What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to optimization efforts for various features on the backend of your website and server that help your site appear in better health to search engines. This allows them to improve crawlability to digest your site’s content. Technical SEO has nothing to do with the actual content on the website, unlike on-page SEO, but instead focuses on the infrastructure of the site.

Some aspects we address while conducting technical SEO strategies include the following:

Website Security/HTTPS

An SSL certificate confirms that your website is secure, letting visitors know that it’s safe to enter their private information, such as an email address or credit card number, on the site.

Additionally, site security is one of the many factors that Google considers when ranking sites, making it a very important part of search engine optimization.

A Mobile-Friendly Experience

Another key part of technical SEO is ensuring that your site is mobile friendly. Most likely, a portion of traffic to your website will come from mobile, meaning it is crucial that your site is mobile friendly.

Additionally, mobile-first indexing means that Google will typically use the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. Therefore, in order to improve your rankings on Google, your site needs to be mobile friendly.

Sitemaps

A sitemap contains all the URLs on your website and is essential for search engines to be able to read the pages on your website. You send this pertinent information to search engines through a variety of WordPress plugins, as well as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools, to help new content on your website be found and indexed.

Site Speed

Site speed is a measurement of how quickly the content on a website page loads. Search engines prefer websites that load quickly, and Google has indicated that site speed is an important ranking factor.

Website visitors also prefer a website that loads quickly, and data shows that longer load times negatively affect conversion rates. Some of the ways you can improve your site speed include:

  • Reducing image file sizes
  • Condensing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files with a file compression software application
  • Decreasing redirects
  • Removing any unused code or unnecessary characters
  • Implementing browser caching
  • Improving server response time
  • Addressing various other aspects that Google deems to be core web vitals

Metadata

Metadata plays a key role in technical SEO. It’s important to have relevant and descriptive metadata on all of the pages on your website. Meta titles and descriptions help both the search engine and the visitor better understand what information is on a page.

Metadata is also important for images, as alt and title tags on photos play a factor in ADA compliance and help users who use additional accessibility tools to read web pages.

Removing Duplicate Content

Another aspect of technical SEO is ensuring that there is no duplicate content on your site. If there are multiple pages on your website with identical content, Google may get confused and not know which page to rank, and therefore will rank all of the pages lower.

Not only does duplicate content make you look spammy in the eyes of Google, but it can also confuse website visitors. There are a number of ways to resolve the issue of duplicate content on your site. Some suggestions include:

  • Delete and redirect pages with duplicate copy
  • Rewrite the copy
  • Add canonical URLs

Schema

Schema is a piece of code on a website that enables search engines to read your site with ease. There are a variety of types of schema and each provides the search engine with different information. Common types of schema include:

  • Services
  • Local business
  • Event
  • Products
  • Video
  • Article

Noindexing and Redirects

If you have recently redesigned your website, or have deleted pages or products over the years, it is likely that you may have a handful of 404 errors on your site that are being indexed by Google, leading users to dead pages.

Noindexing these pages to remove them from search results, and also redirecting them, helps put your website in a better position in case these pages are linked throughout your site and on other sites on the internet.

Additional Site Condensing

On top of condensing your website by noidexing and redirecting pages, we briefly touched on canonicalizing URLs to shore up duplicate content. This can also apply to legitimate pages on your site that are sub-pages of product categories, since these help search engine crawlers read and comprehend the purpose of your site’s content.

Page Structure

Does your site have suitable headers and formatting? A proper hierarchy of H1, H2s, H3s, and so on allow Google and other search engines to better read your site, and also provide better visual cues for visitors to find important sections of content on your pages.

Lead Source Tracking

Although it doesn’t affect SEO directly, having lead source information from your site can help your team see ROI data from the SEO work being done. Lead source tracking utilizes a piece of code that is implemented on your website that tells you where your leads came from, whether it’s SEO, PPC, direct, referral, or elsewhere.

With this piece of code in place, you will be able to see which channel is bringing in the most leads. Through this information, you can make strategic digital marketing decisions that will help increase conversions.

Why Choose Our Technical SEO Services?

Curious what makes us different from other agencies that provide technical SEO services? We pride ourselves on the following:

  • We craft a unique strategy to match your marketing goals and priorities
  • Our team of writers, designers and strategists have over 25+ years of collective industry experience and all work in-house
  • We have worked with clients in a variety of industries
  • We focus on showing you results and always make strategic decisions based on data
  • Our team is proficient in all types of SEO, including no only technical, but local, on-page, and off-page as well
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Contact Us for Technical SEO Services You Can Trust

Located in Cleveland, Sixth City Marketing is a digital marketing agency focused on providing data-driven results to all of our clients. In addition to our technical SEO services, we also offer the following:

Contact us today to learn more about our technical SEO services. We are ready to help you!

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