Why Technical SEO is Important for your Business

Getting your head around Technical SEO can seem a bit daunting, so we’re exploring what Technical SEO is and how it can benefit your business.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimising the technical elements of a website to help search engines, such as Google, crawl, index and render your site more efficiently. By improving technical aspects of your website, you are making it easier for search engines to serve your content to potential customers in higher ranking positions. Some important elements of technical SEO include indexing, website architecture, mobile optimisation and page speed all of which contribute to the overall experience a user has on your website.

Technical SEO should be the core pillar of any search strategy, if search engines cannot find your website, how can you expect users or customers to find it? In this guide we’ll cover the most important aspects of technical SEO and how they can help grow your business.

Why is Technical SEO important for your business?

The biggest question for any online business…. Can search engines find your website?

You could be providing the most useful content on the web but if search engines can’t crawl your website and index it, then your efforts are wasted.

The old saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ could not be anymore relevant for a website’s technical SEO. On the surface a website may look professional, and the content could be very useful but it’s what happens beneath the surface in the backend of a website that can ultimately hinder your organic search performance.

Ensuring search engines can find and index your content doesn’t mean that you’re passing technical SEO audits, this is just the first basic fundamental of technical SEO. Your site’s pages need to be fast, secure, mobile friendly, easy to navigate… and don’t forget the hundreds of other elements that go together to make a website technically optimised.

Getting your Technical SEO strategy right

When your content is found, crawled and indexed by Google, your technical SEO strategy cannot stop there if you want your business to grow and sustain that growth within organic search.

The first step in any technical SEO strategy should be to audit your website, for this you need to consider a wide range of technical topics such as:

• Site Architecture & Navigation – The structure of a website is key to ensuring information is organised in a clear manner which users and search engines find easy to understand.
• Site Indexing – Indexation is the process of compiling data for easy access later. This is a core process in how search engines work and without this ability they would not be able to include the site in the search results. There are many ways in which you can control how your site is indexed such as XML sitemaps, robots.txt rules, meta robots tags, canonical tags, redirects rules, error pages etc. For e-commerce websites you may want to limit how Google crawl and index your pages, if you are using parameters or internal site search you may want to block those pages from being crawled by Google.
• Site Security – An unsecured website can allow for malicious attacks on your website. If your website is hacked, it could result in search engines and browsers flagging the issue to potential customers to warn them away.
• Site Speed – It is important for a page to load as quickly as possible to prevent the user from waiting for long periods of time. Any user frustration could cause them to leave the site without converting, which is something you want to avoid at all costs to maximise performance and revenue.
• Mobile Friendliness – This is the process of ensuring your website is optimised for mobile users and it functions the same way on mobile as it does on desktop. A high proportion of users will browse a website via a mobile device and if your website is offering a poor mobile experience that could lead to users bouncing from the site and, more importantly, reduce conversions.

There are a lot more factors to consider when thinking about technical SEO however, if you get the main features right, then you put your website in a competitive position to perform well within organic search. Don’t stop there, it’s just as important to continually monitor your website’s technical health on a regular basis to ensure the site is passing the major technical elements that search engines are looking for.

SEO metrics to monitor success

There are many metrics that technical SEO can help improve, a successful strategy will get your website noticed and will reward you with the benefits that come with organic growth.

Below will outline some of the metrics that SEO can help to improve:

Organic visibility

Improving your organic visibility means you are appearing to more customers across search engines. The vast majority of online activity begins with a search on a search engine such as Google, so it’s important for you to make your website as visible as possible.

Rankings

More visibility doesn’t necessarily mean higher rankings, increasing visibility could mean you are ranking for a higher number of keywords, and it doesn’t give a true reflection of how your sites rankings have improved for target keywords. Ranking highly generally means more traffic which is likely to lead to more conversions, therefore it’s important to monitor your website ranking to measure success.

Traffic

More visibility and higher rankings should result in increased website traffic, and the beauty about SEO is that you can have a heavy influence on the type of traffic that hits your site.

Getting your technical SEO strategy correct can play a huge role in driving more sessions to your site.

Conversions

Implementing a successful technical SEO campaign will ultimately lead to more conversions. The main goal for any online business is to increase leads and/or revenue and technical SEO will play a huge role in the growth of online conversions. This also makes it important to ensure tracking is correctly set up on your site in order to monitor conversions successfully and ensure they are attributed to the correct channel.

Getting your Technical SEO strategy right

When your content is found, crawled and indexed by Google, your technical SEO strategy cannot stop there if you want your business to grow and sustain that growth within organic search.

The first step in any technical SEO strategy should be to audit your website, for this you need to consider a wide range of technical topics such as:

• Site Architecture & Navigation – The structure of a website is key to ensuring information is organised in a clear manner which users and search engines find easy to understand.
• Site Indexing – Indexation is the process of compiling data for easy access later. This is a core process in how search engines work and without this ability they would not be able to include the site in the search results. There are many ways in which you can control how your site is indexed such as XML sitemaps, robots.txt rules, meta robots tags, canonical tags, redirects rules, error pages etc. For e-commerce websites you may want to limit how Google crawl and index your pages, if you are using parameters or internal site search you may want to block those pages from being crawled by Google.
• Site Security – An unsecured website can allow for malicious attacks on your website. If your website is hacked, it could result in search engines and browsers flagging the issue to potential customers to warn them away.
• Site Speed – It is important for a page to load as quickly as possible to prevent the user from waiting for long periods of time. Any user frustration could cause them to leave the site without converting, which is something you want to avoid at all costs to maximise performance and revenue.
• Mobile Friendliness – This is the process of ensuring your website is optimised for mobile users and it functions the same way on mobile as it does on desktop. A high proportion of users will browse a website via a mobile device and if your website is offering a poor mobile experience that could lead to users bouncing from the site and, more importantly, reduce conversions.

There are a lot more factors to consider when thinking about technical SEO however, if you get the main features right, then you put your website in a competitive position to perform well within organic search. Don’t stop there, it’s just as important to continually monitor your website’s technical health on a regular basis to ensure the site is passing the major technical elements that search engines are looking for.

SEO metrics to monitor success

There are many metrics that technical SEO can help improve, a successful strategy will get your website noticed and will reward you with the benefits that come with organic growth.

Below will outline some of the metrics that SEO can help to improve:

Organic visibility

Improving your organic visibility means you are appearing to more customers across search engines. The vast majority of online activity begins with a search on a search engine such as Google, so it’s important for you to make your website as visible as possible.

Rankings

More visibility doesn’t necessarily mean higher rankings, increasing visibility could mean you are ranking for a higher number of keywords, and it doesn’t give a true reflection of how your sites rankings have improved for target keywords. Ranking highly generally means more traffic which is likely to lead to more conversions, therefore it’s important to monitor your website ranking to measure success.

Traffic

More visibility and higher rankings should result in increased website traffic, and the beauty about SEO is that you can have a heavy influence on the type of traffic that hits your site.

Getting your technical SEO strategy correct can play a huge role in driving more sessions to your site.

Conversions

Implementing a successful technical SEO campaign will ultimately lead to more conversions. The main goal for any online business is to increase leads and/or revenue and technical SEO will play a huge role in the growth of online conversions. This also makes it important to ensure tracking is correctly set up on your site in order to monitor conversions successfully and ensure they are attributed to the correct channel.