Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps search engines better crawl your site through technical optimizations that can also improve user experience.
Benefits of Technical SEO
Optimizing your site for technical SEO eliminates any issues that could lead to poor user experience, such as slow page speed. Fixing technical issues helps search engines easily crawl your site to improve your ranking in search results. Crawlers are better able to understand and rank important pages, leading to increased organic traffic.
You do not want to miss out on customers because of poor user experience.
Technical SEO Services
Rise Marketing group offers technical SEO services that analyze, troubleshoot, and correct errors associated with indexation, URL structure, schema markup, core web vitals, page speed, canonicalization, on-page SEO optimization, and technical issues that arise during a technical SEO audit.
The goal of SEO is to improve your ranking within organic search results, leading to increased traffic and conversions. For this reason, making sure your pages are indexed on search engines is a top priority. Pages that are not indexed will not show up within search results. Users will not be able to find important pages on your site as they are searching using relevant search queries.
There are plenty of reasons why pages might not show up within organic search results. The best way to check is by reviewing which pages are being indexed in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. In some cases, pages will not be indexed if there are technical issues with a page. You will need to troubleshoot and fix these errors first before requesting Google or Bing crawlers to re-crawl a page.
URL Structure
According to Google, ideal URL structure contains simple, descriptive words as opposed to number IDs. Number IDs can be confusing and long for users and crawl bots to read and understand. Having a simple, clearly written slug makes it easier for anyone to see what the page might be about. For local pages, adding localized keywords into the URL could help clarify the intention of the page, as well as who the target audience might be. Review your meta title for any given page and consider whether there is any reason why similar wording to the meta title cannot serve as the slug of your URL.
For pages that require spatial efficiency in the URL, Google recommends using UTF-8 coding as necessary. To keep URLs on the shorter side, UTF-8 can be used for websites that could benefit from having greater descriptions in the slug. UTF-8 helps condense these descriptions in a way that is clear for Google’s crawlers to still understand.
Schema markup is used to add structured data to each page on your site. Structured data markup provides search engines with key indicators of the meaning of each webpage on a site. Using structured data markup allows your pages to show up with additional information in search results that might be of value to users. These are called rich results.
Most structured data markup uses schema to help crawlers understand a webpage. Some websites use plugins, such as Yoast, to automatically add schema to a page. However, you should always review the schema that it adds in case any updates need to be made to its structure. There may also be additional structured data markup options that it did not automatically input.
Core web vitals analyze how pages perform based on real data. Any site owner can review the current state of their site performance using a core web vitals report from Google Search Console. Core web vitals report uses four key metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
- First Input Delay (FID)
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Together, these metrics show how to improve page speed, visual performance of a page, and interactivity through load responsiveness. Core web vitals help you understand your website’s health using data from how users have already interacted with the site. By improving your core web vitals, you are taking necessary steps to improve user experience on your site.
Core web vitals and page speed go hand-in-hand. Improving your site’s load speed can have a serious impact on user experience. 53% users will abandon a website on mobile if it takes over 3 seconds to load, according to Google’s Consumer Insights report. You could be saving your site from losing out on significant volumes of traffic by improving your site’s loading time.
Luckily, Google offers a tool to help businesses review the current page speed of their site. Page Speed Insights breaks down key factors that could be hindering a webpage’s load time, leading to poor user experience for either desktop or mobile. Avoid the risk of missing out on conversions due to a slow site by making necessary improvements to page speed.
Canonicalization
One common SEO best practice is to avoid duplicate content on your site. But, there may still be times when several URLs all need to point to the same content. In this case, canonical URLs are chosen as a representative URL. This is the primary URL that points to a piece of content.
Canonical URLs are the ones that Google indexes within search results. It avoids multiple URLs within search results all pointing to the same content. For example, multilingual sites contain variants of the same content. In another example, HTTP and HTTPS are protocol variants of the same content. The process of canonicalization is crucial to helping Google understand that two URLs are not showing duplicate content.
If a canonical URL is not specified, Google will determine its own canonical URL for that page. There are instances when Google may determine a different canonical URL than the user-specified canonical.
On-page SEO and technical SEO strategies may overlap when optimizing pages on a site for search engines. Updating metadata, fixing headers, and improving linking structure are more technical aspects of on-page SEO optimization. For example, someone adding a blog post to a website may not have realized that the title of the blog is set as an H2. Because it is the title of the blog, it should be changed to an H1. On another page, there might be a missing meta description. When meta descriptions are missing, Google will specify their own. However, meta descriptions are a great opportunity to provide additional content that informs Google’s crawlers and site users what the page is about. This can improve click rate from search results.
Not every website issue that occurs will be obvious. It can be hard to pinpoint exactly why your site is not ranking high within organic search results. A technical SEO audit is conducted by an SEO consultant to take an in-depth look at the performance of your site. They are able to determine where there are technical issues on the site that could be hindering your site’s performance.
Technical audits are able to find even the smallest errors that are easily overlooked. For example, if you created several new pages on your site in a short time span, you may not have noticed that two of those pages contain the same meta description. While this seems small, a meta description is oftentimes one of the first things that Google’s crawlers review. If it notices two pages with the same meta description, you could be at risk of getting flagged for having pages with duplicate content.
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Setting up Google Search Console is a crucial step in understanding how Google is able to crawl and index your site. You can review errors that prevent pages on your site from being indexed. Google Search Console also allows you to review your core web vitals, which are pillars used to analyze user experience and page speed on your site. If your site is exposed to toxic backlinks, Google Search Console provides a disavow tool that lets Google know that you do not want certain backlinks to your site to be taken into consideration.
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Blogs Relating to Technical SEO
How User Experience Affects SEO
Clearly, user experience is important when it comes to keeping people on your site, but that is not all it is good for. A good user experience can also help with SEO.
Website Audit Checklist
Website audits are conducted to show your website’s overall health and how it is ranking in terms of SEO. The top six areas of a website audit are explained here.
Structured Data Markup for SEO
Although it is not seen on the user interface of a page, adding structured data markup to your webpages can enhance your pages for SEO in the eyes of Googlebot and other search engine’s crawlers.
Google Indexing and Its Impact on SEO
In most cases, the most important pages on your site, such as product pages or landing pages, should be indexed. This allows you to benefit from organic traffic through search engine results pages.