Marketing

Technical SEO for Marketers

SEO

SEO

Anything with the word technical in the title can be daunting, especially if you are not “technical”.

Yet, SEO practices are well established and understood.

  • Keyword research
  • Content writing
  • Backlinks

These have been the go-to for SEOs for quite some time.

Competition online is fierce after all the internet provides a level playing field.

You must always be on the lookout for an edge. It is more important than ever to differentiate your website from the competition.

Technical SEO can be this differentiator.

Technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of your website. A poor performing site can move you down the rankings.

Fix the issues on your site and you can leapfrog over your competitors.

In this post, I will explain what Technical SEO is, why it is important and how you can keep your website performance.

What is Technical SEO?

Before we dive into Technical SEO, let’s pause and recap the three parts to effective SEO:

  • On-Page
  • Off-Page
  • Technical

On-Page SEO deals with the content on your site. Things like internal links to content, keyword research, and content structure and length.

Off-Page SEO is all about bringing qualified traffic to your site. Here we are building backlinks, engaging in social media and running PPC campaigns.

Technical SEO is all about website optimization. The task of the Technical SEO is straight-forward. To make sure that when the search engines crawl the website there are no issues or errors.

These three separate disciplines of SEO come together to form a modern SEO strategy. They have the same goal which is to get your pages high in the search results.

Next, let’s look at how search engines find your pages.

Search Engine Robots

To add your webpages to Google search, Google has a web crawler called a GoogleBot. This is a computer program that runs around the internet reading all the pages content.

When it finds good content, it adds the page to the “index” which then makes the page show in Google search.

If your website has lots of errors or is slow to load then this can cause the page to not index. This is because either GoogleBot misses the content completely or takes a long time to find it.

The job of the Technical SEO is to identify and then remove the errors. When the GoogleBot comes round it can find all your great content.

Googlebot will assign a “budget” to each site. The more successful a site the bigger the budget.

When this budget runs out it moves on to the next website.

The Technical SEO must make sure that this budget is as efficient as possible.

The more efficient your website is, the more Google can crawl and the better your search rankings.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 improvements you can make to your websites Technical SEO.

Broken Links

Broken Links or sometimes referred to as 404’s are links that do not go anywhere.

This can happen for many reasons. For example, the link may have been incorrectly added or the page no longer exists.

Broken links slow down GoogleBot.

Instead of spending time finding indexing your content you are sending it to a dead end.

Wasting the GoogleBot’s time and your budget.

Find and them and fix these broken links, to make GoogleBot happy.

Site Speed

Site speed has a major impact on GoogleBot.

The faster your website loads the faster GoogleBot can read all your content.

Here we are looking to make sure that:

  • Image file size is as small as possible
  • We have minified CSS and Javascript
  • Fonts are optimized and reduced
  • We keep the total file size of the page as small as possible
  • Server uses compression and caching

Site speed is a huge topic. Have a look at this in-depth article on web performance improvements to find out more.

Missing Images

Like the broken links we referred to above, we can also have missing images.

Images can also return a 404.

The reasons for these missing images are often the same. Either the image has no longer exists or the URL is incorrect.

Either way, GoogleBot will look at all your images so make sure that they are working.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a list of all the URL’s on your website that you want GoogleBot to find.

You can submit your sitemap to Google to make it easier for them to find all the pages.

To do this create a sitemap and then add it to Google Search Console.

Structured Data

Structured Data lets you tell Google what your page is all about. This to help the GoogleBot so they don’t have to guess.

You can also use it to get better results in Google Search.

For example, if you have an FAQ Page on your website you can add structured data to create search results like this:

This can increase the real estate that you have on Google and increase clicks to your site.

Wrapping Up, Technical SEO for Marketeers

SEO has three disciplines On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical.

All of these work together to make your website perform well and show in Google Search Results.

You probably have an established process for dealing with On-Page and Off-Page. Think about how technical SEO can differentiate your site from your competitors.

We have only covered the very beginnings of technical SEO, the field is vast.

The key take away is to make you aware of its existence and importance for search rankings.

Make sure that your site performance is fast and error-free.

For more information about Technical SEO and how to find site errors visit us at PageDart.com