Lost traffic, ranking, and revenue; this is what you’ll find at the end of it all if you don’t pay heeds to some of the most important aspects of Technical SEO. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Technical SEO is absolutely critical to your business success, and more so, long-term business success. From site structure to SSL, sitemaps to page speed, mobile-friendliness to cannibalization, these are the top 6 metrics of Technical SEO that you need to be proactive about, from the very beginning, if possible. So, if you are planning to finally start SEO on your website or stuck on as to why things aren’t progressing for you, give it a read.
Optimize Site Structure
To ensure that your users and crawlers can make sense of your website, you should optimize your site’s architecture on priority. Doing so should guarantee that there is some order in place and things flow fluidly, including the hierarchy of pages and each page’s design in general and its chances of getting crawled and indexed at the earliest.
The ‘S’ at the End of HTTP is Critical
One of the key ranking factors that dictates whether or not your website will see the light of day on the first page of Google is the SSL certificate. If your web address still displays HTTP and not HTTPS, you can kiss your chances of getting crawled and indexed by Google goodbye. On top of that, you are to lose out on the trust factor that comes to users naturally when they see that tiny lock on the left side of your sit’s URL.
Optimize for XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps serve as a roadmap to your website, making it possible for search engines to navigate across different pages with ease, and ranking them as per merit. If you are new to the game and don’t quite understand the concept, there are many free SEO plugins out there including Yoast that will automate the process. Without proper sitemaps in place, your website won’t be crawled, indexed, and subsequently, ranked.
Optimize Page Speed Time
It remains one of the most important technical SEO metrics (also probably the most overlooked) and a huge, huge ranking factor. Thousands of website give little to no regard to how quickly their pages load. Slow load time negatively affects your rankings as it increases the bounce rate and ruins the user experience, two of the most important aspects when it comes to executing powerful SEO.
Mobile-friendly Equals SEO-friendly
With Google moving inching closer to 100% mobile-first indexing, if your site is not optimized for mobiles and other handheld devices, the chances of you reaching the first page will get slimmer and slimmer. Increasing font sizes, compressing images while keeping the quality intact, using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) are some of the few ways your website can inch towards mobile-friendliness and get indexed and ranked faster.
Avoid Keyword Cannibalization
When two or more of the pages within the same website have the same target keyword phrase, it results in keyword cannibalization issues. It means that both pages start eating the other’s chances of getting ranked higher because search engines don’t know which page to prioritize for ranking purposes when users enter the search query. Run a thorough audit to ensure this isn’t the case.
Providing an excellent user experience backed by solid technical foundation is the cornerstone of every successful SEO campaign. Without it, it just won’t do. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. But if you can manage to execute the above tips and execute it well, you will set course towards your website being appearing at the top of the search results.
