Technical SEO is an essential aspect of search engine optimization that focuses on improving the technical components of a website to enhance its search engine ranking and user experience. It is a critical factor in determining a site’s success in the highly competitive online marketplace.
Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a website’s technical elements, such as site structure, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and indexing. Ignoring technical SEO can have a significant impact on other SEO efforts, such as content and link building. For example, a slow page speed can negatively affect user experience and result in a higher bounce rate, which in turn can lead to lower search engine rankings. Similarly, if search engines can’t properly crawl and index a website due to technical issues, valuable content may not be surfaced in search results. Therefore, website owners and marketers must prioritize technical SEO to ensure that their other SEO efforts are not hindered.
Helping Search Engines Understand Your Website
The primary goal of technical SEO is to ensure that search engine crawlers can easily access and understand the website’s content. This includes optimizing website structure, improving website speed, and addressing technical issues like broken links and duplicate content. When these technical elements are optimized, search engines can crawl the website more effectively, resulting in higher search engine rankings and increased organic traffic.
One example of how technical SEO helps search engines understand a website’s content is through the use of structured data. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a web page and its content to search engines. By using structured data, website owners can provide search engines with additional context about their content, such as the type of content, the author, the date published, and more. This additional context helps search engines better understand the content and its relevance to search queries, which can lead to higher rankings and improved visibility in search results.
For example, a recipe website can use structured data to provide search engines with information about the recipe’s ingredients, cooking time, serving size, and more. This can help the recipe appear in relevant search results for users searching for specific types of recipes or ingredients.
Helping Visitors Understand Your Website
However, technical SEO is not just important for search engines; it also plays a crucial role in enhancing the user experience of the website. A well-optimized website not only loads quickly, but it also provides a seamless browsing experience for users. When users can easily navigate through a website, find what they are looking for, and access the information they need, they are more likely to engage with the website and return in the future.
An example of how technical SEO helps visitors interact with a website is through optimizing site speed. Site speed is a crucial factor in user experience, as slow loading pages can result in higher bounce rates and lower engagement. By optimizing site speed through techniques such as image compression, browser caching, and minimizing code, website owners can improve the user experience and increase engagement. A website owner can have a great off-site content and social engagement that link visitors to the website, but if the website takes too long to load, those visitors will likely leave the page to find quicker information elsewhere. At Daylight Strategy, while reviewing the technical SEO for a client, we once encountered a landing page that took more than 10 seconds to load. Since this page contained the primary form fill, potential customers of the business were abandoning the page at an astronomical rate.
What Does This Mean for Your Business?
Technical SEO is an essential part of any successful digital marketing strategy. It helps to improve website functionality, enhance user experience, and increase search engine rankings. By investing in technical SEO, website owners and marketers can create a website that not only ranks well in search engine results but also provides a positive experience for users, ultimately leading to increased traffic, conversions, and business success.
Ignoring technical SEO means ignoring a huge part of the ranking algorithm Google relies on. Most SEO audits on the market today simply focus on keywords, ranking and content. They tend to neglect the technical SEO components which means that effort that goes into keywords, ranking and content may not be seeing their full potential. If the SEO audit does include a technical SEO section, they tend to either be generic and not specific to the business they’re reviewing. Perhaps most importantly, without interpreting and prioritizing the results, a business’s ability to make meaningful improvements is almost nil. Daylight Strategy makes this process easier by using over a decade of experience in Technical SEO to help website owners and marketers understand their website’s health, uncover a full list of improvements that can be made and provide custom recommendations on how to prioritize the highest impact items that can be completed with the least amount of time and overhead.
Contact Daylight Strategy today for a one-time or ongoing comprehensive Technical SEO Audit.