The Benefits of Technical SEO

Nowadays, having a fully functional website is of the utmost importance.

Modern consumers have high expectations, needs and demands. If the website they’re currently browsing cannot meet those expectations or needs, consumers will simply bounce right off.

Fortunately for web owners, there are ways to provide their potential customers with whatever they want.

This is where SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes in. SEO is a marketing strategy that allows companies to meet consumer needs when it comes to a seamless browsing experience while promoting their businesses online.

You’re basically hitting two birds with one stone. The process in charge of meeting consumer demands is called technical SEO. As its name suggests, technical SEO covers every aspect of a website’s functionality, such as page speed, security and so on.

That being said, most consumer pain points are related to website performance and functionality. For example, pages that take too long to load irritate consumers and force them to bounce.

Technical SEO takes care of such issues and ensures that search engines, such as Google, look favorably upon websites that have consumers’ best interests in mind.

With that in mind, here are a few benefits of technical SEO.

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1. Improved website speed

As mentioned above, page loading time is one of the major pain points for consumers. If your pages aren’t loading fast enough, you will lose a lot of traffic and potential customers. The main reason is that modern consumers simply don’t tolerate sluggish websites.

That said, even if it takes one second longer for your pages to load than what consumers expect it will result in a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, 11% decrease in page views and 7% decrease in conversion rates.

This can have a huge negative impact on your bottom line. Page loading time and overall website speed are part of the technical SEO domain.

There are plenty of things you can do to improve your website speed using technical SEO techniques alone. Here are a few examples.

• Server file compression.
• Code minification.
• Browser caching.
• Image optimization.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) for mobile optimization.

With technical SEO, you can eliminate all the issues that can slow down your website and page loading time. This will improve customer experience and give your rankings a much-needed boost.

After all, website speed is, in fact, one of the major ranking signals. The fact of the matter is that page loading time affects user experience the most.

Search engines, such as Google, want to provide consumers with the best results possible. That means that they’ll check not just the accuracy and value of information but also factors that will affect browsing experience like website speed does.

2. Mobile optimization

As you already know, the number of mobile users has grown significantly over the past few years. As of 2021, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion. That number is expected to reach 7.49 billion by 2025.

It’s safe to say that most online consumers are browsing the web using a mobile device. Search engines, such as Google have been aware of this trend for some time now. This is why Google released their mobile-first indexing update which will give favorable rankings to mobile-friendly websites.

Once again, technical SEO can help you optimize your website for mobile devices. One of the ways it can help you is by ensuring that your responsive design is properly implemented and fully functional.

Some of the best marketing companies advise that all companies should focus on optimizing for mobile, especially if they are leveraging SEO. The main reason is mobile-friendliness will not only benefit your SEO efforts but also help your company acquire more leads and more organic web traffic.

Technical SEO makes sure that your website features and content are performing well on mobile devices. That way you guarantee an exceptional browsing experience to all customers, regardless of which devices they might be using to browse your website.

Technical SEO will also help you test various other features on your website to help you determine if they are mobile-friendly or not. It can even also help you implement the best practices that will ensure that your entire website is, in fact, mobile-friendly.

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3. Page indexing

One of the main benefits of SEO is improved online visibility. However, search engines must be able to crawl and index your pages so that they can rank them properly.

Moreover, search engines must be able to understand the context of your pages so that they can match them with user intent. That’s why you must ensure that search engine crawlers can do their job so that you actually benefit from SEO. Technical SEO is also responsible for this part.

Every time you add a new page or an individual piece of content, you have to ensure that those pages and content are properly indexed.

In addition, you want to avoid redirects, errors, broken links and other inconveniences that will prevent search engine crawlers from doing what they do best. That’s why technical SEO is mandatory.

Here are a few ways technical SEO can help you with page indexing and other factors.

• Help you track and fix server errors.
• Help you prevent loop redirects.
• Helps you identify URL blocking by robots.txt files.
• Helps you identify “noindex” tags.
• Helps you fix 404 errors.
• Helps you locate and fix duplicate content.

When you eliminate or fix the most common problems that hinder search engine crawling, you can boost your rankings and allow search engines to properly index your pages.

4. Website architecture

Website or simply site architecture is very important to both your users and search engines.

From the user’s point of view, site architecture represents website navigation and content hierarchy that allows them to seamlessly browse your website and find what they’re looking for with ease.

On the other hand, search engines use your site architecture to navigate the pages and determine should the page be indexed or not. It also helps search engine crawlers understand the connection between your internal links.

The more pages your website has, the more important site architecture becomes.

Technical SEO can help you create an ideal architecture that will meet the needs of both users and search engines. Here are a few examples.

• Categorizes and organizes the pages on your website.
• Helps create SEO-friendly URLs for seamless navigation.
• Focuses on creating sitemaps to help crawlers with page indexing.
• Creates internal link hierarchy to point search engine crawlers towards pages with more authority.

This allows you to retain your audience’s interest by providing them with additional content that’s easy to find. It also creates breadcrumbs that enable seamless navigation for both users and search engines. That way your pages get properly crawled and indexed while your audience enjoys high-quality content.

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5. Website security

Website security is an important ranking factor and it’s also vital to customer experience. This is especially true if you process consumer-sensitive information, such as names, addresses, emails, credit or debit card information etc.

To ensure that websites will take security seriously, Google made having HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) a major ranking factor.

Websites that don’t have HTTPS would get penalized by Google. To transfer from HTTP to HTTPS, a web owner would have to purchase a TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Socket Layer) certificate from their hosting provider.

However, this migration can and does cause a lot of issues with your website. Fortunately, technical SEO is there to ensure everything is working as properly as it should. Here are a few things technical SEO can help you with.

• Ensure that the same functionalities remain after the migration.
• Monitors the changes in URLs and uses canonical tags to remove duplicate content.
• Helps you test everything after the changes have been made.

Having proper security measures is vital. It prevents your website from being blacklisted and it shows your customers that your website is, indeed, trustworthy.

Technical SEO is there to ensure that your security measures are in place and that everything is working as it should.

Closing words

Technical SEO is a big part of on-page optimization. It ensures that your website functionality and performance are up to the task. Many of the factors that technical SEO deals with are also ranking signals.

These factors affect user experience in more ways than one. That’s why Google considers technical SEO to be an essential aspect of your overall SEO strategy, alongside on-page and off-page SEO.

After all, Google wants to ensure that they’re matching search queries with the best results possible.

By optimizing your technical SEO regularly, you’ll be able to ensure that your website is highly functional and that it performs exceptionally well. This will meet the needs of both search engines and your customers.

In other words, your website will not only end up on the first page of search results due to favorable rankings but it will also be able to provide your users with everything they want or need.

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