TLDR;
Technical SEO is all about crawlability, indexability, speed, and other foundational elements responsible for passing Google core web vitals and attaining optimal organic SERP rankings. And of course creating the best possible experience (which also influences ranking factors).
It doesn’t involve content creation, keyword research, backlink building, or social media strategies. But it does control how well your website ranks.
Without explaining processes, the following post is how I champion the proactive outcomes of technical SEO to clients who don’t appreciate the behind-the-scenes effort that goes into building a brand, which begins with building a website, which begins with building the foundation for recognition.
After all, don’t we all just want to be recognized?
Why Technical SEO Matters
Technical SEO has a lot of layers and it’s easy to find yourself running after perfect web vital scores. But somewhere between perfection and effective engagement, is the pièce de résistance of optimal user experience, followed by higher SERPs which in turn attracts more traffic. It’s a 3-pronged experience that pays dividends for your business.
Understanding it helps paint a more robust picture on the multi-faceted approach that web design plays in establishing your business as a go-to brand in your niche.
It’s also something that can’t be controlled, troubleshooted (troubleshot?), or ignored at the hand of a website builder. Which is why I advocate for self-hosted websites as adamantly as I do. It’s something that I spend the majority of my time and budget on to reach my own (or my clients) website’s full potential via top core web vital scores.
How Important is Technical SEO, Really?
Technical SEO is often dismissed as a non-essential facet of building an online presence, likely because it takes time, intentionality, and effort. In fact, I can confidently generalize (in my experience) that the majority of agencies and freelancers might put in a bare minimum effort but as a rule, technical SEO isn’t something they devote more than 10 minutes to.
I know. I’ve worked for an agency that never bothered with this; I’ve known other agencies who don’t bother; I’ve known freelancers who avoid it like the plague; and I’ve looked for websites that can only be found by specially typing in their URL (because they doesn’t show up otherwise). I know of which I speak.
To be clear, technical SEO can literally make or break your brand by the degree of anonymity you solicit. And no business wants to be anonymous.
What Is Technical SEO?
Brian Dean sees technical SEO as, “the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings.
Ahrefs sees technical SEO as, “the practice of optimizing your website to help search engines find, crawl, understand, and index your pages. It helps increase visibility and rankings in search engines.”
Whatever way you slice it, it helps to have a solid understanding of Google’s RankBrain, Backlinko’s Technical SEO Guide (and Ahref’s guide), and of course, a helpful post about Google Search’s leaked internal algorithm documentation if you want to build next-level websites, which will never happen without optimizing for technical SEO.
Key Aspects of Technical SEO
Google’s Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics that Google has identified as essential to user experience, which ultimately affects your website’s ranking. Hence, SEO. They focus on loading performance, interactivity, and the visual stability of a webpage.
For the curious-minded, Sematext offers a great 8-min lo-down on core web vitals and webdev guru James Quick gives a helpful use case for troubleshooting INP (measures responsiveness).
Core web vitals are the quintessential place to start benchmarking technical SEO elements. And for good reason. Meeting these standards is proven to result in better crawlability and indexing. This means your pages are more likely to appear in SERPs for relevant keywords, which ultimately increases organic traffic.
Main Benefits Of Technical SEO
The following list is by no means exhaustive but is a good place to start.
1. Improved Website Performance
Site performance is directly impacted by site structure and site design.
Site Structure / website architecture (permalinks, intuitive navigation, breadcrumbs, internal linking, anchor text, etc.) refers to how logical content on your site is organized and inter-connected. Think, categories.
Website navigation not only helps visitors find information quickly but also makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. It helps to organize your content into (sub)categories with clear, descriptive names.
And here’s something that the average bear likely doesn’t know…
As of July 2024, prioritizing your website for mobile-friendliness just became your #1 priority because the desktop version of your website will no longer be indexed!
And if you aren’t familiar with the nuances of mobile-first indexing, there’s a good chance that you’ll experience some disruption in your SERP positioning.
