Every business is constantly fighting to improve its search visibility, striving to appear as high up on Google’s SERPs as possible. It’s a competitive field, and maintaining that top spot is a continuous effort, as rankings can easily slip if not consistently worked on.

So, everyone and their dog knows that content marketing and backlinks are still crucial to SEO, right?
Sure, you do.

Now, let’s shift our focus to technical SEO. How well-versed are you in this crucial aspect of online visibility?

Not many businesses know how to improve their technical SEO, so we come in here. We will offer our expert guidance so that you can implement different ways to improve your company’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

Written by: Ryan Walsh
Date: 12/07/2024
Subject: Technical SEO

First things first, why does technical SEO matter?

 

 

Back in the early days of Google’s algorithm evolution, the algorithm was referred to as “PageRank” Back then, we were not walking around with smartphones.

And, well, broadband had not been rolled out here in the United Kingdom then. Remember that you had to listen to a dial-up router make the right racket to connect via your conventional phone line?

So, the point we are trying to make is that, integrated within Google’s algorithm at the time, Google’s PageRank, well, the website’s speed, wasn’t considered an important ranking factor. Then, you have to think about mobile usability. Well, now it’s super important; it’s an important UX and ranking factor, but back in the day, during Google PageRank, well, our phones at that time were bricks, not with the operating system they have today.

Now, everything is about speed.

So, in terms of technical SEO, many metrics SEO companies track have to do with speed and how fast the website is (Google’s Core Web Vitals). These are important, as you have user ability or UX metrics, such as how well-designed the mobile version of the website is. What is the bounce rate like for, say, the homepage?

 

So, how do you go about measuring technical SEO performance?

 

Page load speed

We are all impatient. With self-service checkouts, priority boarding on flights, and the need for next-day delivery on an item, we may kick it into the passageway of our homes and sit there for an extra day before unpacking it.

 

Do we all need to slow down a bit? Probably?

Yet when it comes to web design, there’s only one way: make the website faster, faster, and faster. E-commerce businesses and global brands will obsess over the need for speed when accelerating the speed of their company websites.

That’s because Google’s algorithm now considers how fast your company website is a significant ranking factor. SEO agencies will refer to this as “Google’s Core Web Vitals,” which we mentioned earlier. Yet, it is worth mentioning again because when someone gets a website designed, they may choose super cheap hosting. Please don’t go for quality, super-fast hosting, as improving your company’s organic search engine optimisation is essential.

 

So, how do you go about speeding up your company website:

I am using fast hosting.
Invest in good quality hosting.
Use a single CSS stylesheet instead of multiple stylesheets, as this can slow your company website down.

Use a single CSS stylesheet instead of multiple stylesheets or in-line styles.
Reduce the use of redirects.
Redirects can cause Googlebot to wander in endless circles, so talk to your web designers or SEO consultants about the best way to use redirects on your company website.

 

Tip number 2) Can your company website get indexed?

The pages and blog posts you want to appear in Google’s results must be indexed. If they cannot, it is like closing the door on the bots that want to crawl the work.

The page must be indexable. For this to happen, Googlebot must be able to crawl and index that page. Therefore, if any code, such as the “no-index” tab, is left on, this will cause indexation issues.

So, do make sure of the following:

– Can the page get indexed? Check using your company’s Google Search Console account
– Make sure no “no-index” tabs haven’t been left on
– Are there any “site-wide” issues, such as a no-index tab on every page and blog post?
– If in doubt, ask for help from a web developer for this

 

Crawl budgets and conserving your crawl budget by putting it to use better

If a website has a lot of blank pages or 404-page errors, then this can mean one thing: a wasted crawl budget.

Create a picture of a CPU and make it look ultra-futuristic, like substantial electrical power is being sent.
So, what is a crawl budget?

Well, even with its vast infrastructure and ultramodern computers, Google still has to ensure that it is effectively using all this processing power.

So, to make the best use of Google, Google allocates a crawl budget to each website. How much time should google spend crawling and indexing that page or blog post, and how regularly should it do this, once a day, once a week or once a month, for example?

 

Mobile Friendliness

How mobile-friendly is your company website website?

It seems like yesterday that Google rolled out an algorithm update that ranked businesses without a mobile-ready website lower in Google’s SERPs.

