Technical SEO

Technical SEO helps your website get to the top of search results and gets your content to your audience.

But it all the SEO work your users don’t see like:

• Site architecture
• Mobile optimisation
• Page speed

Before getting into technical SEO, perform a website audit.

Then make a plan to fix the areas your website needs to show up at the top of SERPs.

Let me show you how.

What is Technical SEO

Technical SEO is making your website easier for search engines to crawl and index.

Search engines find it easier to crawl and index websites whose redirects work properly and that load faster. 

So, If your website is slow, with an unresponsive design or doesn’t have a secure connection, then it wont rank on search engines.

Why is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO is important because it helps search engines crawl the content you’ve written and helps your website get organic traffic.

So even with the best content, a website that doesn’t work properly makes you lose traffic. 

Other Issues like confusing navigation, no mobile optimisation and duplicate content will make your website rank lower in search engines.

Technical SEO Strategy

Technical SEO checklists include:

• Mobile optimisation
• Page load speed
• Link health
• Duplicate content
• Schemas
• Crawl errors
• Image issues
• Site security
• URL structure
• 404 pages
• 301 redirects
• Canonical tags
• XML sitemaps
• Site architecture

What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit finds out how your website performs on search engines.

Auditing your website helps you find places to better optimise performance and create a better visitor experience.

Technical, on-page and off-page audits should be done on a regular basis.

Technical SEO Checklist Basics

Technical SEO checklist basics include:

Choose Your Preferred URL Domain

Google used to ask you to choose the version of your URL that you prefer. But now they select a version to show searchers for you.

Basically, you tell search engines that you prefer the www or non-www version of your website in search results.

For example, choosing “www.yourwebsite.com” instead of “yourwebsite.com,” tells search engines to prioritise the www version of your site and redirects all users to that URL.

You can select your preferred version of your domain through canonical tags. Just make sure all variations are all redirected to it.

Install SSL certificate

SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, makes your website secure by being the protection between the web server and a browser.

User information sent to your website, like payment or contact info, is less likely to be hacked if you have an SSL certificate installed.

Domains with “https://” and a lock symbol in the URL bar means an SSL certificate has been installed.

Search engines prefer secure sites, one of Google’s ranking factors.

You need to transfer all non-SSL pages from http to https, with the following steps:

• Redirect all http://yourwebsite.com pages to https://yourwebsite.com.
• Update all canonical and hreflang tags.
• Update the URLs on your sitemap and your robot.txt
• Set up a new instance of Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools for your https website and track it to make sure all your traffic transfers over.

Optimise Page Speed

Site speed is important for user experience, conversion and it’s a ranking factor.

Use Google’s page speed check to see which areas are slow on your website.

To improve your average page load time:

• Compress all of your files. Reduce the size of images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files, to take up less space and load faster.
• Clean up redirects. Redirects take a few seconds to load, but more redirects can add up and slow down your site speed. 
• Use a CDN (content distribution network). Storing your website information on servers in different locations then delivering from a server closest to the searcher. Shorter distances for information to travel means your website loads faster.
• Only use essential plug-ins. Updated plugins avoid security vulnerabilities. Use the latest versions of plugins and only what’s most essential. Use custom-made themes. Pre-made website themes come with unnecessary code. 
• Use cache plugins. Cache plugins store a static version of your website for returning users and decrease time to load on repeat website visits.

Crawl

Technical SEO starts with making your website easier to crawl. Search engine bots crawl your pages to collect information about your website.

If search engine bots are blocked or find it difficult to crawl your website then they can’t index or rank your pages.

First make sure all of your important web pages are accessible and easy to navigate.

Make your website easier to crawl for search engine bots:

Create an XML sitemap

Your site structure is part of your XML Sitemap which helps search bots understand and crawl your web pages.

It’s a map for your website. Submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools when it’s complete and keep your sitemap up-to-date.

Prioritise important web pages

Prioritise the most important web pages of your website for crawling.

Follow these tips to do that:

• Remove duplicate pages.
• Fix or redirect broken links.
• Check crawl stats for sudden dips or increases.
• Block any bot or page that doesn’t want crawling.
• Keep your sitemap updated and submit it to the right webmaster tools.
• Remove unnecessary or outdated content.

Optimise site architecture

Organise your website pages for search engines to easily find and crawl them. Also known as site structure or site architecture.

Helps search bots understand the relationship between your pages by grouping related pages together, for example, link your blog’s homepage to individual blog posts then link these to author pages.

Base your site architecture on the importance of individual pages, for example, when you link page X to your homepage and other pages link to page X, the more important page X becomes to search engines.

Page X could be the About, Product, News, etc. pages. So, put your website’s most important pages closer to your homepage with the most internal links.

Structure your URLs

The structure of your URLs could be a result of your site architecture.

URLs can have subdirectories or subfolders, showing where the URl leads. Subdirectories like, blog.yourwebsite.com or subfolders like, yourwebsite.com/blog.

For example, a blog post URL would be www.yourwebsite.com/blog/yourblogpost. And a product page URL would be www.yourwebsite.com/products/yourproduct.