Adding to the list of performance factors…
Content Delivery Network (CDN) services reduce latency, improve load times, and specifically improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID). They do this by distributing your content across multiple global servers to ensure faster load times, regardless of a user’s location.
Custom caching strategies also result in faster loading times. They also directly influence LCP by storing static versions of your pages so they’ll load quicker. This reduces the load on your server and speeds up load times.
Minifying CSS, HTML, JS, and miscellaneous scripts also directly influence your LCP score.
Robots.txt controls which pages search bots can/can’t crawl.
Indexability, XML sitemaps, errors, and 301 redirects bring up the rear of the factors that affect your website’s performance (and ultimate ranking) along with image optimization which compresses and resizes images, reducing their load on your website and contributing to faster page load times.
And in case there was ever a doubt, page speed IS a ranking factor.
Technical SEO improves your website’s loading speed, making it more user-friendly, leading to lower bounce rates, and subsequently, higher dwell time.
Site Design
The design in the details. Like, page titles, metadata, links (internal, external, anchor text), structured data markup code (rich snippets require this), and avoiding duplicate content, robots.txt files, sitemaps, you get the idea.
Strategic formatting is the kind of thing that draws attention to your content without giving readers the slightest impression that they’re reading something through a “technical” lens.
Duplicate content is the kind of thing that can hurt your chances of ranking well just from being repetitive (link to content, don’t copy it).
And rich snippets are the magnum opus of your SEO efforts. When you see these, give yourself a cookie.
Snippets are automatically created from page content which contains custom code known as schema markup. No schema, no snippets. Schema markup (generated automatically or manually) tells search engine spiders about the content on a page.
Ahrefs walks DIY-ers through adding schema markup to your website.
You also want to take advantage of internal linking to guide users and search engines to important pages on your site because Google advocate, John Mueller has affirmed that linking is important for SEO.
2. Increased Organic Traffic
It goes without saying that optimal site performance will result in higher SERP positioning and therefore, more traffic. And of course, if you’ve done your job on the content side of things, once a user visits your website, and it’s answering their search query, those people will reward you with longer dwell time and repeat visits.
3. Better User Experience
Increased traffic to your website often means better performance scores which means better SERPs which means more traffic which means better UX which means better performance scores which means ….
While much of your visitors’ experience is realized through content, strategic marketing, and engagement, the kind of UX delivered through technical SEO is circular – the better the SEO, the better the UX; the better the UX, the better Google rewards your website with high web vital scores.
4. Improved Security
This is the natural by-product of pre-empting vulnerabilities and implementing security best practices. Whether that be from using HTTPS and SSL certificates or other security protocols that focus on meeting core web vitals for consistent uptime and trust (UX).
Plus, I would be remiss if I didn’t emphasize the importance of hosting your website with a reputable hosting provider because you absolutely get what you pay for. Choose with your eyes open, read the fine print, and keep your fingers crossed for never having to deal with malware attacks or recovering compromised data because $5/mo won’t bail you out of that boat!
The right host will preclude the need for code-heavy backup or security plugins with multiple firewalls and priority malware intervention.
And while we’re on the subject of plugins, don’t think that you have to keep them all activated – some plugins have no functionality after they’ve been applied and can be deactivated, especially optimization plugins. Simply reactivate them when needed.
Monitoring and Maintaining Technical SEO
Regular technical SEO audits are the best way to track your website’s performance over time. The best results are realized from Google Search Console as well as paid tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog.
Working with a conscientious web designer who uses such tools can be worth the price of a retainer (which covers other peripheral services like maintenance, backups, and other negotiated activities).
Key Takeaways
By understanding and implementing technical SEO through a self-hosted website, you can significantly enhance your website’s performance along with providing optimal user experience.
One of the biggest advantages of self-hosted websites is the level of control and customization they offer. Unlike hosted platforms, self-hosted sites allow you to tweak every aspect of your site to optimize for technical SEO.
If you’re not a DIYer, book a call to learn how we might work together to unlock your website’s full potential. You don’t have to be a great conversationalist, just someone who recognizes that their website is a business asset that needs to be setup properly.