But it wasn’t yesterday. It was back in 2018, how time flies.

Now, Google uses something called “mobile first” indexing, which just means that Google will crawl the mobile version of all new pages for indexing purposes first when it’s crawling web pages.

 

Page Speed Insights

Use Google’s Page Speed Insights

Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a free tool that provides helpful tips on how to improve the speed of your company’s website.

 

We would recommend using SSL

 

Use SSL

SSL sounds complicated; it stands for “secure sockets layer” and encryptes information. Now, Google, way back in 2014, announced that it prefers websites to be more secure, so it recommends SSL. So, if your business doesn’t have SSL, you might have seen an organic rankings drop. So, we would recommend hiring a web developer to do this work for you.

 

Create an XML Sitemap

You are trying to find a landmark in a famous city without a map, but it’s hard. You might have to ask for directions, and here someone says, go left, right, left, left again, turn in a circle, and walk backward; it gets confusing.
Things are a lot simpler with a sat-nav unit.

This is the same for Googlebot; if it doesn’t have an XML sitemap, it will likely index through the main menu. Yet, it might miss a new internal page by not crawling the internal link or your last four blog posts. Now, you can send each new page for manual indexing via Google Search Console. However, we would recommend adding an XML sitemap. Plus, make sure you keep your XML site map up to date.

 

 

Fix broken links

Broken links are a bit like going someone to a shop that still says it’s open online, but when you go there, the business has gone, moved, where? Nobody knows unless they leave a sign in the window where they have relocated. That would make sense, right?
But broken links and 404-page errors cause two SEO problems they are as follows:

 

Wasted crawl budget:

So, as earlier mentioned, you don’t want to waste your crawl budget; you want to use it to crawl your business’s most important pages and blog posts. Yet, if Googlebot is crawling and indexing 404 pages all the time, you’re wasting your company’s crawl budget. So, get your web designers and SEO experts together and say, let’s do something about these broken links.
Broken links will cause a poor user experience.

If you walk into a store and a staff member is rude, this causes a poor user experience, and you may leave and just visit another company.

Well, this is about the same as a company website. If it offers a poor user experience, such as poor design and broken links, you are likely to get a frustrated shopper.

Frustrated shoppers lead to them “bouncing off” the website, increasing the bounce rate. Google’s algorithms know that someone leaving the website in a few seconds does not click on another page; this shows that they are not interested in that company, its products, or its services.

Google’s algorithm may not know exactly why the customer is leaving, whether it’s the price point of an item, the website is hard to use, or there are too many broken links. What it does know is that the bounce rate is high.
Now, when you think about it, if you have ten organic business results on the first page of Google, and some have much lower bounce rates, the shopper is spending much longer on those websites, browsing the items they have for sale. Well, those websites seem to have happy shoppers, shoppers who are more interested in those businesses.

So you guessed it, lower bounce rates, websites with higher time on site, these websites will move up

 

Engagement metrics are important

A businesses engagement metrics, such as:
– Time spent on site
– Bounce rates
– Number of pages visited

These are all important SEO metrics your business should be following. Plus, this SEO information is offered for free via your Google Analytics account.

Engagement SEO metrics are different from technical SEO metrics, yet they are directly linked. For example, a lot of broken links causing 404 page errors is a technical SEO problem. Yet the broken links themselves cause a poor user experience, which is an engagement problem.

So, technical SEO issues must be fixed to improve the engagement SEO metrics, such as time spent on the site, bounce rates, and number of pages visited.

 

Does your business require help to improve your organic search engine optimisation?

We are a long-established SEO agency based in Cardiff’s city centre. We have massively talented SEO consultants working for us.

To give you an idea of our team’s knowledge, some have over ten years of experience, mainly helping Welsh businesses get on page one of Google.

 

We can help your business in the following ways:

We can improve your company’s on-page SEO

We can improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation by better optimising alt text, content marketing, internal links, meta titles, and meta descriptions.

 

We can help to improve your business off-page SEO

We can help improve your company’s off-page SEO by building backlinks and business citations.

Would you like to work with us?
If you want to work with our digital marketing agency, why not call our team today? Prices for our organic SEO work start from £750.00 PCM.

Call us today on: 029 21 761777