Are you ready to increase the traffic to your website? Have you gained an understanding of content marketing and links? If so, now is the time to move into technical SEO.
Technical SEO may seem daunting for new business owners, especially if you need to familiarise yourself with coding. But, by taking advantage of the power of technical SEO on your website, you can get better search engine rankings and grow your online presence quickly.
This article will cover precisely what technical SEO is and outline tips for any business owner to optimise their website! If you need a technical SEO audit running on your website, why not speak to the team at Outrank today? We can utilise industry-leading tools to run audits that give insight into your website’s technical health.
Phase 1: Technical SEO Audit and Research
A technical SEO audit and research are essential for identifying and fixing technical issues on a website that may impact its search engine rankings. There are several steps involved in conducting a technical SEO audit:
The first step is to crawl your website using a tool like Semrush. This helps identify technical issues such as broken links, duplicate content, missing metadata, and other issues that can impact search engine rankings. This technical audit is broken down into errors, warnings and notices; these will be differing factors of issues that need fixing on your site.
Mobile-friendliness is another critical aspect of technical SEO as more people access the internet via mobile devices. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check if your website is mobile-friendly.
Website security is also an essential aspect of technical SEO. Use tools like SSL Checker to verify that your website has an SSL certificate and that all pages are served over HTTPS.
It’s essential to ensure your website is crawled and indexed by search engines. Use the Google Search Console to check for any issues with indexing or crawling.
The structure of your website is also crucial for technical SEO. Ensure your website has a clear and logical structure that makes it easy for users and search engines to navigate. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyse the structure of your website.
On-page SEO factors such as titles, descriptions, headings, and alt tags should also be optimised to ensure they are relevant and optimised for your target keywords. This helps improve the search engine rankings of your website.
Phase 2: Crawlability and Indexation
One of the most critical factors to consider when building a website is search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO aims to improve a website’s visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and ultimately drive more traffic to the site.
One essential aspect of SEO is ensuring search engine bots can efficiently crawl and index your website. Simply put, if your website URLs are not indexed, they will not rank on Google nor pass any strength throughout your website.
Crawling refers to search engine bots visiting your website and browsing its pages to collect information. Indexing involves adding the pages to the search engine’s database and making them available in search results. If your website is crawlable and indexable, search engines will be able to understand its content, which can result in better visibility on SERPs.
To ensure that your website is crawlable and indexable, you need to optimise some aspects of your site. The first step is to create a robots.txt file, which tells search engine bots which pages of your site they can and cannot crawl. This file should be in your website’s root directory and accessible to search engines.
Phase 3: Mobile-Friendly Tests
In today’s digital age, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial for any business that wants to reach a broad audience. With more and more people accessing the internet on their mobile devices, ensuring that your website is optimised for mobile users is essential. This involves conducting mobile-friendly tests and optimising your website’s design, layout, and content.
You can use various tools and tests to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a popular option, which allows you to test your website’s mobile responsiveness and view any issues that need to be addressed. Other tools, such as GTmetrix and Pingdom, provide detailed reports on your website’s loading speed and performance on mobile devices.
Once you’ve identified any issues with your website’s mobile-friendliness, optimising your design, layout, and content is time. One of the most important factors to consider is the website’s design. A responsive design will ensure your website looks great on any device, whether a smartphone, tablet, or desktop computer.
This involves using fluid grids, flexible images, and CSS media queries to adjust your website’s layout and content to different screen sizes.
In addition to a responsive design, you’ll need to optimise your website’s content for mobile users. This means simplifying your content and making it easy to read on a small screen. Consider using shorter paragraphs, larger fonts, and bullet points to make your content more scannable.
You should also avoid using pop-ups and other elements that can be difficult to close on a mobile device.
Phase 4: Speed Tests
Website speed is an essential factor that can significantly impact user experience and search engine rankings. Slow-loading pages can lead to frustrated users and high bounce rates while fast-loading pages can improve user engagement and increase conversions. To ensure that your website is optimised for speed, it’s essential to conduct speed tests and optimise your website’s elements.
Once you’ve identified any speed-related issues, it’s time to optimise your website’s elements. One of the most significant factors that can impact website speed is images. Large images can take a long time to load, significantly slowing your website. Make sure only to use the right-sized images and always compress them to reduce the overall file size.
In addition to images, CSS and JavaScript files can impact website speed. These files control the design and functionality of your website and can be considerable. To optimise them, you can minify and combine them, reducing their size and the number of HTTP requests required to load your website. Various plugins and tools are available to help with this process, such as Autoptimize and WP Rocket.
Finally, it’s essential to consider the impact of your website’s hosting and server response times on website speed. A slow server can significantly impact website loading speed, so choosing a reputable hosting provider with fast server response times is essential.
Phase 5: Schema Markup Declaration
A technical SEO strategy involves optimising a website for search engines and users. One of these tasks is declaring relevant schema markup on the website.
Schema markup is a structured data format that helps search engines better understand a website’s content. By implementing schema markup, you can improve the search engine visibility of your website, making it easier for users to find your content.
There are various types of schema markup that you can implement on your website, including organisation, local business, product, and article markup.
By declaring the appropriate schema markup, you can provide search engines with additional information about your website’s content, such as reviews, ratings, and product details.
This can improve your website’s visibility in search engine results in pages and increase the likelihood of rich snippets appearing.
Optimising schema markup for rich snippets, site links, and other features is another critical aspect of a technical SEO strategy. Rich snippets are additional information displayed on search engine results pages, such as star ratings, images, and prices.
Speak To Our Team At Outrank For More Information On How Technical SEO Can Help Your Website Grow
It’s important to note that technical SEO is the foundation of any SEO campaign. With proper crawl ability, mobile-friendliness, speed, and schema markup, it’s easier for search engine bots to crawl, index, and understand the website’s content, which can negatively impact search engine rankings and visibility.
As such, ongoing monitoring and tweaking of technical SEO are crucial to ensure the website’s continued performance and success in search engines.
Regular technical SEO audits and updates can help ensure that the website remains optimised for search engines and users and that any issues are promptly addressed.
If you want more information on how technical SEO can improve your website and its chances of ranking on Google, contact one of our experts today!
Our team here at Outrank is always more than happy to run an in-depth technical report on your website so we can see where you need improvements!
