SEO is one of the broadest areas of digital marketing. In general terms, SEO means ensuring a business’s website ranks highly in search engines for relevant terms and queries. But what does technical SEO mean?
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is one of the ways digital marketing agencies like us boost your website’s ranking in search results. We improve different technical aspects of your website to make it more discoverable to search engines, and ensure your content is easy to find and understand. We also take a close look at the user experience your website offers, and whether this can be enhanced.
In a nutshell: technical SEO is the process of ensuring your website is as efficient as possible, so search engines can easily crawl, index and rank it – and you gain relevant search traffic.
Why is technical SEO important?
A technical SEO audit is vital for uncovering and correcting any hidden weaknesses in your website that are holding back its performance in search engines.
This could be happening for a number of reasons, including:
- Slow website speed: This will either result in frustrated users abandoning your pages for being slow to load, or search engines ranking your website unfavourably for offering a poor user experience.
- Inaccessible pages: Web pages that aren’t accessible to search engines won’t appear in searches at all, however optimised and important your content is.
- Poor performance on mobile devices: This is a confirmed ranking factor that search engines take into account.
What does technical SEO include?
No pun intended, but technical SEO is more than a little bit … technical. Seeking the advice of technical SEO experts, like us, is the best way to get it working in your favour. Our technical SEO checklist of five key elements will help get you started – all of which can be done using some great free tools.
1. Site crawl
To start, you’ll need to establish which pages of your website have been indexed by search engines and identify any potential crawl errors. Search engines crawl pages they’re already aware of, following links on those pages to find other, newer pages.
Search for your own website using the following formatting: “site:www.mywebsite.com” (putting your website in place of www.mywebsite.com). Click Tools underneath the search bar to see the number of results returned. This will give you a general indication of the number of pages Google has indexed.
Another thing to check is your website’s status codes. Status codes tell us what happens when a browser tries to contact a website.
Run your website through the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool to check your status codes. Pay particular attention to any 404 codes and 500 codes. 404 codes indicate a page that cannot be found or accessed. This often happens when a page has been moved and redirected incorrectly. Search engines don’t like 404s, so correct any broken links and check your redirects. 500 codes are server errors, meaning the server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from filling the request – this should also be addressed as a priority.
2. Website speed
As previously mentioned, website speed is a major ranking factor. Running your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights will diagnose its performance and suggest improvements.
Typically, issues that seriously slow down a website include:
- large images
- too many plugins
- embedded videos
- hosting issues
- overly inflated or ‘dense’ code
3. Duplicated content
Google defines duplicated content as “substantive blocks of content” that are either identical or “appreciably similar” to other content that exists online. This includes duplicated content within the same website, or across different domains (i.e. content that has been copied from another website). It’s an issue because it makes it very hard for search engines to index and rank pages.
If you’re targeting a specific keyword and duplicate content appears on the same page, search engines will struggle to decide which page of your website to rank against the keyword. This is increasingly becoming an issue in the age of copy and pasted AI-generated content. Running your website through Siteliner will quickly identify any duplication issues.
4. Mobile performance
These days, the vast majority of search engine queries are being made on mobile devices. Google now prioritises mobile website loading speeds over desktop speeds.
If you’re not sure how mobile-friendly your website is, Google’s PageSpeed Insights is again helpful here, as it does both mobile and desktop technical SEO audits.
5. Missing or incorrect robots.txt files
The robots.txt file for your website provides instructions to search engine crawlers, letting them know which parts of your website they should access and what to avoid. Missing or incorrect robots.txt files can prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your website, or direct them towards pages you don’t want them to crawl and index.
By visiting mywebsite.com/robots.txt (putting your website in place of mywebsite.com) you can see if your website’s robot.txt file is blocking important pages from being crawled/indexed, or accidentally allowing sensitive pages to be indexed. If configured badly, it can completely prevent pages from showing in search results.
