What is technical SEO? A quick guide
SEO has become an indispensable part of most companies online marketing campaigns. It’s hard to imagine a brand that has a website but doesn’t invest in making it more visible in the search engine results. Yet, nowadays SEO is so much more than a couple of low-quality backlinks on random platforms.
Most of all, it focuses on your website and its value for users. Apart from the content and UX, there’s also a need to take care of its technical aspects. And that’s where our technical SEO guide plays its crucial role.
Technical SEO – definition
Technical SEO focuses on your website’s thorough optimization to let Google bots crawl it with ease and thus index its pages properly and improve their search engine ranks. It has nothing to do with both link building and content optimization. It simply does its best to meet current, usually quite demanding and rapidly changing Google requirements. And the famous search engine likes to mess with us once in a while, preparing new, complex algorithms and giving us no choice but to adjust. That’s why all the actions connected with technical SEO will never be constant – a good specialist always has to keep track of what’s new.
Technical SEO audit
First of all, you should hire some professionals to perform an SEO audit of your website. By using advanced, dedicated tools they’ll be able to check all of your site’s technical aspects and estimate what needs to be done better. Sometimes the changes are purely cosmetic, but it happens that nearly a whole website has to undergo a huge revolution.
Most important elements of technical SEO
There are many elements to consider while taking care of the technical aspects of your website and here are some of the most essential ones.
1. Site’s speed
If your site doesn’t load fast enough, it may discourage a potential customer who will just simply turn to your competitors instead of waiting. And the speed is not only evaluated by the internet users but also the almighty Google bots. What can slow your website down? The main fault usually lies in images of films that are too large. It’s a good idea to check them out and compress them if possible.
2. Mobile-friendliness
More and more people browse the internet via their smartphones, and the number grows each month reaching about 50-80% – depending on a website’s content. Your potential clients are surely among this group and you want them to be happy with what they find on your website, right? If you pay attention to how your page looks and feels on mobile, Google will be satisfied as well. It was a couple of years back when it announced the mobile-first index. Now it got even closer to mobile-only, so beware!
3. Website’s architecture
Your site’s architecture should be friendly as well. It concerns aspects such as:
- Clear URL addresses (with no unnecessary numbers and letters)
- A sitemap added to Google Search Console
- Secure browsing provided by using HTTPS
- Breadcrumb type of navigation
- And more
It was supposed to be a quick technical SEO guide, so we’ll finish here, but you should know that there’s definitely more to this topic. So, if you want to have your SEO done right, it’s best to hire a professional agency to do it for you.