Technical SEO: 5-Minute Guide

You don’t need to know a lot about technical SEO.

For business owners, we here at TGC always recommend that you delegate these tasks to web developers.

However, it’s never a bad idea to have a general idea of the technical aspects of SEO.

After all, if your dev gets technical SEO wrong, you can say goodbye to anyone finding your website.

So what is technical SEO?

Why is it so important?

And what does working on technical SEO look like?

Let’s find out in this quick 5-minute guide!

What is Technical SEO?

Why is Technical SEO Vital?

Typical Technical SEO Tasks

What is Technical SEO?

The Technical Things

Technical SEO is the branch of SEO that deals with your website’s performance and how well search engines like Google can crawl it.

In short, the technical things.

By now, you should know that the goal of SEO is to put your website on the top of search engine rankings.

However, if your website is extremely slow, is filled with broken pages, or can’t be found by Google’s crawlers, you’ll never get to the top.

Remember, search engines like Google want to put the best websites on the top.

If they detect multiple technical issues on your site, they won’t give it a good ranking – and you won’t be able to reach your potential customers.

But that’s not all technical SEO is about.

Indexing Your Site Effectively

Technical SEO isn’t all about ensuring there aren’t any errors.

It’s also about optimizing the technical parts of your website so that crawlers index your site as effectively as possible.

Remember, you can’t rank for your target keywords if Google doesn’t know what your page is about.

While good content and on-page SEO should be enough to help them understand what you’re trying to rank for – technical SEO can give you an extra push in the right direction (we’ll show you how in a bit).

Is it necessary?

How important is making it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your website?

On a basic level, as long as your site doesn’t have any obvious errors, you should be good to go.

However, if you’re trying to rank for a tough keyword, doing everything to get an extra edge is necessary.

Big keywords can get very competitive. To win these, you’ll have to use everything at your disposal.

Why Technical SEO is Vital

If your website is full of technical errors, you will NEVER reach your audience.

You will never rank for keywords.

You will never build traffic.

You will never get leads.

And you will NEVER get any sales from your websites.

Does “never” sound too harsh?

Well, it’s the truth.

All your efforts on SEO will fall flat if your website is riddled with technical errors.

Think of it this way:

You can have a fantastic product and back it up with the best content in the world – but you won’t get anything from it if your site doesn’t load!

Technical SEO is the foundation of all your SEO efforts.

If there are cracks, the whole building will collapse.

Typical Technical SEO Tasks

Okay…

So now that we got what technical SEO is and why it’s important out of the way, let’s look at some of the typical things that affect your website’s technical SEO.

If you have a web developer on your team, it’s good to talk about these things with them.

After all, these are the types of things they eat for breakfast.

They include:

Choosing a good web hosting provider
Finding broken links
Monitoring page speed
Submitting a sitemap
Adding markups

And more.

Let’s take a very quick look at these.

Web Hosting

Your hosting plays a big role in technical SEO.

Choose a bad host, and your site will constantly be crashing.

Choose a cheap hosting plan, and your site will slow down tremendously if you get plenty of traffic.

While plenty of people don’t consider web hosting a part of technical SEO, a bad hosting company can ruin your entire site.

Broken Pages

Have you ever found yourself clicking on a button, only to be directed to a page that doesn’t exist?

That can be extremely frustrating.

If your site has lots of these broken pages and broken links, it will negatively affect your visitors’ experience.

That’s why when search engines spot these (and mind you, it’s VERY easy for them to spot these), they’ll drop your site down the order.

Monitoring Page Speed

Everyone knows page speed is a ranking factor.

But does it matter if your website loads .0001 seconds slower than your competitors?

Probably not.

As long as your website isn’t a drag to move around, this shouldn’t be a problem.

However, if your website is full of animations, giant images, and autoplay videos, this might be a problem.

That’s why web developers should know how to put up a beautiful site without sacrificing page speed.

To do this, they resize images, use plugins, and avoid turn off autoplay for videos.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are a map of your site for crawlers.

They show these spiders how your website is designed and how the pages connect to one another.

Submitting a sitemap to Google Search Console is an easy and surefire way to boost your technical SEO.

Why let Google figure out how your site is structured when you can submit a map to them?

It’ll make it so much easier for Google to crawl and index every page on your site.

Markups (Schema)

Adding structured data markups is another way to help crawlers understand what your page is about.

Plus, there’s also a chance you’ll get more real estate on the SERPs.

What do we mean?

Take a look at this SERP of “Bluehost Review”:

And compare it with this one:

Have you noticed how there’s so much more information on the second one?

There’s the date founded, star ratings, number of reviews, and links to BlueHost vs other hosting providers.

That’s because digital.com added structured data to their page.

Google then picked this up and used it to add more information on their SERP result.

This makes it take up more space and is a lot more attractive for people searching as well.

Ready to Work on Technical SEO?

There’s a lot more involved in technical SEO than just those.

But those five tasks should give you an idea of what working on technical SEO looks like and some of the results it can bring you.

So…

Are you ready to work on your technical SEO?

Probably not.

Again, it’s one thing to know what needs to be done, and it’s quite another to do it.

That’s why we highly recommend getting a web developer to handle these tasks.

If you’re looking for someone to handle these technical aspects – and ALSO handle the rest of your SEO strategy – sign up for our FREE audit today and find out how!

and find out how we can work together to rock your online marketing!