What Is Technical SEO
An effective SEO marketing strategy is built around three key components: on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. If you neglect any of them, your other efforts might not produce the desired results.
Technical SEO is particularly essential, as it ensures your website is easy to navigate and free from technical issues that can prevent it from being understood and ranked by search engines. In this article, we’ll discuss what is technical SEO and its benefits to your site.
What exactly is technical SEO, and how does it differ from on-page and off-page SEO?
Technical SEO optimizes a website’s underlying structure and back-end to help search engines crawl, index and understand its content efficiently. It focuses on site speed, mobile-friendliness, architecture and XML sitemaps. Technical SEO is a critical component of an SEO strategy, along with on-page SEO, which focuses on content, and off-page SEO, which concentrates on backlinks.
Why is technical SEO so important for my website?
A strong SEO foundation starts with technical SEO. A well-optimized SEO infrastructure ensures that search engines can easily crawl, render and index your site. Without it, even the best content may remain invisible in search results.
It also affects how users interact with your site. According to the SEO experts at Forthgear, technical SEO enhances website performance SEO by making pages load faster, securing your site with HTTPS and ensuring mobile responsiveness. This is essential because users normally leave when they encounter a slow loading speed, errors or poor navigation. This informs search engines that your site isn’t helpful and can result in lower rankings, fewer clicks and lost conversions.
What are the most common technical SEO issues, and how can I fix them?
Being faced with the same technical SEO issues repeatedly can be frustrating. These prevalent challenges can be persistent and disruptive, impacting your site performance and search visibility.
Fortunately, most of these issues are avoidable and can be fixed. Here are the eight most common technical SEO issues and how to fix them.
Slow page speed
Page speed, also known as load speed, is a confirmed Google ranking factor that measures how quickly your web page’s content loads. If your website doesn’t load quickly, your audience will look for alternatives.
Users are 32% more likely to bounce when page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds. Search engines will also notice and drop your search engine ranking.
How to fix it:
· Use Google Page Speed Checker to detect and fix specific issues
· Compress and optimize images
· Minify your CSS, JavaScript and HTML
· Use browser caching
· Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Mobile unfriendliness
More than half of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, so Google uses a mobile-first search engine indexing approach. For this reason, it’s likely that your website will be ignored if it’s not mobile-friendly.
How to fix it:
· Utilize a responsive design that adjusts to various screen sizes
· Test your site with Google’s mobile-friendly test and fix any issues it flags
· Simplify the menu
· Use the recommended font sizes
Crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when search engine bots encounter issues when trying to access and index your website’s pages. They include DNS errors, redirect errors (301/302), server errors (5xx) and soft 404.
How to fix it:
- Google Search Console’s “Crawl Errors” report will help in identifying and resolving indexing issues
· Remove or update broken links
· Configure the robots.txt file properly
· Implement 301 redirects for moved pages
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is when similar content appears on multiple web pages. This can mean it’s an exact copy or shares most of the same content with similar variations. Having duplicate content on your website can cause the wrong version of a page to display in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
How to fix it:
· Use canonical tags to specify the preferred version of a page
· Use 301 redirects to consolidate similar pages or outdated URLs
Missing XML sitemap
A sitemap tells search engines which pages to crawl. Without one, it will be difficult to crawl and index your site.
How to fix it:
· Generate an XML sitemap using Yoast or Rank Math and submit it through Google Search Console
Missing or incorrect robots.txt
Robots.txt file controls crawler access. However, it can block your whole site if misconfigured.
How to fix it:
· Ensure a valid robots.txt file is present in the root directory
· Double-check that it isn’t unintentionally blocking important URLs or resources
No HTTPS/SSL certificate
Search engines explicitly flag HTTP sites (those without SSL) as “not secure,” which can deter users from interacting with them. Google also uses this as a minor ranking signal.
How to fix it:
· Install an SSL certificate via your hosting provider
· Redirect all HTTP URLs to HTTPS using 301 redirects
Poor site architecture/internal linking
If your site is disorganized, both users and search engines will struggle to navigate it. This can increase bounce rates and make search engine crawlability and indexing more difficult, potentially hurting your visibility in search results.
How to fix it:
· Organize content into logical categories and subcategories and use internal links to connect related pages
Conclusion
Technical SEO is a part of SEO that makes everything else work effectively. If your site is not ranking well or has high bounce rates, it’s time to conduct a technical SEO health check. You can contact the SEO experts at Forthgear if you’re unsure how to do it.
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