The right technical SEO services can help improve user experience and site performance. These are some of the benefits you can expect from hiring the experts.
There are currently over 5.07 billion people that use the internet worldwide, so a good website is crucial for your business. But even if it’s one of the best-made sites ever, it’s worth nothing if no one ever sees it.
Technical SEO will get a lot more eyes on your site, but it’s not easy to implement. Professional technical SEO services can help ensure your website gets a lot more traffic and produces the best results.
In this technical SEO guide, we’ll discuss what it includes, why it matters, and how to achieve a good level of optimization.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a practice that will ensure your website meets the guidelines set out by search engines. This will ensure they can crawl and index your site properly so that it shows up when people perform searches. A technical SEO audit will analyze the current SEO of your site and highlight areas that need improvement.
Why Technical SEO Is Important
Google is by far the world’s most popular search engine, and when using it, an average of 28.5% of people will click on the first result that shows. For each result following this, the percentage of people who click on those sites drops significantly.
Good SEO will help your site rank higher, leading to more clicks and organic traffic. It’s one of the most cost-effective ways to achieve this and could have a huge impact on the number of visitors your website gets each month.
Keywords are an important part of search engine rankings, so many people focus on them. Without technical SEO, however, you still won’t have much chance of showing up in the top results.
What Technical SEO Involves
Technical SEO affects a range of factors. It will determine how your site ranks, but also the experience that your users have when interacting with your site.
Increasing Site Load Speed
The speed at which your site loads is a lot more important than you might think. Among mobile users, 53% of people will leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. People viewing your site on a computer will have even higher expectations.
Various tools can analyze the load speed of your website so you can see how it’s performing. The faster it loads, the higher your conversion rate will be. It’s also worth noting that search engines favor speed, so a faster site will get a higher ranking.
Multiple metrics are used, such as the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) which is how long it takes the main textbox or image on a page to load. You want this to be less than 2.5 seconds, so if it’s higher, you might want to make some improvements.
Improving Web Page Stability
Page stability relates to the structure of a webpage. As a website loads, the layout may shift around. While this seems like a small thing, it can be very frustrating for users.
It’s not uncommon for someone to try to click a link, but then the page quickly shifts around. They may then end up clicking on something different, leading them to a page they have no interest in.
CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) is a metric that can determine this. The closer to 0 it is, the more stable your pages will be. Improving your page stability will help increase your ranking.
Boosting Site Responsivity
People have high expectations of websites, so yours should do what people want without any delays. When they click “Log In”, for example, they should be able to immediately enter their log-in details. This is the FID (First Input Delay), and you want to try to get this below 0.1 seconds.
Backlink Analysis
A new website likely won’t have many backlinks, but with time, you should be able to build a larger network. However, you don’t just want more backlinks – you want to ensure you have quality backlinks from reputable websites. Backlink analysis can show you this so that you can determine if you need to take any action.
LSI Keywords
LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) is an algorithm that search engines use to figure out what your website is about (beyond matching the search term). LSI keywords aren’t necessarily synonyms for search terms but are related in some way.
This helps Google get a better idea of the topics your pages cover and provides users with a broader range of search results that should be related to what they’re after.
Image Optimization
Image optimization is a reasonably simple method of improving SEO, but it’s still very effective. Images will slow your site down, so you should only include the ones that you need, and you can use various tools to compress them so that they take up less space.
You also want to ensure your images are relevant and that you’ve included proper tags and alt text. This will affect your ranking, user experience, and accessibility.
Eliminating Certain Issues
Sometimes SEO isn’t just about adding or optimizing elements. There can be additional content or components on your site that shouldn’t be present. These can hurt your page ranking, so another part of technical SEO involves removing them when they occur.
Broken Links
With time, your site will develop and change. As this happens, you may end up with some broken links that no longer lead to proper pages, and will show the user a 404 error page instead.
Fixing broken links will ensure a better user experience and help maintain good SEO.
Note that this can also happen if someone types a link incorrectly when developing the site. This is why thorough testing is crucial to make sure everything works.
Duplicate Content
If you have duplicate content on your site Google might not know what URL to show in search results. This is bad for your ranking, and the additional content will add unnecessary bloat to your site.
It can become even worse with time as other sites might link back to yours using various links so when you delete the duplicate content, some of those links will stop working. A technical SEO specialist can work to remove any duplicate content to prevent this from happening, and the sooner this is done, the better.
Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Search engines rely heavily on title tags and meta descriptions. Having duplicates of these can cause similar issues to duplicate content, and it can be even worse for your search engine ranking.
This can happen if someone sets up duplicate title tags and meta descriptions in the code. It can also be caused by the CMS your site uses or a plugin that you’ve got installed. Through technical SEO, these can be found and removed so that any tags and meta descriptions only appear where they should.
Challenges
Technical SEO is an ongoing process, so even if everything is ideal now, you will likely have to make adjustments soon. You might want to do this yourself, but that’s probably not a good idea.
It’s important to understand that someone with little experience generally won’t do the best job. They won’t be as efficient, and even if they’re following a technical SEO checklist, they may make mistakes that cause other problems.
Changing a URL name to include keywords, for example, will then cause any external links for that page to now lead to a 404 page. Any websites that notice links to your page have stopped working will also likely remove them, resulting in a weaker backlink network.
Working With a Technical SEO Agency
If you want things done well you should hire a technical SEO expert or agency. They have proper training and experience so they can carry out a technical SEO audit and make any adjustments as needed. They also know what works well and what doesn’t, so they can do things efficiently.
An SEO expert will know when something is beyond the scope of their work, and they need to hand it off to someone else. This might be if your site has technical issues that need to be resolved by a web developer, for example.
Professional Technical SEO Services
Technical SEO services will help ensure your site functions correctly, provides a good user experience, and ranks higher on search engine results pages. Ballantine is a leading direct mail and digital marketing agency that has been in business since 1966. We have plenty of experience in technical SEO, so we can help ensure your site is performing at its best.
To find out more about our services, click here to contact us today.
I'm the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a family-owned and operated direct mail & digital marketing company based in New Jersey. and started in 1966 by my great uncle!
