Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important to every business’s digital marketing strategy. It is impossible to generate online traffic and increase website conversions without SEO. Yet, many business owners cannot tell the difference between on-page and off-page SEO. Technical SEO falls under the on-page SEO umbrella and primarily focuses on parameters that impact a website’s relationship with search engines.
So, what is technical SEO and what are the parameters we are discussing? Is it important? If you are seeking answers to these questions, you are in luck!
This article sheds light on technical SEO and why it is important for Google.
But first, let us understand what technical SEO is and what it includes.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is everything you do at the backend to ensure your search engines can find your website, interpret its content, and store it without any hassles. The objective is to improve the site’s user experience across desktops, smartphones, and other mobile devices.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Your SEO’s performance hinges on technical SEO. How can Google assign a rank to your website or a page if it cannot locate it? Additionally, even if your website is indexed and Google finds it, its traffic and overall ranking will take a hit if it takes time to load.
Let us discuss why technical SEO is important.
1. Better Crawlability
Crawlability refers to Google’s ability to find a webpage and follow the different links on a website it has never seen before. The process is simple. Google deploys thousands and millions of “bots” that crawl across the web to find your website and index it. If Google deems the content to be relevant and in line with its ranking criteria, it will display the page in its search results.
One of the most effective ways to improve your site’s crawl ability is to create an SEO-friendly website architecture. A sitemap helps Google’s “bots” to find your content easily. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google to ensure it can easily locate all your web pages.
2. Improved Indexing
Crawling? Check. Now, let us learn what indexing means in the SEO world. Once the search engine crawls your page, it will analyse its content, and save it in its search index. Your web pages must be indexed to show up in search results. Perform a “site:” operator search if you are unsure whether your web pages are indexed or not.
For example, we will type “site:www.crazydomains.au” in the address bar to determine the index status of all the pages on our site. While it is important to index all your pages, you should ensure your most important pages are indexed. However, you can use the no-index tag if you wish to exclude a few pages. For example, thank you pages, contact information pages, etc.
3. Mobile friendliness
More than 4.66 billion people own a smartphone as of 2024 and this number is expected to grow further in the coming years. Further, more than 60% of the internet traffic is generated through mobile phones reinforcing the need to create mobile-friendly and responsive websites. Google analyses the mobile version of your site’s pages to index and determines its rank. In short, if done right, technical SEO ensures that your website is mobile-friendly website.
4. Better Loading Speed
The average loading speed of a website is around 8.6 seconds on a mobile device and 2.5 seconds on a desktop. According to experts, the optimal load time to improve conversions is between 0 and 4 seconds. So, does optimising load speeds come under technical SEO? Yes!
5. Secured Website
Website security has been an important ranking factor for Google since 2014. While the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) was used before, today, websites use the hypertext transfer protocol secure protocol (HTTPS) to indicate whether their site is secured or not.
Click on the “lock” icon on the right-hand side of the refresh page icon to check whether the website is secured. Additionally, you will also see a “not secure” warning if a website is not using HTTPS.
6. Eliminate Duplicate Content Issues
As the name suggests, duplicate content refers to the repeated or redundant content on several pages on your website. Although Google does not flag or punish websites with duplicate content, it can lead to undesired issues. These include backlink dilution, misspent crawl budget, and more.
7. Adding Structured Data
What do you see when you type something in Google’s search bar? You will find the newly introduced AI Overview and small snippets from articles that answer your query. Why do you see those snippets? The magic of structured data and technical page SEO.
Your web pages can be featured as snippets if you add relevant and valuable structured data. Snippets are informative and often provide the required information, improving your site’s credibility and click-through rates (CTR). The key is to optimise your content for structured data to increase the probability of your pages being displayed as snippets.
8. Fixing Broken Pages
How often do we shut down a website after seeing a 404 error? Would you want that? Broken pages impact your user experience negatively resulting in higher bounce rates. Conduct an SEO audit to find broken pages to reinstate them. You can also redirect redundant or older pages to relevant pages. Now, you also need to update internal links that direct users to broken pages.
Want to keep technical seo aspects in check for your website? Try out SEO services!
Parting Words
Are you still wondering what is technical SEO in digital marketing? We hope this article was informative and helpful, especially for new or inexperienced digital marketers. Technical SEO optimisation is vast and cannot follow the one-size-fits-all approach. Every website is unique and requires a customised approach to address its challenges.
Overall, technical SEO optimisation is important to help websites rank better, gain visibility, and help businesses increase conversions.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between technical SEO and SEO?
While SEO overall, focuses on improving a website’s search engine ranking, technical SEO primarily focuses on the website’s backend and infrastructure to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website.
How do I master technical SEO?
You can master technical SEO by adhering to the best technical SEO practices. This includes improving crawlability, and page speeds, fixing broken links, ensuring the site’s security, and eliminating duplicate content with relevant and useful information.
Does technical SEO require coding?
While it is not important to know coding to master technical SEO, it is a good skill to have to understand how websites work and address code-related challenges.
How long does technical SEO take?
It can take search engines around three to six months for your technical SEO efforts to show results.
