We provide our top tips on how your business can improve your technical SEO

 

Date: 04/12/2024
Author: Ryan Walsh

 

Table of contents:

• What exactly is technical SEO?
• Can Google crawl and index the work?
• Why your business should work improving your website speed
• Has the work even been indexed?
• Benefits of using Google Search Console
• Blog posts could benefit from having H1-H6 titles
• Why a business needs an XML site map
• Why your company website needs to be mobile-friendly

 

Introduction

Improve your business’s technical SEO if you want it to appear in the top results within Google’s SERPs. This can mean making sure Googlebot can crawl and index the work, having an XML sitemap in place, and having page titles. And we forgot to mention that you must make sure the website is mobile-friendly.

What exactly is technical SEO?

Technical SEO balances ensuring that pages and blogs can be indexed by Googlebot, for example, by not allowing a “no-index” tab when you want that page to appear within Google’s results.

It’s also about improving the UX, that’s user experience. So, part of technical SEO is making sure the website is fast. You can use a tool like GT Metrix to see which ways you can make your company website fast.

Improving website speed to improve U.X

Google’s algorithm uses over 200 ranking factors to decide where a business should rank. One of these ranking factors is speed; therefore, if you have hired web designers/developers who designed a super nice, fast website, then your website should rank higher. Therefore, to rank higher in Google’s organic search results, the website should be fast. For this to happen, we would recommend purchasing fast website hosting.

 

Our top tips for improving page speed

Invest more in quality web design

So, when you have your website designed, do mention that speed is a priority. You don’t want a slow, sluggish website. For example, if possible, you don’t want to use too many WordPress plugins, which may slow down the website’s speed. So balance offering good UX with the website being fast.

Also, compress images; for example, sometimes the images, such as JPEG on the homepage, don’t need to be as large as they are. Some pictures, for instance, on the main pages, could be smaller, perhaps a lower resolution, which can speed up how fast the page loads.

Remember, it’s a balance between offering a good user experience and U.X., so shoppers are interested in your products or services but not making the website so slow that the bounce rate is high.

 

Choose good quality hosting.

This is a widespread mistake, especially with start-up businesses. They opt for the cheapest website hosting, believing all website hosting is identical. However, some companies offer super-fast hosting. Some offer sluggish, slow hosting, which means that no matter how hard you work on improving your business’s organic search engine optimisation, sometimes, it doesn’t matter because the hosting is so slow, Google’s algorithms may never place the company on page one of Google, simply because the hosting is so slow.
So, the best advice is to pay for quality dedicated website hosting.

 

Good website structure

Some SEO agencies may not consider this technically technical SEO, but we think it’s crucial if you want to improve your company’s SEO.
We think that a good website structure is crucial. By that, we mean that each leading service you offer as a business should have its page.
This allows you to improve your on-page SEO significantly, and it also sends a clear message to Google’s algorithms about exactly what services or products you sell.

The problem with grouping services, say, on one page, is that it doesn’t communicate clearly to Google what services you offer. So, for example, when you talk to top SEO experts, they will say it’s far better for the website designer and copywriter to work together to place each main service on its own page.

 

That has the following benefits:

Add separate H1-H6 tags for each page

• You can add alt text for each page
• Separate anchor text for each page
• Separate meta title and meta description for each page to improve the CTR

 

Well-written anchor text

 

External links

There are two main different types of anchor text. There’s the anchor text that leads from external backlinks to your website, and there’s the anchor text placed on another website that’s linked to your website by a backlink.

 

Internal links

Then, there’s the anchor text for internal links, which you click within a website. So, for example, let’s say the business has written a long blog post; it’s likely to mention many different products that the business offers; you can then add an internal link to the product pages. Googlebot will then follow the link, and this, therefore, helps with indexation. Yet, at the same time, what can happen is that Googlebot and Google’s algorithm can learn what that page is about.

For example, if you have a lot of anchor text labelled “chardonnay,” “champagne,” or “luxury whiskey,” then Google’s algorithm will see that you are selling alcoholic beverages.

 

To create a sitemap, also known as XML sitemap

So, creating an XML sitemap can act like a shopping list of all the pages and blog posts on your company website. This is a piece of cake to do. You might think that creating an XML sitemap sounds highly technical and perhaps confusing, but if you have a WordPress CMS, then it’s absolutely a piece of cake to do.

You can actually use the Yoast plugin, which is offered for free by Yoast. If you have a WordPress website, this plugin can automatically generate an XML sitemap, for example, using Microsoft Excel format. All you have to do then is submit your website’s sitemap into Google Search Console, and then Googlebot will crawl and index those pages.

Now, if we were to ask what the best technical SEO tip we can provide would be to ensure that all the main pages and blog posts can get indexed. You might be surprised to learn that some blog posts or pages can’t get indexed by Googlebot on your website just yet. This means that they will never appear within Google’s SERP’s. There could be a range of reasons for this; sometimes, it’s something as simple as a no-index tab being left on.

 

Manually submit each new page or blog post to the Google Search Console

After you write a new blog post, rather than waiting weeks for Googlebot to crawl and index the work, we recommend manually submitting the URL to Google Search Console using the index button.

This can massively speed up the indexation time, meaning the page can appear in Google’s SERPS much faster. Therefore, you don’t have to wait for Googlebot to manually find the work, which can sometimes take many weeks.

Make sure that your company website works on mobile

Over 50% of shoppers visit a website via mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. Therefore, it is crucial that the website is mobile-friendly and works on smartphones.

Yet, the design must also be really good to reduce the bounce rate. So often, what a lot of businesses do is have a really well-designed responsive website and then use what web developers call split testing to improve the design.

 

In conclusion

So, in summary, these are the three most important areas to focus on when improving a business’s technical SEO.
Indexation

The website should have all its main pages and blog posts indexed. You can manually submit each page to Google Search Console. Alternatively, you can use a WordPress plugin like Yoast SEO to submit an XML sitemap.

 

Mobile friendly

Make sure that you have a mobile version of the website designed, as roughly over 50% of visitors now come via mobile.

 

Fast

Make sure that your company website is supersonic fast.