Technical SEO focuses on optimising the infrastructure of a website, behind the page that you usually don’t see. This can include the coding of the site, how a page loads, etc.
Checking on the status of a site and improving technical SEO ensures that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines, ultimately improving organic rankings.
This guide will cover the key areas of technical SEO, the tools to use, common errors encountered, and the ways to fix them.
Technical SEO platforms
Lighthouse Reports
The first thing you should do when checking a website is to run a lighthouse report. You do this by going to their website, right clicking and selecting “Inspect”, then on the main menu of the box that appears, click the “>>” arrows to go to “Lighthouse”. From here, select to “Analyse Page Load” and then do a report for mobile and desktop each.
The number that appears will let you know how well this page is performing. Make a note of the date and the score that’s shown for the client to show our progress.
Common errors include “a large contentful paint” (or first), which is the time it takes for the most significant piece of content, like an image or a block of text, to fully load.
To fix this, you can reduce image size and quality so that it doesn’t slow the page, using a plug-in such as ShortPixel for WordPress, or by manually shrinking it yourself.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix is a similar tool that will give you a site score and tell you areas of improvements. The site will walk you through what each for the area mean, with ways to improve, such as installing plug-ins to aid the load speed of your site.
Simply copy your URL into their engine and see what it suggests. to see recommendations for the site also.
Google Search Console
Create a Gmail account and set up a Google Search Console profile. If using WordPress, install the Google Site Kit plug in to easily connect your website to the site.
Go into Google Search Console and select the ‘property’ (website) you want to look at. This will give you an overview of how your site is performing organically as well as via ads.
Click ‘Performance’ on the left menu, you’ll be able to view the total clicks, impressions, click-through rate (CTR) and average position you rank. This is a great place to review the efforts of your SEO work and see how it improves.
This Google support guide will walk you through setting up in more depth.
Key Errors in Technical SEO
Below is a guide of the common issues in technical SEO and how to fix these.
By correcting any errors on your site, Google will be able to crawl it easier and therefore rank your site more favourably. It’ll also improve your audience’s experience, making them more likely to engage with your brand.
1. Website Crawling and Indexing
To ensure that search engines can crawl and index your site efficiently, you need to pay attention to a few critical aspects. Tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and Ahrefs Site Audit can help you identify issues in this area.
Common errors include pages blocked by the robots.txt file, which prevents them from being crawled, and pages with noindex tags, which keep them out of search results. Additionally, crawl budget wastage occurs when irrelevant or low-priority pages are crawled.
To fix these issues, update your robots.txt file to ensure important pages are not blocked, review and remove noindex tags from necessary pages, and optimise your crawl budget by disallowing the crawling of low-priority pages.
2. Website Architecture
A well-structured website is crucial for both user experience and search engine optimisation. Tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Sitebulb can help you analyse and improve your site architecture.
Common issues include deeply nested pages, which are too many clicks away from the homepage, broken internal links, and a poor internal linking structure.
To address these problems, flatten your site structure to reduce the number of clicks needed to reach important pages, fix broken links, and create a robust internal linking strategy to ensure key pages receive adequate link equity.
Essentially, make your navigation clearer and ensure any important sites can be reached quickly via the homepage or the navigation menu.
3. Mobile Optimisation
With the increasing number of users accessing websites via mobile devices, mobile optimisation is essential. Google Mobile-Friendly Test, Google Search Console Mobile Usability Report, and Lighthouse are useful tools for this purpose.
Common errors include non-responsive design, slow mobile page load times, and touch elements that are too close together.
Implementing a responsive design ensures your website is mobile-friendly, optimising mobile speed involves compressing images, leveraging browser caching, and minifying CSS/JS, and improving touch usability by ensuring touch elements are appropriately spaced can resolve these issues.
Website builders such as WordPress will be able to help you through responsive designing, allowing you to see how your website appears on mobiles as well as desktop.
4. Site Speed
Site speed is a critical factor for both user experience and search engine ranking. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom can help you identify and fix speed-related issues.
Common problems include unoptimised images, render-blocking resources, and slow server response times.
Compressing images using image compression tools, minifying CSS and JavaScript to reduce file sizes, and optimising server performance through the use of content delivery networks (CDNs) can significantly improve site speed.
You can easily use a tool such as ShortPixel to shrink your images and help them load faster.
5. Structured Data
Structured data helps search engines understand the content of your website better, leading to enhanced search results. Tools such as the Google Structured Data Testing Tool, Schema Markup Generator, and SEMrush are invaluable for implementing and validating structured data.
Common errors include incorrectly implemented schema markup and missing structured data for important content.
Using these tools to validate your structured data and implementing the appropriate markup on relevant pages can enhance your website’s visibility in search results.
6. Canonicalisation- Duplicate PAGES
Canonicalisation helps prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a web page. Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Ahrefs can help you identify and fix canonicalisation issues.
Common errors include duplicate content and incorrect canonical tags. Setting canonical URLs correctly and using 301 redirects to direct duplicate pages to the canonical URL can resolve these issues and ensure that search engines understand the preferred version of your content.
7. HTTPS
Securing your website with HTTPS is essential for both user trust and search engine ranking. Tools like SSL Test by Qualys and Google Search Console can help you identify and fix HTTPS-related issues.
Common problems include mixed content, where both HTTP and HTTPS resources are present on the same page, and expired SSL certificates.
Ensuring all resources are loaded over HTTPS and keeping SSL certificates updated can resolve these issues and provide a secure browsing experience for users.
8. XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps help search engines understand the structure of your website and find all the important pages. Google Search Console and XML-Sitemaps.com are useful tools for creating and submitting sitemaps.
Common errors include missing sitemaps and incorrect URLs within the sitemap. Generating an XML sitemap, submitting it to Google Search Console, and ensuring it is regularly updated with new content can help search engines index your site more efficiently.
9. Robots.txt
The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages they can and cannot crawl. Tools like Google Search Console Robots.txt Tester and Screaming Frog can help you check and optimize your robots.txt file.
Common errors include blocking important pages and syntax errors in the robots.txt file. Reviewing and updating your robots.txt file to ensure that important pages are not blocked and correcting any syntax errors can improve your site’s crawlability.
10. URL Structure
A clean and descriptive URL structure is important for both users and search engines.
Tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog can help you analyse and optimise your URL structure. Common errors include non-descriptive URLs, excessively long URLs, and dynamic URLs with unnecessary parameters. Ensuring your URLs are short, descriptive, and keyword-rich, and avoiding dynamic parameters where possible can enhance your site’s SEO performance.
Technical SEO is fundamental to the success of your overall SEO strategy. Regular audits using the mentioned tools and addressing common errors will ensure that your website remains optimised for search engines.
By focusing on these key areas, of technical SEO, you can improve your site’s visibility, usability, and performance, leading to better search engine rankings and a superior user experience.
Unsure of where to start with technical SEO? Contact our team today and we can conduct a full audit of your site and help to get it running smoothly and efficiently. You can view our SEO services here.
Leave a Reply