Quick links
Technical SEO is the dirty work of SEO. It’s the process of optimising a website to enable search engines to crawl, understand and index a website’s pages.
The goal of technical SEO agency’s is to improve a website’s visibility and rankings in search engines, so it’s an essential practice for any business that relies on online sales, or that uses their website to attract potential clients.
In this guide, we will outline a number of technical SEO tips that any business can use to increase traffic to their website.
Why is technical SEO so important?
Without a comprehensive technical SEO strategy, optimising your website won’t achieve the rankings it is capable of.
How can technical SEO help with rankings
Technical SEO ensures your website keeps up-to-date with the requirements of search engines. When technical SEO is applied correctly it can significantly boost the rankings of a website.
How can technical SEO help improve user experience
Technical SEO can also improve the user experience of a website and make it easier and faster to use on mobile devices
Throughout this article, we’re going to explore technical SEO basics by outlining some technical SEO best practices.
A complete technical SEO audit checklist
There’s a lot to consider when performing a technical SEO audit, that’s why we have put together this technical SEO checklist.
Each item on the checklist is equally important, if website managers neglect one element your SEO strategy won’t be as effective as it could be.
Check site page speeds and core web vitals
Fast page loading speeds provide a better user experience and a smaller chance of users exiting a page early. The rate which users leave a page is known as the bounce rate, and this is a key metric used to improve rankings across the entirety of a website, particularly high-traffic pages.
Check core web vitals
These are a set of three metrics that measure core web vitals like the speed, interactivity and visual stability of a website.
They are elements of Google’s ‘page experience’ ranking signals, which is how Google rates the user-friendliness of your website.
They can be checked in the enhancements section of Google Search Console.
Check page speed on different devices
You can use pagespeed.web to the check the speed that your website loads on different devices.
This free tool helps you make your website as fast as possible across all devices.
Just enter a URL to see how fast your website loads on mobile and desktop.
Check your page is loading correctly
You can ensure your webpage loads quickly by using lazy loading for images and videos. The way it works is by deferring the loading of content until it is needed. So, instead of loading the entire web page at once, lazy loading loads only the necessary elements initially.
Other more resource-heavy elements, such as images and videos are loaded later, this reduces the initial load time and conserves memory.
Lazy loading improves user experience as visitors see relevant content quickly, while other elements load as they scroll through and interact with content.
Mobile usability
The majority of your users will be on mobile, 54% of internet traffic came from mobiles and tablets in 2023. Therefore, it is essential to check that your website is fully functional on mobile and contains features that improve mobile usability.
Mobile usability used to be a nice to have, now with user’s familiarity and comfort with browsing on smaller screens, improving mobile responsiveness and usability is critical to business success.
To do this design mobile-first websites:
- Choose a mobile-responsive theme or template
- Strip back complicated content
- Make images and CSS light
- Avoid flash players
Ensure a clean site structure
It is also important to evaluate your site structure by crawling your site. Imagine different customer personas and scenarios and attempt to reach the customer’s destination in the most logical way, as if you don’t know the content on each page.
Carrying out a usability test is a good way to do this, as it shows you how your potential customers navigate your website, lets you know if it is logically structured and how you can improve it to benefit user searches.
You should ensure pages are structured in logical hierarchies and grouped by topic. Have parent and child pages. Parent pages are at the top of the hierarchy and are the most important, while child pages are related to the main pages, but not as important to the website hierarchy.
Here’s an example:
About>Mission>Team
Your about page is the overarching parent page, while your team mission is important it is a subset of your about page and your team page is related to both, but not as central as either.
Thinking in terms of a website menu the about page would be at the top, followed by mission, then team.
Safe browsing
Use HTTPS and SSL certificates for SEO benefits. This is because Google uses https as a ranking signal. Additionally, activating an SSL certificate will give your website a slight ranking boost.
However, SEO is not the only reason to use https and SSL certificates, they also help you gain trust with customers as they let them know your website is safe to visit and that their data is protected.
Broken links & redirects
During an SEO audit, check for any broken links. This could be either broken destination page or link formatting.
Focus first on pages that are in prominent navigation areas on your website such as headers and menus.
You might already have redirects set up for old unused pages. It’s worth checking that they are pointed at the most topically relevant page, especially if your website is old and content has been updated frequently.
Site indexability
Site indexability refers to the pages you want Google to make searchable for users. If you ‘no index’ a webpage it cannot be shown on SERPS by search engines. However, you should be aware that users can still access no index pages if they have the URL, or have clicked an old link referred by another website.
Additionally, similar pages without added value can be canonicalized together, meaning a signal is sent to Google that the webmaster considers them to be duplicate content and refers Google to the preferred page for ranking purposes. This can be done using link rel canonical tags.
Check crawl-friendliness
Make your pages as easy to crawl as possible by Google spiders. You can do this by preserving HTML and limiting Javascript (JS) rendering to make pages easy for crawlers to scan and digest.
Also, ensure URLs are well-structured and crawler friendly, i.e. not too long and full of random numbers or letters, ensure they contain keywords and can be easily interpreted by users.
Add structured data and schema
Use structured data and schema markup to help search engines understand your content better.
Using structured data allows your content to be displayed in rich formats in SERPS, think images, reviews and any additional information you want to show to users to entice them to click through to your pages.
It’s also crucial to add a comprehensive navigation menu that is easy to browse. You can do this by adding a breadcrumb element. Breadcrumbs are an essential part of any website, they tell people where they are on your website and look like this: About>Mission>Team, and they help Google work out how your content is structured.
Get help with technical SEO
You can now see the importance of technical SEO for better ranking, improved customer satisfaction and enhanced brand reputation.
Having a website with healthy technical SEO elements has countless benefits and is essential for any business that wants to excel in SEO and boost its brand visibility.
If your team simply doesn’t have the time to commit to implementing our comprehensive technical SEO checklist with the regularity it needs, why not consider handing the reins over to Polaris?
As a specialist SEO agency, we have the technical SEO expertise and resources to ensure your technical SEO is in great shape and presents your website in its best light to search engines.
Learn more about our technical SEO services and get in touch with us to discuss your needs.
