There’s more than what meets the eye when it comes to optimising your website for search engines. Executing an effective Technical SEO strategy is crucial for the functionality of your website and helping both Google and users read your content.
Google judges your website on its functionality and how well it runs behind the scenes. Your website can look pretty and offer your users quality content, but without a Technical SEO strategy in place then your keyword rankings can suffer.
Our guide will look at how you can implement a Technical SEO strategy that creates a powerful website for easy crawlability and provide users with a page experience that sets your website from the rest.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to improving the functionality and speed of a website for search engines and users on all devices, including desktop, mobile and desktop.
Search engines have bots that crawl and index pages to read their content. They want websites to be organised and easy to crawl, without taking longer routes. Users want to access the content they want quickly on the device they are on.
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Implementing an effective Technical SEO strategy has a direct impact on keyword rankings, which can influence clicks to your website, and determines how users behave on your page.
Google uses page experience as a direct ranking factor for your website, looking at all aspects that influence the functionality and speed of your website. If your website does not offer a page experience that is optimal for users, it can negatively impact keyword rankings and push listings further down the results page.
The functionality of your website can also change the way that users behave on your page. If users are looking at their watch whilst your page loads, or the content that they want to access cannot be found, they can become frustrated and leave your website to look at competitors. This can be damaging for both SEO, as well as lead generation.
How to Create a Technical SEO Strategy
Wanting to take your Technical SEO strategy to the next level for your website? Make sure that you are implementing these processes to ensure your website has the best chances of beating the competition.
Sitemap Management
Your sitemap is the bible for Google when crawling your website. They use your sitemap to find and access your pages to crawl your content.
To make sure that your sitemap is in order and make sure that your most important content isn’t being missed, it’s important to make sure that all the most recent versions of your pages are submitted to the sitemap and that any pages that aren’t needed in there are removed.
If you recently made site-wide content changes to your website or processed a site migration, it is important to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console so that the next time your website is crawled Google can see the changes.
Manage Crawl Budget Efficiency
Google is only able to crawl a certain number of pages at a time, so you need to let them know what pages you want to be crawled and what pages you .
For larger websites, managing crawl budget is vital for pushing your most important content to the front of the index and hiding pages that don’t need to be. This makes for a more efficient crawling process, helping with keyword rankings.
Directives are the best way to tell Google what content you want them to index or prioritise through your Sitemap and Robots.txt file.
Two simple directives that you can put in place to manage your crawl efficiency are:
- Robots meta tag -the robots meta tag instructs Google what you want to do with a certain page or piece of content. The most common robots meta tag used is ‘noindex’ which stops Google from adding it to their index.
- Disallow crawling – disallowing pages on your Robots.txt file tells Google that you don’t want that page to be crawled or shown on their search engines. This means that Google will also not follow any of the links on the page.
Improving the internal linking on your pages are another way of managing crawl budget efficiency. The more relevant links there are on a page, the quicker bots can continue on their crawling journey and access important content. Breadcrumbs are a great way to ensure that relevant pages are linked to one another; see how we’ve implemented breadcrumbs on our Shopify SEO page to give bots and users links to relevant pages:
URL Structure
The way that your URL’s are structured helps Google’s crawling efficiency and improve how they read the semantics of your pages. Keeping your URLs grouped and organised can help improve how efficiently your pages are crawled and help Google understand the semantic links between different pieces of content.
As opposed to the traditional way of creating pages by the slug following immediately after the domain, grouped URL structures consist of a parent page and child pages which can follow it. See how we grouped our URLs our WooCommerce SEO page to have a parent, child page and then sub-child page:
Page Speed
The speed of your page is a key signal to Google of your site’s page experience for the user and how easily they can access the content on your site. They judge the speed of your website on both mobile and desktop, so it’s important to consider both.
They use Core Web Vitals as a key indicator as to how well your page loads in, and the content appears on desktop or smart device screens. These look at several factors and provide an estimate page speed score.
Check out what your page speed score is and how it can be improved on https://pagespeed.web.dev/.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile browsing is now prominent than desktop browsing, which means that your website must be friendly for mobile users.
Mobile users will require different functionalities compared to desktop users, due to their smaller screens and touch features. This means that Google will address how easy your website can be used on mobile, looking at buttons, text size and readability.
Keyword Cannibalisation Management
Duplicate content can result in keyword cannibalisation, which causes multiple pages ranking for the same keyword. Whilst it can be beneficial to have some pages ranking on page 1 at the same time, keyword cannibalisation generally has a negative impact on a page’s potential keyword rankings.
To avoid pages cannibalising, it’s important to keep content together on one singular page and give it the best chance of ranking higher.
Another way to reduce cannibalisation is through canonicals, which indicate to Google which page you would like them to prioritise in the index. Canonicals are especially important for many eCommerce websites with paginated category pages and product variations that offer similar content.
Link Fixing
Links are navigational for bots and users, helping them sift through a website and access important content. Link errors can prolong this process and have a negative impact on the user experience, as well as crawl efficiency.
There are two types of common errors that can occur, which would require fixing.
3xx Links
3xx errors occur when the user has been redirected another page. Although redirection can be useful to direct users and bots to nearest relevant content, it is optimal to have the status code as a 201 which takes them straight to avoid slowing their journey.
4xx Links
4xx errors occur when a user reaches a dead end and can’t access the content they want as the webpage doesn’t exist or it has restricted access and might something like this:
If a page is showing a 4xx error codes then best practice is to show users a 404 page with information about what they should do next, or redirect the page to the nearest piece of relevant content.
Image Optimisation
Images on your website can affect your website’s page speed so it’s important to consider the file size of your images and their formatting.
Large image file sizes, due to their size parameters and quality of image, can take longer to load on the page which can negatively impact page experience for users. Similarly, image file formatting can also take longer load times. Despite sacrificing quality, file format WebP is often preferred over JPEG.
To give more information to Google about your images, it’s important to optimise your files by giving them an accurate file name, and add alt text to give a brief sentence overview about what’s happening in the image.
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Things to Consider for Your Technical SEO in 2024
SEO is an ever-changing and evolving phenomenon, with Google continuously changing their algorithms. To make sure that you stay with the times, there are thing that you should consider for your Technical SEO strategy in 2024.
Mobile-First Indexing
Mobile-first indexing refers to Google’s prioritisation of the mobile-version of a website in their index, over other desktop, or device types. This means that when they crawl your website, they will analyse your content and rank your pages to see how it is presented for mobile users.
This highlights the importance of ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and should be a part of your SEO strategy for 2024. If your website is not mobile friendly and users cannot read your content, then it can impact your keyword rankings and you are at risk of sending traffic off your website to your competitors.
New Core Web Vitals Released
Core Web Vitals was introduced in 2020 by Google as key metrics for website page speed and is how they assess the quality of a page’s user experience.
In March 2024, Google released INP as a brand-new Core Web Vital metric called INP (Interaction to Next Paint) that measures your website’s responsiveness for when a user interacts with a frame, and the next paint shows. To stay on top of your Core Web Vitals in 2024, you need to make sure that all of your interactive content on
Speak to an SEO Agency For Your Technical SEO
If your business is looking to execute an effective Technical SEO strategy, then you can speak to an SEO agency for your digital marketing.
Maxweb are a digital marketing agency that specialise in helping businesses improve their visibility through professional SEO services. For years our SEO team have helped businesses scale online and generate traffic to their website.
If you want to execute a Technical SEO strategy that helps drive traffic to your website and generate leads, then we’ll be happy to help. Speak to our team today to find out more about how we can help your growth in 2024.
Posted on Friday, April 12th, 2024 in SEO.
