What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO focuses on optimising the code of your website to improve its performance. It’s the framework and foundations of your website that your content is built upon. Regular audits are necessary to uncover issues that you just wouldn’t be obvious to you when navigating your website, such as robots.txt files inaccurately placed, sitemaps not up to date and many other factors that could be causing unseen problems.

When looking at your code for issues that could be affecting your technical SEO, consider two types of visitors – your customers AND search engines.

To optimise your site for customers you need to ensure that they don’t encounter broken links, slow load times, confusing navigation and many other annoying experiences that forces them to give up and leave.

To optimise your site for search engines, it must be easily crawled and indexable.

A robust website infrastructure needs to address all of the above, no to mention other considerations such as Google’s Core Web Vitals which is frequently updated so should always remain on your regular audit to-do list. I’ll cover that in a future blog.

Consider the following as your priorities:

Site Speed:

Fast loading times are crucial. Users want information quickly, and search engines favour speedy sites. Compressing images, minimizing code, and using efficient hosting are ways to speed things up.

Mobile Friendliness:

With more people browsing on phones and tablets, your site must be mobile-friendly. This means it should look and function well on all devices. Google even prioritises mobile-friendly sites in its rankings.

Indexing and Crawling:

Search engines send out crawlers to gather information from websites. Your technical SEO ensures these crawlers can easily navigate your site and index its pages correctly.

Secure Connection (HTTPS):

Having a secure site with an HTTPS connection is not just for e-commerce anymore. Google considers HTTPS a ranking factor, so it’s essential for all sites to have that “lock” symbol in the address bar.

XML Sitemap:

Think of this as a roadmap for search engines. An XML sitemap lists all your website’s pages, making it easier for search engines to find and index your content.

My final words:

It sounds scary if you’re not particularly technical but don’t worry many off-the-shelf website hosts will have all of the above in place. But I would recommend you carry out an initial audit and do this every few months, depending on how often your site is updated.

Technical SEO may sound daunting, but it’s all about making your website user-friendly and accessible to search engines. By paying attention to the technical details, you’re laying the groundwork for higher visibility and better rankings.

If your site is quite large and complex, you may require a front end developer to help you update the code. However, If you’d like me to help you carry out a technical audit and offer advice on how to improve its performance, contact me via email at josmithtoday@gmail.com.