Technical SEO is a must for every website that wants to rank higher on search engine results pages. It is not only about keywords and meta descriptions, but also about the site’s code, which needs to be up-to-date and error-free. More importantly, search engines must be able to easily crawl your website to rank your content and business on the internet. We have already looked at the role of SEO in Digital Marketing and now we will focus on the importance of technical SEO for business growth.
In this section, we will be looking at what Technical SEO entails and how it can help you get better rankings on Google’s first page. We will mainly look at the benefits of doing Technical SEO. Finally, we will provide a list of actionable steps on how you can do Technical SEO on your own website.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to actions that are taken in order to improve the functionality of a website so that it can be more visible to search engines. Digital marketers often use a checklist since they are many aspects involved in the optimizations. If such accomplished professionals prefer to use a checklist so that they make sure all aspects have been covered. It can only mean that there are significant benefits. This brings us to the next section where I’m going to go through all the major benefits that can be derived from optimizing your website and content.
Benefits for Business and Marketing Activities
Technical SEO holds a critical value that can impact both your businesses directly and marketing activities. Most people especially beginners prefer to focus on on-page SEO because it is much easier and less technical. However, on-page SEO has its limitations and is not the only factor considered by search engines.
Improves Ranking in SERPs
Part of technical SEO involves submitting your website to search engines and enabling indexing. This is done with Webmasters(Bing) and Google Search Console for Google. Once your website has been submitted it means it can now appear in search results. This will no doubt contribute to your SERP rankings. In the previous article on the Role of SEO in Digital Marketing we touched a little on what is SERP and why is it important.
Allows Traffic From Different Devices
Cellphones and mobile devices have become ubiquitous in the 21st century. As such, websites must accommodate both mobile and desktop devices. Mobile devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets must be considered when setting up your website. This is one of the biggest advantages of Technical SEO in this instance. Mobile usability and speed are tested to ensure that businesses can accommodate clients on different devices.
Furthermore, the ability to save your website to the home screen of users’ smart devices is a bonus to businesses. This will keep them in front of their customers all the time. Websites that are mobile-friendly will rank higher in search engine page results than websites that are rigid and incompatible.
Enriches User Experience
In light of what I mentioned above. Proper navigation also assists in enriching the user experience. If customers understand where to get what information they are looking for on your website they are more likely to return. Every website must have a designated homepage, about us, privacy policy, and a contact form. In essence, the more usable your website the more visitors will keep on using your website.
Enhances Security
Implementation will result in improved security. SSL certificates are required by search engines and they boost consumer confidence. They are different types of SSL certificates that can be used by organizations and these are as follows:
- Extended Validation (EV)
- Organizational Validation(OV)
- Domain Validation (DV)
If you are interested in how to set up a free SSL for your website just check out this article How To Set Up SSL on VPS. The bottom line is Secure Socket Layers are there to protect visitors and your website from malicious attacks. Users can tell if your website is not safe if the URL does not have the lock key prior to the HTTPS: portion of the URL. If your website does not display this then it is susceptible to attacks and whatever information that your visitors submit will not be encrypted.
Technical SEO Increases Sales
Technical optimization to rank higher in SERPs will result in more traffic. As a result, more sales will be generated from your website. Proper navigation and a well-defined process flow on your landing pages will help customers check out faster. For example, imagine if you want to buy something online and the add to cart button is not working, this will obviously put you off. Another example would be trying to go to the next page which is the product description but the page takes forever to load. Such bad experiences will chase away customers.
Technical optimization ensures that all these issues such as broken links and poor page speeds are identified first. To identify these issues a site audit is required and they are several online tools that you can use to carry out the audit. One of the most popular and best tools is the Google Search Console. It’s free and easy to link your website. To add your website to the search console, you can either use your URL or verify through DNS as displayed in the image above.
Brand Awareness and Visibility
The higher the rankings in SERP the more visible your website becomes and your business starts to grow. In fact, according to Moz the first page of google captures 71% of the traffic. Which is an incredible amount of visitors and this signifies the importance of ranking higher in SERPs.
Gap Identification through Technical SEO
Through Technical SEO you will be able to establish which content is driving traffic to your website. By mapping out these customer journeys you will be able to see which keywords your website is ranking for and if you do not have content that satisfies those visitors’ needs you can start to produce more of what is driving traffic.
Another important benefit is the ability to identify traffic sources and Geo locations. Content can be optimized based on geo in order to boost sales. For example, if you have more visitors from french speaking countries. It would be wise to direct visitors from those countries to your pages that are in french. Most companies and website owners do this by the way. They leverage the language settings in the browser to determine which pages the visitors are going to see.
Technical SEO Fixes Problems
As mentioned earlier after you identify problems through conducting a site audit either using ahrefs or google search console. The next step is to perform the necessary optimizations. A list problem solved is as follows:
- Page speed issues
- Duplicate content
- Security vulnerabilities
- Broken links
- Mobile usability
- Missing or incorrect robots.txt
- Multiple homepages
- The site isn’t indexed correctly
- No XML sitemaps
- No HTTPS security
These are just but a few of the problems that can be successfully resolved by implementing technical SEO.
Improves The Customer Journey
As a result of the improved page speed, clear navigation, and no broken links. An optimized website provides the best customer journey. Users are easily able to find what they are looking for and they can easily navigate and access information.
Typically users must not perform more than 3 clicks to get to where they want to be on the website. If you suers go for then there is a chance they might not want to return and can dim your site as unusable. Having social share buttons at the end of the customer journey will help you get more visitors. Your visitors can use these social share buttons to spread links to your website to their visitors.
Compliance With Search Engines
Web crawlers require certain conditions to be met in order to rank your content or to least be able to index. In order for this to happen certain requirements must be in place. Technical SEO helps achieve all these factors that are necessary in order to satisfy these requirements. A few examples of these are as follows:
- Submitting your website with Webmaster and Search Console
- Having a robots.txt file that is indexable.
- Submitting your sitemap
- Page speed and H1 tags
- Meta tags and description
These are just but a few of the requirements that will be satisfied through optimization.
Conclusion
If you want web traffic then Technical SEO is the heart that will drive visitors o your doorstep. In this article, we touched on what is Technical SEO and why is it important. More importantly, we looked at the benefits to the business. A few of these benefits we discussed are improved user experience, visibility in SERPs, and ranking high just to mention a few.
If you would like to read more on SEO we have another article on What is SEO in Digital Marketing. If you have any questions feel free to ask in our forum it’s free to join.
