What is technical SEO?

Fine-tuning the technical aspects of your website to increase page rankings

Most people who have a website for their business will have some awareness of SEO, what it is and how it works.

When you delve deeper into the subject, however, there’s a whole new set of concepts and terms that can seem confusing.

Good SEO takes account of a range of different factors that can help turn basic SEO into something much more sharply focused and potentially very powerful.

One aspect of SEO, often overlooked but critical to website success, is technical SEO. What exactly is it, how do you use it and what benefits can it bring?

What does technical SEO mean?

Put simply, technical SEO, or on-site SEO, refers to fine-tuning the technical aspects of a website in order to increase the ranking of its pages on search engines.

It’s sometimes known as ‘technical optimisation,’ and as with other optimisation strategies, it’s all about making it easier for search engines to crawl your website and understand what it finds. It’s the part of SEO which focuses on improving technical elements on your website to achieve higher rankings in the search results.

This contrasts with off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for your website through other channels.

This might consist of links from other websites, social media posts and marketing activities away from your website.

Why is technical SEO important?

Quite simply, Technical SEO makes it easier for search engines to find, crawl and index your website. This is important because it typically leads to increased traffic, and increased internet traffic means a greater likelihood of enquiries, leads and sales.

The correct technical set-up on your page helps search engines understand exactly what your site is all about.

It lets them know that this is a website of high-value that will be useful to its users and that the content is clear, valuable and arranged in a way to help people find what they are looking for.

If your website loads quickly, isn’t stuffed full of dead links and is secure to use, then Google’s crawlers are likely to give it an extra boost in the search listings.

Attention to detail when it comes to the technicalities of your website will make it easier to find, more likely to feature prominently in the search engines and be easier for your users to negotiate.

All of these things will ultimately help your business.

How do you do technical SEO?

At its most basic, technical SEO helps search engines find, crawl, and index the pages on your website.

While this is a good start, technical SEO needs to go further.

In fact, there’s countless things you can do to improve the technical optimisation of your website, and too many to share in a single article.

There are, however, a few key points that you should try and prioritise:

Website speed – the faster your website loads, the more likely it is to be higher placed in search results. Think about optimising your website images and enable compressing and browser caching. You can check the current speed of your site with tools such as Pingdom and Google PageSpeed. Alternatively, Google recommend using a browser extension such as Lighthouse to check the technical aspects of your website.

Mobile optimised – More users are browsing the internet on their phones and other mobile devices than via a computer. Google and other search engines prioritise websites that are easily accessible for mobile devices.

Make it secure – Your website should include an SSL Certificate. This provides extra security for visitors. It confirms identities, strengthens trustworthiness and protects data. If you purchase a SSL Certificate you’ll not only make your site more SEO friendly, you’ll also make it more secure.

Sitemap – Submit your sitemap to search engines. These are lists of the pages on your website and they’re critical because they allow search engines to find and index the pages of your website that are important to you and your audience. Sitemaps are easy to create and many website building platforms provide a plug-in that creates one for you.

Taking things further

If you want to improve your technical SEO further, there are a few other points you can consider. A lot of these involve the structure and layout of your site. For instance, you should try to create a flat, organised structure. In practice, this means that your site’s pages should only be a few links away from each other.

Don’t make information difficult to locate. Page URLs should follow a consistent structure that makes it easy for the users to understand where they are on your site. This also helps Google crawl your site for information.

Although Google’s search results are provided at a page level, they like to have a sense of where the page fits into the bigger picture of the site.

Breadcrumb Navigation is a secondary type of site navigation that can make it easier for users to know where they are on your site, and, in turn, makes your site more appealing to search engines.

Aqueous Digital can optimise your technical SEO

While technical SEO won’t guarantee to get you to the top of Google rankings, poor technical SEO could mean you don’t. At Aqueous Digital, we spend a lot of our time on technical SEO to ensure your website can hold its own against the competition.

We use ethical, long-term and sustainable techniques to help enhance the visibility of your site and, in turn, to grow your business.