Setting Up An SEO Strategy: Technical SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been the focus on the blog for a little while now. We began by looking at what exactly SEO entails as well as its importance. We’ve focused on how to improve SEO strategy by detailing the process of keyword research. Last time we focused solely on on-page optimization, and today we are going to look at another aspect of SEO: Technical SEO.
Just as it sounds, technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its rankings on search engines. Just like with on-page optimization, it’s about helping search engines find, crawl, and index all the pages of your website easily. Now, we could really go into the weeds here with these technical factors because that is the world of programmers and coders, but we’re going to try to keep it as simple as possible.
So, let’s talk about a few vital points of technical SEO that can help improve your site’s results.
1. Site Architecture & Internal Linking
So, admittedly, whenever your site is brand new or only has a few pages, the architecture of your site is pretty simple and doesn’t require much work to index. However, as a site grows, how it’s organized can make a huge difference. There should be a hierarchy to your website that organizes your pages into categories. We’ve attached an image to help you visualize the way your website should flow.
Along with this, you should be including internal links to your high-priority pages. All we mean by this is that you should be using hyperlinks to point to different pages on your website. As an easy example of this, we’ll have a hyperlink at the bottom of this blog linking you back to our web design and development services.
2. Mobile Optimization
In regards to SEO, mobile optimization is pretty much required. One reason for that is because Google uses the mobile version of your website as its “main” version for ranking search engine results. Also, mobile traffic accounts for almost 60% of all web searches, so you need your website to be functioning properly on mobile devices.
Some common ways to improve your mobile optimization include using responsive design (which ensures everything functions properly on different screen sizes), not using popups or ads, using appropriate font sizes, and making sure all of your buttons/menus are easy to tap.
If you are wondering if you have any mobile usability issues, then you can check out Google Search Console if you have verified your site with it. Their Core Web Vitals section will point out any problems.
3. Page Speed
Unsurprisingly, the loading time of your website’s pages is another important factor. Not only are faster loading websites a better user experience, it actually does impact SEO. Google has used page speed as a ranking factor since 2018. Everything from mobile-friendliness and your sitemap to image compression and HTTPS security can impact your page speed. Now, luckily, you don’t have to guess what’s appropriate on page speed. Google has a PageSpeed Insights tool that will check your page speed. It’ll give a 0-100 performance rating as well as a list of things you can do to speed things up.
This isn’t everything that falls under Technical SEO, but this gives you a small crash course into the type of technical aspects that might need to be optimized. Have you attempted to optimize any of these areas? Comment and let us know.
One of the services we offer here at The Digital Shore is web design, so if you’d like more information about our web design process, you can click here.
We’ll keep talking about the components of an SEO Strategy in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.