Hopefully, by now, you’ll have seen that we love creating websites. Well, more specifically, we love building websites that work. To put it simply, we’re just a bit nerdy really and love working with website code, plugins, JavaScript, CSS and PHP (Tom especially loves that!) to create websites that are actually going to help our clients.
As far as digital marketing goes, SEO is – and has always been – our preferred method of helping our clients win new business. An effective SEO strategy for a client doesn’t just rely on high-value keywords, engaging content and a robust set of backlinks. These on and off-page SEO elements are vital, but technical optimisation is equally essential.
How can Google rank your top-tier content for relevant keywords and search terms if your site isn’t even coded properly for its crawlers? That’s where you need technical SEO experts like the totalsurf nerds to help you.
You may be wondering if there’s a slight oxymoron here – how can you make technical SEO easy to understand? We’ll make it as easy to understand as possible for you, so you (or your developer) can understand what to pay attention to.
Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of a website to positively influence its rankings in search engines. Technical website optimisation involves making the website run faster, easier to crawl and accessible for search engines.
Technical optimisation is a bit of an anomaly, in the sense that there is no universal technical SEO ‘score’, figure or percentage to aim for. Furthermore, there isn’t any simple hack or universal strategy to push you ahead of your competitors.
Technical SEO is a part of on-page SEO, which is a term you may have come across before. If you haven’t, this involves improving elements on your site to boost your rankings.
Your ideal SEO strategy varies depending on your website CMS, what plugins you have installed, how it’s coded, how it’s structured, what content you have, where you have it, and so on. Also, it depends on how competitive your industry is, what your actual SEO competitors are, what content they have and what people are searching for around your industry. There are hundreds of factors.
Google prioritise websites that are easy to navigate and use on mobile devices. In fact, if your site isn’t optimised for mobiles, you won’t stand much of a chance at ranking whatsoever. More users are browsing the web on their phones, and if your site doesn’t work well on mobiles, you’re missing out on valuable organic traffic. Google assesses sites under what it calls “mobile-first indexing”, and that pretty much says it all.
Website speed also plays a crucial role. If your site is slow to load, then maybe you need to look at your server caching solution. You may need to find out methods of optimising your images and content, compressing where possible. These can take time to implement but will make a vital difference.
We’ve talked about this previously, but including an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate on your website provides extra security for visitors. If you don’t have an SSL, you’re missing out big time. Having HTTPS makes sure no-one can intercept data sent between the browser and the server. What’s more, Google prioritises secure sites. HTTPS is also a good indicator to your visitors that their information is going to be protected. So it’s a bit of a no-brainer, really.
An XML sitemap is a list of all your website’s pages, in layman’s terms. It serves as a roadmap for search engines, so that they won’t miss crawling any important content on your site. XML sitemaps are often categorised in posts, pages, tags and so on. Not all sites have a great internal linking structure, and content doesn’t always connect in the way we’d like it to. XML sitemaps are excellent solutions to get around that issue, and also tell Google which pages are a higher priority than others.
While slow and unresponsive websites are frustrating, something that’s perhaps more annoying is landing on a page that displays a 404 error. It’s also frustrating for Google as well. It’s challenging to spot dead links that aren’t obvious.
If you think about it, for most businesses, their website is a continuous work in progress. It’s quite natural for things to break in a website’s lifespan and for a page to break unnoticed.
There are solutions that can help you resolve 404 errors, by implementing 301 redirects for URLs when they are altered, moved or deleted. Redirecting to active pages that replace the old ones is ideal. But this is difficult to do correctly. Luckily for us, it’s second nature!
Having the same content on multiple pages might confuse search engines. If these pages show the same content, how is a search engine going to know which one to prioritise? As a result, both pages might end up lower down in the rankings. You may have a duplicate content issue, where different URLs can show the same content inadvertently. This isn’t a problem for visitors, but for search engines, it does, as it’ll see the same content on a different URL.
By implementing a canonical link tag on the preferred page – the master page, if you like – you can tell the search engine which content to index and to crawl.
Structured data helps Google understand your website, content and business in greater detail. By adding structured data, you can tell Google the products you sell, the services you provide and what you currently have on your site – be it physical or digital. By implementing schema markup, search engines can easily find and understand this information, therefore placing your content in a bigger picture
Technical optimisation is something you should definitely take seriously. While going over a full list of tactics would probably confuse a large majority of you, we don’t want to make your heads explode! So we’ve just outlined a couple of essential things to pay attention to:
Technical SEO is quite a lot to take in at once. We wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to take a walk and grab a coffee now (just make sure you’re abiding by the lockdown rules! :P), but the reality is, we’ve only scratched the surface. There is so much more to technical optimisation for a website.
As web developers, a lot of this technical jargon is second nature to us. Luckily we’ve got tools and solutions in place to help us monitor sites so that when something goes wrong (and it inevitably happens, there’s no avoiding it), we find out straight away. We spare no detail in our monthly reports (which span hundreds of pages in some cases) – where clients can see up-to-date data, figures and statistics from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google My Business and so on. We embed reports and dashboards from Google Data Studio to see exactly what issues their site currently has and how many of them there are. It all is presented in a way that is easy for them to understand!
We believe in total transparency. We want to educate you about SEO and doing it properly, and we’d also love the opportunity to talk to you about our services in more detail. Why not take advantage of our free SEO audit? Fill in the form, and you’ll be given a detailed breakdown of how your site is currently performing, what technical issues it has (if any) and what can be done to fix them. You’ll get the chance to discuss this with us directly after filling in the form, so why not? Now’s the time to focus on ensuring your website is in a good position!
It’s very simple. Just fill in the form and we will be in touch with your reports. We will also ask you to book a 30 min call with us so we can run through the report and explain what the issues are with your site, what your goals are and how we can help you.