Keep the same structure if you choose subdomains or subdirectories in your URLs. Meaning have the URL on one page as, blog.yourwebsite.com and on another page as, yourwebsite.com/blogs.

Follow these tips about writing URLs:

• Lowercase characters only.
• Use dashes to separate words.
• Keep it short and descriptive.
• Don’t use unnecessary characters or words.
• Include your target keywords.

When your URL structure is done, submit your XML sitemap, giving search bots context about your website.

Utilise robots.txt

When search engine bots crawl your website, they check the /robot.txt file, to figure out sections or pages of your website to crawl and which not to crawl.

Some malicious bots scrape your content or spam your community forums, robot.txt stops them from entering your website.

When indexing, search bots crawl your website to match your web pages to relevant search queries.

So, it’s better to not crawl pages that don’t help your website match relevant search queries, like login pages.

Add breadcrumb menus

Breadcrumbs tells your website users how their current page relates to the rest of the site and is also used by search engine bots.

Follow these tips on Breadcrumbs:

• Visible to users for easy navigation without using the Back button.
• Structured markup language for accurate context to search crawl bots.

Use pagination

Pagination in technical SEO is a form of organisation.

Pagination uses code to tell search engines when pages with distinct URLs are related to each other.

For example, pagination is used to make content series that are broken up into chapters or multiple web pages easier for search bots to discover and crawl.

Steps to do this are:

• Go to the <head> of page one of the series and use
• rel=”next” to tell the search bot which page to crawl second.
• On page two, you use rel=”prev” to indicate the prior page
• And rel=”next” to indicate the page after, etc.

Check your SEO log files

If a search bot can crawl your site doesn’t mean that it can index all of your pages.

Log file information is useful to you because you see how your website is crawled and what’s stopping bots from indexing or accessing your website.

Web servers record and store log data about every action they take on your site in log files.

Log file information includes:

• Time and date of the request
• The content requested
• Requesting IP address

From log files you can see when, and what was crawled and filtering by the user agent and search engine.

To access your log files, you can use a log file analyser, like Screaming Frog.

Index

Search engine bots crawl your website and index pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Your page can only rank after it has been indexed.

Get your pages indexed:

Unblock search bots from accessing pages

Make sure search engine bots crawl your preferred pages and crawl them easily.

Tools like Google’s robots.txt tester, help by giving you a list of blocked pages.

Use Google Search Console’s Inspect tool to find out why these pages have been blocked.

Remove duplicate content

Duplicate content affects your content’s ability to get indexed in a bad way.

Use canonical URLs to show your website’s preferred pages.

Audit your redirects

Make sure all your redirects are set up properly.

Redirect loops, broken URLs, or improper redirects cause indexing issues.

So, Audit all of your redirects regularly.

Check the mobile-responsiveness of your site

Indexing mobile website’s first is by default.

Google indexes mobile sites first and prioritises users’ mobile experience over desktop.

Use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check where your website needs improvement.

Fix HTTP errors

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) shows errors to your users or search engines and how to fix them.

HTTP errors can block search engine bots from important content on your site.

Every HTTP error is unique and with a specific resolution.

A brief explanation of each HTTP error and solution:

• 301 Permanent Redirects permanently send traffic from one URL to another. Set up these redirects with your CMS, but too many slow down your website and degrade user experience, adding to page load time. Aim for zero redirect chains, too many and search engines to give up crawling that page.
• 302 Temporary Redirect temporarily redirects traffic from a URL to another webpage. This automatically sends users to the new webpage but the cached title tag, URL, and description remain the same with the origin URL. If temporary redirects are in place for long then it’s treated as a permanent redirect and elements also pass to the end URL.
• 403 Forbidden Messages means content for a user is restricted due to access permissions or server misconfiguration.
• 404 Error Pages means the page requested doesn’t exist, because it’s been removed or they typed the wrong URL. Create 404 pages with branding and engaging to keep visitors on your site.
• 405 Method Not Allowed means your website’s server recognised but blocked access methods so an error message showed.
• 500 Internal Server Error, a general error message meaning your web server is having issues delivering your website.
• 502 Bad Gateway Error is a miscommunication or invalid response between website servers.
• 503 Service Unavailable means your server is working properly but it can’t fulfil the request.
• 504 Gateway Timeout means a server didn’t get a response from your web server to access the information.

Whenever you get these errors on your website, fix them straight away, even if your website has been crawled and indexed because access issues for users and bots negatively affect SEO.

Access

SEO Accessibility is different to Web Accessibility.

Web accessibility makes your web pages easy for users with disabilities or impairments, for example, blindness or dyslexia.

Steps for SEO accessibility is everything apart from making your website accessible to visitors with disabilities.

Steps for SEO accessibility include:

Server Performance

Server timeouts and errors cause HTTP errors that stop users and bots from accessing your website.

If your server is having issues, fix them fast.

If you don’t, search engines can remove your web page from their index because it’s a poor user experience to have broken pages.

HTTP Status

HTTP errors also stop access to your webpages.

