What is Technical SEO & Why Is It Important for Your Website’s Success?

As much as having great content and design is important for your website, having a proper care of your website’s technical aspect is equally as important. Technical SEO is like a behind the scene maintenance and care of these website aspects. Just as a car needs regular checkups to run smoothly, your website too needs technical SEO to fix and maintain so it will function properly for the users. 

So, what exactly is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a strategy that involves optimizing a website’s working structure and coding to ensure search engine crawlers can easily access, index, and understand your website’s content. This is crucial in ensuring your website will be able to rank, and for the audience to enjoy a positive user experience while using your website.

There are many elements that technical SEO focuses on improving for your website. Here are 6 of the key components that make up a technically sound website, and what technical SEO is set on improving: 

1. Website Structure and Navigation

A website structure is the organization and hierarchy of your website’s pages and content, such as blog articles and service category. On the other hand, website navigation is what users experience while navigating through your website from page to page. 

Improving a website structure and navigation involves properly placing the pages and content of the website in the correct location. Blog articles in the blog subfolder, service landing pages inside the service subfolder, and so on. 

2. Indexability

Indexability is how easy and efficient is your website for search engines to discover, understand your website content and potentially index it. A search engine crawler will access your site, go to every page they can, and scan the content. 

Improving indexability involves improving the format for the content, such as ensuring every content implements proper Heading tags, proper internal linking, and there are no factors blocking the site from being indexed, such as robots.txt indicating a noindex tag for the site.

3. Mobile friendliness

With the majority of the web usage and searches are now happening through mobile devices, mobile-friendliness is one of the emerging necessities for website owners. Having a mobile friendly site allows mobile users to use the functionality and accessibility of a site.

Improving a site’s mobile-friendliness involves implementing mobile responsive features to the site, which improves the usability of the website on mobile devices. This would also help in improving the website’s search ranking as mobile friendliness is now one of the ranking factors set by Google.

4. Website Loading Speed Optimization

Website loading speed refers to how fast the website content can appear on the user’s screen after they enter a link. It’s essentially the time taken from your website from showing a blank screen to all content being fully loaded.

Website speed optimization involves a few aspects of your site, some of them are optimizing the images to reduce the size while retaining qualities, using cache to provide faster data retrieval for users, and minimizing plugin usage to reduce load on the site.

5. Website Security (HTTPS)

Website security in this context refers to the secure communication protocol (HTTPS) that is used to protect the data being exchanged between a website and user. This protocol adds an extra protection for the information you transact to a website and ensures only authorized entities can access it.

Optimizing the site security using HTTPS involves implementing technical measures that ensure a smooth transition to HTTPS protocol, and all functions are working smoothly after the switch.

6. Schema Markup

Schema markup, also known as rich snippet, is the special code that helps search engines better understand your website content and ultimately affect the way your website visualizes on the search result pages. There are a lot of schema markup types available, each with its own intended usage and focus for specific website content.

Implementing schema markup on your site involves inserting a few specific coding into the HTML Header of your site, highlighting key points such as author name for an article, numbers of reviews a product has, or even the time taken for a recipe to be cooked.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Now that we’ve covered the elements of technical SEO, let’s have a look at why it is important to implement those strategies for your website. 

Technical SEO holds a very important position in defining your SEO efforts, bridging the access between users – or search engine crawler – and your website. If search engines are not able to easily access and understand your site, they won’t be able to rank your content. This means that all the hard work you’ve put into creating high quality content would be in vain.

Additionally, it is also confirmed that some of the ranking factors set by Google includes loading speed and mobile friendliness, both are elements of Technical SEO. Optimizing those factors would not only benefit you indexability-wise, but also ranking-wise.

Meanwhile, if you see this from the users POV, a slow loading site would only lead to more frustration and higher bounce rate. This happens more frequently on a less mobile friendly site, as users browsing through their mobile devices are more likely to browse on-the-go, preferring a site that’s usable and able to fulfill their search intent quickly.

Get to Know Your Website Technical Status

It’s best to know the status of your website’s technical health on a periodical basis so you can implement the necessary changes and keep your website in top condition.

 There are a few tools which you can use to assess your website’s technical health. Some of the more popular options you can use are:

• SERanking: This all-in-one tool offers a website technical audit features that can identify crawl errors, broken links, improper headings and much more. The tool will crawl through your site and detect the errors, helping you pinpoint areas in which you needed to put extra attention into.
• Google PageSpeed Insights: This free tool from Google can analyze your website loading speed, and provide you with points so you can easily assess the condition of your site. This tool also provides some of the necessary diagnostic data that proves to be helpful if you need to improve your site.
• Google Search Console (GSC): This is a free tool from Google that offers valuable insights into your website’s technical health such as indexing status and crawl errors. This tool is the door connecting you and the search engine crawler, giving you valuable data such as the errors in crawling your website and the cause.

While these tools help with identifying your website’s health status, finding the root cause might not be a simple task. Trying to fix those issues without prior experience and knowledge might cause further harm to your site. 

The best and the most cost effective way is to reach out to a website maintenance expert for rectifying those issues. Engaging a website maintenance service will incur some cost, but it will be the safest option compared to risking your website usability and loss in conversion, damaging your brand reputation along the way. 

Conclusion

Technical SEO might seem complex, but its importance cannot be overlooked. Prioritizing technical SEO will ensure your website is optimized for users and search engines, laying the foundation for long term SEO success. Remember to run a regular audit on your website’s technical health and identify issues before it becomes chronic and affect your search ranking.