SEO best practices , such as mobile friendliness and quick loading times. Website visitors who experience fast page loads and easy navigation are more inclined to interact with your content.   
• Better Website Health: Focusing on technical SEO can reveal underlying issues with your website’s code, structure, and crawlability. By fixing these problems, you can create a more robust and healthy webpage overall.

Key Areas of Technical SEO

Although many components make up technical SEO, some of the more important ones are as follows:

• Crawlability: Search engines need to be able to access and explore your website’s content. This involves optimizing your robots.txt file, ensuring a clear website structure with a logical sitemap, and fixing broken links.
• Indexability: Once search engines can crawl your website, they need to understand your content to determine its relevance for search queries. This includes optimizing title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags with relevant keywords.
• Mobile-friendliness: A mobile-responsive website is needed because most internet searches are conducted on mobile devices. Websites that are mobile-friendly tend to rank higher in search results .  

• Website Speed:   People are impatient! Slow-loading websites frustrate visitors and can hurt your search ranking. Optimizing images, minifying code, and improving server response time are crucial for website speed.
• Structured Data:   Search engines can provide better results when users provide structured data, also known as schema markup, which includes additional information about your content. Therefore, this could lead to a rise in CTR.    
• Security:   Google prioritizes secure websites (HTTPS) in search results. Having an SSL certificate ensures a secure connection between your website and visitors.

How to Get Started with Technical SEO

There are several steps you can take to improve your website’s technical SEO :

• Conduct a Technical SEO Audit:   This involves analyzing your website to identify technical SEO issues. Many free and paid tools are available online to help you with this process.
• Fix Crawl Errors:   Find and correct any crawl issues that obstruct search engines from retrieving content from your website. 
• Optimize Website Speed: Employ techniques to shorten the loading time of your website by identifying areas for improvement and putting them into practice using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights . 
• Mobile-First Indexing: Get your site mobile-friendly and consider using Google’s Mobile-First Indexing principles.  
• Create a Sitemap:   A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that includes every vital page and connection. Search engines can better index and find your material if you submit your sitemap.   

• Focus on User Experience:   An intuitively designed website improves user experience for visitors and is beneficial for search engine optimization. 

Technical SEO is an ongoing process, but following these steps and best practices can lay a strong foundation for your website’s success in search engines. Remember, a technically sound website is the first step towards attracting organic traffic, improving search ranking, and achieving your online goals.

Ready to explore how OCH can help you with your Technical SEO needs? To assess your website’s technical SEO health, our seasoned SEO experts may repair any crawl problems they find, make your site faster and more mobile-friendly, and create a plan to improve your site’s overall technical SEO. Don’t let technical hurdles prevent your website from reaching its full potential. Contact OCH today to discuss your technical SEO needs and explore how we can help your website thrive in search results.