Technical SEO

Technical SEO is one of the three main pillars of Search Engine Optimisation (On-page and Off-page SEO beign the other two). It is a crucial activity in order to audit a website and determine what SEO strategy to adopt.

I personally like to run a tech audit as the first step, when taking a client on. It does not necessarily have to be long and extremely comprehensive, as a good tech audit can easily uncover the most prominent problems of a site even in a couple of hours (depending on the size of the site, of course). Technical SEO is the foundational work you need to get right, in order to allow your site to be in a position to do well in SEO.By auditing a site from a technical point of view, SEOs are then able to create a list of issues, broken down by priority. Such prioritisation is key when developing an SEO roadmap for a client, making sure to address first what will have the biggest impact.

My brilliant colleagues at Distilled created a wonderful checklist that I normally use when doing the task. It is extremely easy to follow, the explanation is spot on and it is very comprehensive!

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the practice of optimising a website for crawling and indexing, but also includes any technical process meant to improve its search visibility. 

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO allows your site to be technically sound, making sure search engines are able to “find” your website and “store” its information correctly. You may have the most interesting website ever, but if Google cannot find it, what use does it have?

Some of the technical SEO tasks

Among the most popular technical SEO tasks that we, as SEOs, perform on our clients’ websites, we have the following:

  • Site-wide technical audit:

    Analysis of all the possible elements that can prevent your entire site from performing at its best, from a technical point of view.

  • Site speed audit:

    Analysis of the speed of main page templates on your site, compared to direct competitors. Page speed has become a mobile ranking factor since 2018, so yes, it is important!
  • Structured data audit:

    Audit of your current structured data, identifying errors and opportunities for your site to implement new markups, with the intention to help the overall click-through-rate.
  • Hreflang tags audit:

    Analysis of the existing hreflang configuration of an international website, identifying errors and opportunities to implement a correct set up, with the intention to help rankings and overall user experience.
  • Backlink audit:

    Analysis of the quantity and quality of the backlinks pointing to a site, making sure they meet Google’s guidelines, so to avoid the risk of a penalty.

  • Log file analysis:

    Audit of the information provided by the logs of a site, in order to find key insights that help webmasters understand how search engines crawl their websites.

FAQ

Most frequent questions and answers

It is the process that search engines use to discover new and updated content. Search engines, such as Google, are provided with sophisticated prommages called “spiders” that inspect the web looking for pages, by following links (both internal and external).

Once search engines have discovered pages on the web, they need to store a copy of their content in order for such information to be available to servers when users enter search queries. The index is nothing more than a large database where all this data is contained.

Logs are files from your web server that record any requests that such a server receives. Logs are often used for technical audits to help webmasters understand key insights about how search engines crawl a site, discovering patterns and errors that will help them make decisions about their SEO strategy.

Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another: if a site X links to a site Y, then such site Y has a backlink. From an SEO point of view, backlinks constitute a very important factor. Not only do they help search engines discover your pages (crawling happens via links) and allow your site to get additional traffic (classified as referral traffic) but they are also seen as “signs of confidence/authority” within the ranking algorithm, as they signal to search engines that other sites out there vouch for your content.

Structured data is a standardised format to mark up the information about the web page, helping search engines better understand its content. Search engines use structured data to trigger special search result features and enhancements. These enhancements in the search engine result page (SERP) can impact your click-through rate (CTR) and, therefore, increase your organic traffic, as they are more visually appealing and offer more information to searchers.

Hreflang tags are a technical solution which is key for international websites. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use hreflang tags to specify to search engines the language and geographical targeting of a webpage.

The benefit is two-fold: not only the user lands on the correct page from a geographical and language perspective (having the right user experience on your site), but also these tags prevent the problem of duplicate content in the eyes of search engines.

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