Advanced technical SEO guide: Best practices from the experts

While mastering the fundamentals of technical SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is always a good place to start for blossoming businesses wanting to improve their online presence, what’s the next stage of this powerful process? Advanced technical SEO.

To help you understand how to carry out an advanced technical SEO audit, our team of experienced technical SEO experts have created this ultimate guide.

Featuring technical SEO best practices and the various components you should be including in an advanced technical SEO audit, we cover it all.

What is advanced technical SEO?

Advanced technical SEO simply refers to a set of SEO techniques and strategies that require a deeper understanding of SEO, search engines and their various algorithms, as well as ever-evolving marketing technology.

These methods go beyond the fundamentals of technical SEO such as spotting and removing duplicate content.

What should an advanced technical SEO audit include?

While a basic technical SEO audit often includes the analysis of backlinks and the review of your website’s sitemap, an advanced technical SEO audit should go one step further.

Unsuitable for SEO novices, advanced technical SEO requires the knowledge of more complex processes and techniques.

To help you determine whether your business is ready for (or could benefit from) advanced technical SEO, we explore some of the more common components of an advanced technical SEO audit below.

Optimise for mobile users

An important part of SEO is ensuring your site is accessible – and with more than 60 per cent of the global population using a phone to get online, mobile optimisation is key to helping customers access your website.

Configured with the mobile user in mind, an effective mobile-optimised site will reconfigure itself to suit the user’s type of mobile device.

As a result, the user experience is improved which can lead to an increase in visits, session duration, and conversions. Mobile optimisation is therefore an essential part of technical SEO best practices and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Crawl budget optimisation

Crawl budget optimisation refers to a process that helps speed up the visits of search engine bots to your pages. With more visits, your site will be indexed quicker, allowing page changes to be updated as quickly as possible.

You can achieve this by using a variety of SEO techniques including preventing Google from crawling your site’s non-canonical URLs, optimising your JavaScript, reducing crawl errors, checking your crawl rate limit using Google Search Console, and reviewing or updating any stale content.

Some common crawl errors that can often be easily fixed include those that respond with a 302, 400, 404, or 500 error codes.

SEO-friendly pagination

Pagination (described by Google as “Where a user can use links such as “next”, “previous”, and page numbers to navigate between pages that display one page of results at a time”) can be a difficult SEO topic to master.

However, as long as your pages are no more than three clicks away from your homepage, pagination can help to boost your SEO performance – unlike the infinite scroll and ‘load more’ alternatives.

This is because the infinite scroll option cannot be completely indexed by search engine bots, and similarly, they cannot click ‘load more’ buttons either. As a result, valuable sections of content on pages using infinite scroll and ‘load more’ techniques are often left unindexed by search engines.

An advanced technical SEO audit can also help you to identify and rectify any unlinked pagination pages. It’s well worth exploring technical SEO best practices for pagination to get this right.

SEO-friendly host

While the host of a website isn’t typically viewed as SEO, it can still have a significant effect on your organic traffic, SERP (Search Engine Result Page) rankings, and conversions. It’s therefore best practice that you choose the right SEO-friendly option for your business – namely, a host company that offers favourable site speed, reliability, impressive server uptime, and, most importantly, security.

Contact the experts at Aqueous Digital

As an award-winning digital marketing agency servicing companies in the Sheffield area, we help our customers succeed online. Specialising in advanced technical SEO (both paid and organic SEO), content strategies, and reputation management for high-net-worth individuals, we can support businesses with their marketing goals.

To find out more about our technical SEO strategies, please feel free to get in touch with our expert Sheffield team today. You can either give us a call on 0800 285 1424, send us an email enquiry via hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk, or fill out our convenient online contact form.

Regardless of whether you want to build your online presence or learn more about our technical-only SEO packages, we look forward to hearing more about your business. Get in touch today to arrange your free, no-obligation consultation with one of our SEO specialists.