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A study released last week showed that social media is seen as the most important channels in terms of product launches within a business. The study highlighted that 74% of marketers consider social media to offer the highest value for new product launches; sales promos (55%) and email marketing (53%) followed in importance. Whether it is any of the above, or any press/PR driving users to a website, PPC or display advertising, it is essential to understand the importance of technical SEO practices and user experience on site.
Why Is Technical SEO Important
Technical SEO is the foundation of any website and if a product launch is going to be driving multiple users to a website then the experience they have needs to be smooth. High load times, bad rendering and servers that do not respond will turn users away, as well as search crawlers.
Indexing starts with technical SEO, with building out from here a solid approach to all round SEO success.
Technical SEO Essentials
Each of these can also be broken down into multiple sections – from understanding render blocking scripts to improving the size and strength of an internal server (or upgrading a cloud based server to manage higher demand).
Working on Site Speed
As an SEO agency our approach to technical SEO is straightforward – all of the above elements and sub-elements are audited for performance.
For example, site speed can be audited using Page Speed insights or additional tools if you have access to them. This will highlight any coding (CSS, HTML or Javascript) that could be impacting upon site performance.
Rendering on mobile is a huge factor here as well – if a website does not load within 2 seconds on a mobile device, or respond to a change of browser size on desktop, then slow code could be having an impact on a website.
Speed should be considered at the forefront of any technical SEO related work, it is the foundation on which a website is built. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights and W3 Validator to identify any issues with troublesome code slowing a site down.
Going into more detail to outline server response times by element will also improve the speed of a site at a much deeper level. For example, chat pop-ups, third party integration and plugins can all slow a website down.
Understanding Site Security
The next phase is to understand how secure a website is – for the most part websites looked after on servers, through SEO agencies or a web development team are safe places to visit. However, Google (and other search engines) consider different layers of security as ranking factors.
Most notably, the difference between a HTTP site and a HTTPS website offers a secure area for users involved in a purchase cycle, so a very important factor for users being pushed to a website. This comes into an even bigger focus when going after new users and customers with no brand loyalty.
Beyond this, keeping a site safe from hacking will avoid any nasty messages when attempting to view a page – such as ‘This page may be infected with Malware’.
Use services such as CloudFlare will allow monitoring of changes on a website as well managing login attempts, large scale spam hits and traffic with no servers or from the same IP addresses (suggesting again spam traffic). Using these services and removing the risk of hacking and spam traffic, will benefit the technical and smooth running of a website.
Site Structure within Technical SEO
Finally, the importance of site structure within technical SEO is paramount. Crawlers and users need to be able to navigate the website easily with the end conversion, whether it be a sale or enquiry, clear and accessible.
Site structure will also dictate URL structure. So clean URLs, breadcrumb trails and sitemap priority management are also essential.
Always consider a key action should never be more than two clicks away from where a user currently is. This is best practice and reduces needless exits on pages.
POLARIS is an SEO agency based in London, contact info@polarisagency.co.uk for all related queries
