Technical SEO

What Is Technical SEO?

Many business owners don’t know that they need SEO services or what Technical SEO is and how important it is for a website that is fighting to get in the first positions of the search engines for industry relevant keywords.

Technical SEO, represents the optimisation process of both website and server with the purpose of helping the search engines spiders crawl and index your website faster and more efficiently. It’s usually up to the SEO Specialists to audit the website and put together a list of steps for the webmaster to follow and make the website compatible with the search engine guidelines.

Alexis Sanders, Technical SEO manager @ Merkle, gives an even more specific definition: “Technical SEO covers the crawl, index, and render portion of the “crawl, index, rank” model. At a high level, you need to learn how to answer these questions:

• Can search engine bots crawl/find your page? (includes topics such as status codes, sitemaps, information architecture, robots.txt, facets)
• Can search engine bots index your page? (includes: meta robots)
• Can search engine bots render your page? (includes: JavaScript, the DOM, page speed)
• Can bots understand content on your page? (includes: structured data (Schema.org, HTML), accessibility)
• Are you sending search engines the proper signals for dealing with ranking content? (e.g., canonical tags, dealing with pagination)
• Is this page worthy of ranking? (includes: content relevance, authority, HTTP, UX, mobile-friendly, site latency)”

You can read more about What Is Technical SEO? Your Ultimate Guide To Getting Started  in SEMrush’s great article.

What Are the Benefits of Technical SEO?

Proper technical optimisation will help improve your website’s ranking for your target search keywords and phrases and as a result, drive more traffic to your landing pages. It will also make your customers journey a pleasant one by improving the speed of the website and that in turn will encourage conversions.

A technical SEO audit will address your website and server configuration. There are over 250 criteria to take into consideration when analysing a website so prepare for things to get techy.

The top things to analyse when performing a Technical SEO Audit are:

• Crawlability
• Rendering Performance
• Indexability & Index Coverage
• Mobile Responsiveness & Mobile Friendliness
• Website Security – SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate
• Structured Data/ Schema Mark-Up
• Page Speed
• Content Optimisation
• Status Codes
• Site Structure

Who Needs Technical SEO?

If you think your website is perfect in terms performance, online visibility & functionality then a technical SEO audit might not be for you. As our experience has proven, things can always be better, so this is why an in-depth technical SEO audit can certainly improve your search engine rankings. One thing is for sure, things are always changing and we all need to stay ahead of the game.

What do you do with a Technical SEO Audit?

The SEO audit will give you actionable suggestions for your website & server and show you how to improve your SEO. After you get your audit you have 2 options:

– Implement it, in-house: Forward it to your website developers and ask them to follow our suggestions.

– Let the specialists handle it: We all know that webmasters can be really good at what they do, but not all of them choose to develop their SEO knowledge. This is a fair and totally understandable point and also the reason why SEO Specialists exist. Let us help you with what we know best, SEO.

Contact us today to discuss your SEO requirements & how we can improve your search engine visibility and ranking.