Technical SEO: Why It’s More Important Than Ever

The power of visibility can never be underestimated, especially in the marketing world. To become visible in the online marketing world, you need a strong SEO game since 93% of online experience begins with a search engine. Many businesses think SEO is all about on-page and off-page SEO and put all their efforts into perfecting them. However, there is a third element to a successful SEO strategy—Technical SEO. It acts as a linchpin for both the other features and makes your SEO strategy successful.

Here we give you the lowdown on what technical SEO is and why you should enhance it to help your business grow.

What is technical SEO?

Technical is the aspect of your website which allows the search engine to run through your website (crawling) and index it. It has nothing to do with the actual content on the website but includes factors like URL structure, navigation, and other factors. There are three major segments to a healthy technical SEO for your website they are:

• Site architecture:

Technical SEO is the foundation of your website, and every foundation has pillars to hold up the building. In SEO, the structural pillars are HTTPS, robots.txt, and sitemap building.

• Fast website speed:

Website speed is another crucial element of technical SEO that needs to be perfect for your website to get sufficient traffic.

• Mobile-friendliness:

Making your website mobile and tablet friendly is essential nowadays since 90% of the population surfs the internet on mobile phones.

How does technical SEO make a difference in your SEO strategy?

Technical SEO isn’t new. However, its importance has grown significantly as more and more people rely on online searches for everything. And as a business, you need to put yourself out where your customers are looking for you. Here’s why you need to improve the technical aspects of your SEO:

A. Optimizes the URL structure

A website’s URL structure is like the address of a building, and it is not just recognizable to the search engine but your visitors. The readability of your URL structure matters to them, and you need to optimize your website’s URL to make it more readable, recognizable, and memorizable. Here are some tips to enhance your website URL’s readability:

• Keep it short and straightforward. (Avoid adding stop words, codes, and numbers)
• Use hyphens and underscores to separate words.
• Avoid using all caps
• Don’t stuff the URL with keywords
• Say no to semantically inaccurate URLs

B. It enhances your website’s navigation

Many people think that the end goal of an SEO strategy is to get more traffic to your website. However, that is just a means to an end. The ultimate goal of any business strategy, including SEO, is to get conversions. And you get conversions from SEO only when a visitor comes to your website and stays long enough to find something they want and click on a call to action button.

However, customers only reach that point when they can navigate your website easily. If your website is challenging to navigate, they will simply go back to another site for information. It will increase your bounce rate and decrease your ranking on the search engine. Search engines also rely on your website’s structure to crawl and index it.

Navigation of your website depends on its internal link architecture and design, design of your website. Two ways to ensure the correct navigation for your website are:

• Using XML sitemaps:

XML sitemaps are like roadmaps that help the search engine index your website easily. It enables the search engine to identify the structure of internal links starting from your home page and moving on to the most important to least important pages. When submitting an XML sitemap of your website to Google, ensure that you add only logical pathways and precise details to enhance the website ranking.

• Create a robot.txt file:

Also called robots exclusion protocol is another technical SEO tool that shows search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl on your website. With this, you can determine what you want to be prioritized on your website for the search engine. However, many people use robots. txt to hide things from the search engine, which can eventually lead to penalties and other consequences. So instead of using it to hide something, use it to control the crawling traffic so that you don’t waste your crawling budget on unimportant stuff.

C. It enhances the page speed of your website

Your website’s speed is one of the most crucial ranking factors. It is because as the speed of your website decreases, the probability of bounce rate increases. Research shows that as the load time goes from 1 second to 10 seconds, the bounce rate can increase up to 123%. It is also a crucial consideration for a ranking factor known as Page Experience.

To enhance your page speed, you can use a tool provided by Google called PageSpeed Insights which tests your page speed and offers suggestions to enhance it. It can provide recommendations related to technical SEO depending on your website’s performance, such as:

• Optimizing your images for size and quality
• Improving your server response time
• Remove render-blocking JavaScript
• Use CDN (Content Delivery Network) and others.

All these recommendations vary according to your website performance.

D. It makes your website mobile-friendly

A few years back, having an interactive website with relevant content and fast loading speed was enough to rank your website and generate traffic. However, with an increase in mobile phones, Google has made a mobile-friendly website a vital consideration when ranking your website.

Not only that, almost 99% percent of the internet-using population uses mobile to access the internet, which is why it is essential to have visitors on your website, and enhancing your technical SEO can increase your website’s mobile friendliness.

Here are some ways through which you can increase your website’s mobile usability.

• Implement mobile SEO configurations from Google.
• Take a mobile-friendly test and act upon the recommendations you get.
• Avoid using pop-ups and interstitials.

E. It helps enhance your site security

Another essential benefit of having a good technical SEO is that it provides enhanced security for your website against malware and hackers. Now you may think about how technical SEO is related to security? The answer is simple: if you have an HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) website, Google automatically rewards you by improving your ranking. This way, it benefits you on both ends; your website becomes secure against threats, and you increase your rankings to get more traffic.

Summing up

Technical SEO is the hidden factor that acts as a foundation to your SEO strategy and keeps it standing in the long haul. It may be difficult and time-consuming, but the rewards you would get by enhancing the technical SEO of your website are worth the pain. The only thing you need to note is to get it done right by experts or professionals to reduce cost and efforts on everyone’s end.