- Technical SEO is about ensuring your website meets the technical requirements search engines check for when crawling, rendering, and indexing your website.
- Technical SEO requires some knowledge of how websites work beyond a typical CMS or content and publishing a page.
- Technical SEO forms the backbone of your website, setting the stage for Google to assess site quality before even considering the content.
By now, you’ve heard the term SEO plenty, and you’ve got on-page and off-page SEO down. Your team is creating compelling content, sprinkling in a few keywords, and building a quality backlink portfolio. But it feels like there’s still a switch to flip.
Say hello to technical SEO, the silent hero of search engine optimization.
One thing to remember is that Google receives more than 90% of global search traffic. They want everyone online to have as enjoyable a time as possible, so Google decided to set some ground rules and incorporate performance and experience into their ever-evolving algorithm.
We want to be sure that you don’t approach adhering to technical SEO best practices as just a means to appease our Google overlords. It’s a strategic move to uplift your site’s usability and visitor satisfaction. Technical SEO isn’t just backstage tech wizardry; it’s about making a smoother experience for your audience, making it more likely for users to stay on your website, revisit, or make a purchase.
But what is technical SEO, and how can a beginner make a real dent in their site’s performance? We’ll explore the most important elements of technical SEO, offering practical advice that can lead to tangible improvements in your site’s performance.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a systemic approach to ensuring a website meets the technical requirements search engines look for when crawling, rendering, and indexing it. The goal of technical SEO is to improve the efficiency with which a web crawler accesses your site, which in turn will improve organic rankings.
It is called “technical” because it requires some knowledge of how websites work beyond typing content or publishing a page. However, most elements are still very accessible, even for small business owners who might only have a few hours a week to tackle their SEO.
Let’s start with what elements are included in technical SEO:
- Page speed: How quickly a page takes to load from the time a visitor clicks the link. Slow load speeds are considered a poor-quality signal. 40% of users will leave pages that take longer than three seconds to load. Google doesn’t like that and punishes pages accordingly.
- Mobile Usability: How well is your site optimized for mobile users? Does it properly scale to a smaller screen, are menus usable, and is side-scrolling minimized?
- Crawling and Indexation: Can Google’s robots “crawl” your site to find what’s on there? The more difficult it is for them, the less happy they’ll be (not that the robots have feelings, but they love efficiency and will punish your SEO rankings accordingly).
- Rendering: How a page is rendered on a user’s PC or device. This includes how and when images, widgets, or other features load and how they appear.
- Secure Connections (SSL/HTTPS): Security is vital, influencing user trust and search rankings. People do not want to browse unsecured websites, and Google will not willingly serve up pages that can put user data at risk.
- Structured data: A piece of standardized code that informs major search engines of the vital information from a webpage. Implementing Schema.org standards enhances your site’s visibility and interpretation by search engines.
- Content optimization: Ensuring that your site’s content is optimized, that is, it isn’t duplicated or too short, and adheres to Google’s EEAT content guidelines.
- Indexation: This refers to how search engines store and organize your website and pages.
- Site structure: How your site is laid out, including its URL trees and how pages link internally. A coherent structure aids both user navigation and search engine indexing.
Every technical element impacts your site’s Google rankings to various extents. Some might already be optimized from the get-go because the website was set up properly. However, the idea of fixing all technical SEO elements at once can seem overwhelming, especially considering their technical nature.
For beginners, it’s best to zero in on the low-hanging fruits—those straightforward, impactful technical SEO strategies are within easy reach and can significantly boost your site’s visibility and performance.
Technical SEO tips
Let’s look at some actionable technical SEO optimizations that can boost your site’s performance, user experience, and rankings. These tips are geared towards beginners and cover standards like improving page speed, responsiveness, content authority, and security—all of which are essential for satisfying both Google’s algorithms and your site’s users.
Optimize page speeds with lazy loading
Page load speed is huge for Google and your customers. Moz found that pages that took a second or less to load converted 150% better than pages that took 5+ seconds.
One way Google has recommended boosting page speed and user experience is by implementing ‘lazy loading.’ This method delays the loading of elements not immediately visible (such as those below the fold), thereby prioritizing visible content. This method significantly enhances page load times and conversion rates by ensuring that only essential content is loaded first.
Make sure your site is responsive
Given the predominance of mobile searches, having a responsive site is absolutely critical to reach the majority of internet users. Enhancing your site’s mobile usability is critical, as more than half of searches now begin on mobile devices, with the figure rising above 70% in certain industries. Enhancing mobile responsiveness not only addresses SEO needs but improves technical SEO by aligning with user preferences.
Ensure Google knows your canonical content
The bigger and more authoritative your site or the more widely shared your content gets, the better for your rankings. However, it also increases the chance your content will be copied both on your own website and by other sites. Google dislikes duplicate material because it indicates spam and laziness.
Using canonical tags (by including ‘rel canonical’ in the HTML) tells Google which page is the original and which should appear in search results. This helps you avoid getting penalized for duplicate content.
NOTE: The Yoast SEO tool has a section for adding canonical URLs to a page.
Use SSL
Using a secure socket layer (SSL) gives your site a security certificate that shows you’re using the highest encryption standards for data exchange. This is easily seen by a URL starting with ‘HTTPS’ instead of ‘HTTP’ for those without SSL. Google has confirmed that HTTPS sites perform better in rankings than HTTP.
NOTE: Google also lists ‘HTTP’ pages as ‘Not Secure’ and requires users to agree to a pop-up warning before entering an unsecured webpage, which is like putting a ‘Possible Rats Inside’ sticker on a restaurant’s door. Put your visitors and Google at ease by employing SSL protection for your site.
Take advantage of Google’s search console:
Once your site has been verified with Google, you get to use the advantages offered by its Search Console. This tool shows you how your site is performing on search results, but also boosts your technical SEO capabilities. It’s perfect for monitoring link quality, requesting crawls for new content, and understanding your site’s structure from an SEO perspective.
Technical SEO final thoughts
As we wrap up our beginner’s guide to technical SEO, keep in mind that technical SEO is more than just a checkbox on your to-do list; it is the foundation that tells Google the quality of your site before it even looks at your content. It is about ensuring that your website is constructed on solid foundations and optimizing it to fulfill the technical standards that search engines require while improving user experiences and making your website a breeze for visitors to navigate.
Want to improve your site’s technological score but don’t know how? Redefine will be your guide through the technical SEO jungle. We have the tools, knowledge, and experience to navigate even the most technically garbled website. To talk to us about all of your technical SEO needs, get in touch with us here.
