Table of Contents
Introduction
Since websites have many moving elements, it’s vital to optimize them to be functional, user-friendly, and fast to create successful site marketing. Technical SEO is one of these elements and it focuses on improving your site’s infrastructure.
It is essential as it makes sure your site is easy to use and doesn’t have technical issues that can prevent it from ranking high on search results pages (SERPs). For this reason, it’s crucial to use technical SEO to generate organic traffic and convert it to customers.
Let’s explore the importance of technical SEO and its key benefits.
What Is Technical SEO?
It is a part of SEO that focuses on improving your website’s infrastructure so that search engines can easily crawl and index it. It handles the technical elements of your site, including page speed, sitemaps, URL structure, site navigation, schema, etc. Here’s a handy technical SEO checklist for effective website optimization.
Your website needs to be technically optimized if your goal is to generate organic traffic because website content and design are futile unless users can access and navigate it.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
While many site owners understand the significance of on-page SEO, they often avoid the technical part of SEO, as it looks tricky. However, technical SEO is essential as it allows search engines to crawl your website and rank it in the SERPs.
Technical SEO encompasses all elements that make your site functional, fast, user-friendly, and easy to use. Without technical SEO, your website has an appealing look but loads slowly, can’t be used on smartphones, doesn’t guide users to where they want to go, or glitches when they attempt to buy your services or products.
5 Key Benefits of Technical SEO
Now that you know the importance of technical SEO, let’s move to some of its key benefits.
1. Better Rankings
Technical SEO can improve your site’s ranking for the target keywords, driving more organic traffic to the landing pages. When your website has a clear structure, Google can index and show content more efficiently, leading to improved rankings.
Moreover, Google prefers fast page load speed, meaning if your pages load fast, Google will rank them higher than the pages that load slowly.
2. Improved Web Page Speed
Page speed is one of the most vital factors Google considers when ranking pages and technical SEO is essential to improve it. A website that loads quickly typically gets a higher ranking. On the other hand, a slow website increases bounce rates, resulting in poor conversions.
Several factors can slow a website, like poorly optimized images, no compression of content, tricky page templates, and pages with many CSS requests.
When implementing structured schema markup, you describe to search engines what your page contains, get rankings, and gain more exposure. Moreover, with a mobile-friendly website, you enhance the user experience. That’s why it’s vital to have a flexible site that loads quickly on different platforms.
To help your site load faster, you can use fast hosting, minimize HHTP requests, and utilize several CSS sheets. Also, consider reducing your image sizes and compressing your pages by eliminating unneeded spaces and line breaks.
3. No Duplicate Content
If you’re using canonical URLs, canonicalization is a great way to get rid of duplicate content. It refers to selecting a favored URL in case multiple choices exist for a page. You can prevent duplicate content via frequent technical audits.
The search engine can penalize the website if there’s the same content on several pages of your website. To prevent this, make sure to distinguish one page from another with a title, meta description, and heading tags.
However, different URLs may display the same content because of technical issues. While this won’t affect your visitors, the search engines will notice the same content on a separate URL.
You can use Yoast SEO to make canonical URLs for all pages. Moreover, Yoast inserts self-referencing canonical links to pages to discourage duplicate content you may not know about otherwise.
4. Structured Data
Structured data is vital to websites regarding their performances. It refers to the code you add to your site so the search engines can understand the content better, helping them better index your website and offer more useful results.
It can also improve results by offering rich snippets, such as star ratings. Since they are more attractive and outlined relevant information for users, they can boost your clickthrough rate (CTR) and generate more traffic to your website. And search engines prefer websites with higher CTRs.
5. Better Website Structure
Technical SEO also improves the structure of your website. Site pages should be reachable in three clicks or less. If your pages sit deeper, you’ll likely need to improve your website’s structure because when pages sit deeper, they are less likely to be discovered by users and search engines. Technical SEO will mark those pages in the issues section of your website’s audit.
Technical SEO Is Vital to Your Website
Technical SEO is critical as it set the base for other SEO parts, holding them together. For this reason, you should make it a priority when optimizing your site. Besides ranking higher and generating more organic traffic, it also points out other SEO parts that have some room for improvement. For example, without technical issues fixed, not even the best keywords will be able to rank you higher.
Whether your website is old or new, you probably have some issues regarding technical SEO that may impede your rankings. Fortunately, many problems can be solved. The best way to fix those issues is to order a technical SEO audit. This way, you’ll be able to determine and address any technical problems that may slow your traffic. Working with an SEO expert will help prevent expensive errors and save you money and time.
Good luck!