Use a web crawler, like Screaming Frog, Botify, or DeepCrawl for a website error audit.

Load Time and Page Size

Web pages with long load time have server errors that block bots from your webpages

Or search engine bots crawl partially loaded versions with important sections of content missing. 

Plus decreasing your page load time also decreases your website’s bounce rate.

JavaScript Access

Google has difficulty processing JavaScript (JS) and recommends pre-rendered content to improve accessibility.

Google resources help you understand how search bots access JS on your website and how to improve search-related issues.

Orphan Pages

Orphan pages are pages with no internal links.

Orphan pages dont give search engine bots any context to understand how to index that page.

If a page on your website is important then it should have more than one other page linked to it.

Page Depth

Page depth is how many layers down a page is in your site structure, for example, how many clicks is the page away from your homepage.

Keep your website architecture shallow but user-friendly.

Or, keep your website organised if it’s multi-layered.

Keep important pages no more than three clicks away from your homepage, for example, pages like your product and contact pages.

Important pages deep in your website are hard to access and give poor user experience for users and bots.

An example of a website with a poorly planned site structure URL that points to a product page is:

• www.yourwebsite.com/products-features/features-by-industry/your-case-studies/your-products.

Redirect Chains

Redirecting traffic from one page to another affects crawl efficiency.

If redirects are not set up properly they can:

• slow down crawling
• reduce page load time
• Make your website inaccessible

So, keep redirects to a minimum.

Rank

Rankability in Technical SEO helps improve your website’s search engine ranking from a technical SEO standpoint.

Getting your pages to rank involves on-page SEO, off-page SEO with technical SEO methods.

All these details work together to create a SEO-friendly website site.

Internal and External Linking

Internal linking and external linking improves crawling, indexing, and ranking.

Links help search engine bots understand where your web pages a search query and gives search engines information on how to rank your web pages.

Links direct search bots and users to related content and transfer page importance. 

Backlink Quality

Backlinks are links from other sites pointing back to your own and act as a vote of confidence for your site.

Backlinks tell search engine bots that the website linking to yours believes your page is high-quality and worth crawling.

As search bots notice more backlinks, bots see your website as a more credible source.

The quality of backlinks are important because links from low-quality sites can negatively affect your rankings.

Ways to get quality backlinks to your site include:

• outreach to relevant publications
• claiming unlinked mentions
• providing helpful content other websites want to link to

Content Clusters

Content clusters are linking related content to each other, helping search engine bots to easily find, crawl, and index all of the pages on a particular topic.

Content clusters help rank your website as an authority for any related search query by showing search engines how much you know about a topic.

Click

Technical SEO can help your web pages get more clicks, also known as click-through rate (CTR).

Other elements that affect CTR:

• Searcher behaviour
• Keywords in your meta descriptions
• Page titles with keywords

If your website ranks higher in the search engine then the click-through rate will increase. 

To get more clicks to your web pages then they need to stand in the search results.

To improve your clickability include:

Use structured data

Use structured data called schema to categorise and label elements on your webpage for search bots.

The schema helps search bots by:

• Defines each element
• How elements relate to your website
• How to interpret elements

For example, structured data tells bots, “This is a video,” “This is a product,” or “This is a recipe.”

Structured data helps organise your content to make it easy for search bots to understand, index and rank your pages.

Win SERP features

SERP features, also known as rich results and showing up in rich results increases website traffic.

Rich results don’t need the page title, URL, meta description format like other search results.

Your website gets more clicks from rich results than appearing in the top organic results.

To get into the rich results:

• Write useful content
• Use structured data
• Making it easier for search bots to understand the elements of your website

Elements of your page that can get into rich results are:

• Articles
• Videos
• Reviews
• Events
• How-Tos
• FAQs (People Also Ask section)
• Images
• Local Business Listings
• Products
• Sitelinks

Optimise for Featured Snippets

Featured Snippets are boxes above the search results that give answers to search queries.

Featured Snippets quickly give searchers the answers to their queries.

Google says the best answer to the searcher’s query is the only way to get a featured snippet.

Google Discover

Google Discover lists content by category for mobile users.

The tool helps users to build lists of content by selecting categories of interest.

Technical SEO Service

Technical SEO services get paid to help your website get rid of the most common errors that negatively affect the rankings in search engines.

Technical SEO services offer:

• SEO audits
• Indexation optimisation
• On-site optimisation
• JavaScript optimisation
• Performance optimisation
• Core web vitals optimisation

Technical SEO cost

The cost of Technical SEO varies: (on average)

• Technical SEO Audits costs $300 to $5,000
• Technical SEO Audit Implementation costs $55+ an hour or $300+ per project
• Technical SEO Consulting costs $100+ an hour or $1,000 per month
• Website Maintenance costs $150+ per month

Conclusion

Using Technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO together brings organic traffic.

On-page and off-page techniques are the methods people try first.

But technical SEO is important to get your website to the top of the search results and your content to your audience.

Tell me which method is your favour or anything I missed you.

Comment in the section below.