Table of Contents
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of fine-tuning your website to enable search engines like Google and Bing to crawl and index your site, maximizing your potential organic visibility. It covers elements such as page speed, mobile friendliness, site hierarchy, sitemaps, canonicals, errors and redirects, metadata, and other backend features.
How Do You Monitor Technical SEO?
Technical SEO requires ongoing attention, not just a one-time effort. Therefore, you must regularly monitor your website’s health.
To do this, you’ll need specific tools for monitoring aspects of technical SEO, such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, secure connections (HTTPS), crawl errors, and similar issues. For instance, Google Search Console can highlight crawl errors or security concerns.
Additionally, SEO tools like Ahrefs or SemRush can help identify issues with metadata, broken links, and duplicate content. Many of these tools also offer the option to set up alerts for when something goes wrong, which can help minimize the need for frequent manual website checks.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
If the technical setup of your website isn’t right, search engines might not understand what your site is about. This problem can create a chain reaction, affecting everything from how well your content performs to how easy your site is to use, leading to lost organic visibility.
So, just like you optimize your on-site and off-site SEO, you must also address the technical aspects of your website. Combining all three gives you the best chance at increasing your rankings on search engines.
How to Perform a Technical SEO Audit
If you lack the technical expertise, you’re always welcome to consult our team here at Salteq. We’d be happy to assist you with a technical SEO audit for your website. That said, it’s possible to conduct an audit on your own using a variety of tools:
- Use a Crawling Tool: Start with Google Search Console or Screaming Frog to identify crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content.
- Assess Site Speed: Check loading times with Google PageSpeed Insights.
- Test Mobile-Friendliness: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site works well on mobile devices.
- Secure with HTTPS: Confirm your site uses HTTPS for security.
- Optimize Site Structure and URLs: Ensure a logical site structure and SEO-friendly URLs.
- Eliminate Duplicate Content: Use tools like Siteliner to find and remove any duplicate content.
- Optimize On-Page SEO: Check and improve title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and images.
- Create and Submit a Sitemap: Generate a sitemap.xml and submit it to Google via Google Search Console.
- Fix Broken Links: Identify and repair any broken links on your site.
- Review Internal Linking: Ensure a coherent internal linking structure.
- Verify Indexing: Use Google Search Console to ensure all important pages are indexed.
- Test Your Site’s Schema Markup: Utilize Google’s Rich Results Test to ensure that all your website’s structured data can generate rich results.
These steps will give you a solid start. But as your website grows and gets more complex, you’ll likely run into new technical SEO challenges. This means you should get in the habit of checking and keeping an eye on your website regularly or hire the professionals who will do this for you.
FAQs about Technical SEO
What Does Technical SEO Cover?
Technical SEO covers all the nuts and bolts in the backend that make your website work well for both search engines and human visitors. From ensuring it’s secure and loads quickly, to making sure it’s easy to navigate on any device.
Things to Avoid When Optimizing My Website
Technical SEO mistakes happen more frequently than you think. Here are some things you should avoid when optimizing your website:
- Duplicate content
- Thin content
- Under-optimized meta tags
- Failure to address slow page speed
- Non-existent mobile optimization
- Improper redirects.
Is Longer Page Load Speed Bad for SEO?
Absolutely. According to Google themselves, page speed is one of the ranking factors. Plus, think from the users’ perspective—nobody has the patience to wait until a particular page loads up. Your potential customers will simply go elsewhere. Fast load speed is essential for keeping both visitors and search engines happy.
What Tools Are Essential for Technical SEO?
There are a bunch of tools that can help you with technical SEO to keep your website in top shape. A great starting point is Google’s suite of tools, including Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights, plus a Screaming Frog tool to crawl through your website like a search engine would.
Does Technical SEO Require Coding?
A bit, but don’t worry, you don’t need to be a programmer. That said, understanding the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server responses can greatly enhance your ability to diagnose and fix technical issues.
How Do I Add Structured Data to My Website?
To add structured data to your website, use schema markup, which is a code that helps search engines understand and display your content. Here are three simple steps how you can do it:
- Go to Schema.org to find appropriate schema markup for your content type, like articles, products, or reviews.
- Copy the relevant schema markup and paste it into your webpage’s HTML.
- Use tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper for an easier way to generate and insert the code.
