Are you struggling to attract new visitors to your website? Is your content failing to rank on search engines like Google? Without search engine optimization (SEO), you might struggle to improve your ranking.
Technical SEO ensures search engines can crawl and index your content. Once Google recognizes the value of your posts and pages, you can boost your ranking.
Since over 90% of all online activity starts on a search engine, this is one digital marketing strategy you won’t want to miss.
Not sure if you want to optimize your site? Here are seven reasons you should! Keep reading to discover the top benefits of technical optimization.
1. Speed Up Your Site
Google wants to provide its users with the best possible online experience. In order to provide that experience, Google looks for the best websites online. It ranks these websites based on various factors that can impact the user’s experience.
One of these factors is site speed. No one wants to wait for a slow website that takes forever to load. Most consumers will leave that site to visit another, faster one instead.
People are impatient. They’re looking for fast, immediate answers to their questions. If your website is lagging behind, you could lose customers.
Google will drop your ranking, making it more difficult for consumers to find you online. The traffic you attract can also impact your ranking, causing you to drop even more.
Check Google’s PageSpeed Insights to determine what’s slowing your site down.
You might need to compress giant image files or remove a few unnecessary plugins. Making these changes can rev up your speed.
Don’t forget to compare your mobile page speeds to your desktop speeds, too. A one-second delay in mobile load times can hurt conversions by up to 20%.
About 76% of consumers who check their phones for something nearby visit a business within 24 hours. A fast mobile experience could help you attract more customers to your store.
2. Easier for Search Engines to Find
The top three organic positions on a Google page earn about 75.1% of all clicks. If you’re not ranking at the top of the first page, there’s a chance consumers aren’t seeing your website. In fact, many consumers don’t look beyond the first page of search results.
Is your website easy for search engine bots to crawl and index? Bots search through your content to determine what content is important and valuable.
If bots can’t explore your site, you won’t increase the ranking for those pages!
First, make sure bots can crawl and index your site. You can also use an internal linking structure to help these bots recognize important pieces of content.
Then, block bots from crawling pieces of content you don’t want them to find. These can include work-in-progress pages.
To give bots more instructions, use the robots.txt file to tell browsers what your site should look like. Robots also look for the meta tag to determine what to do with the page.
3. Avoid Confusing Search Engines
One of the easiest ways to optimize your site is to review your existing content. Do you have any pages you don’t want visitors to see? Do you have any duplicate pages that might confuse search engines?
If you have duplicate pages, how will Google determine which to rank above the other? Google might rank both pages lower if the bots are confused.
Use the canonical link element to tell Google which page is the original. This content will rank on search engine results pages. You can use a plugin like Yoast to remedy your duplicate page issues.
4. Stay Secure
As you consider different components of technical SEO, don’t neglect your site’s security.
Remember, Google wants to provide users with the best possible experience. Consumers don’t want to find out a hacker stole their private information. If your website isn’t secure, you could lose potential customers.
Google uses site security as a ranking factor. If you’re not secure, your ranking could fall.
Optimize your site by making sure you have an SSL certificate. Look for “HTTPS” in front of your domain name. You should see a lock to the left of your site URL as well.
An SSL certificate indicates the user’s credentials will remain safe while they’re on your site.
5. No Annoying Dead Links
Have you ever clicked on a link, only to get redirected to a 404 error page? Redirects can frustrate your website visitors. As you start making changes to your technical SEO, keep a look out for dead links.
Search engines don’t like finding error pages either. Your website is a constant work-in-progress. Chances are, you have one or two dead links without realizing it.
There are tools available that can help you find your site’s 404 errors.
Make sure to direct any broken links to the proper page to improve the user experience.
6. Remain Mobile
Remember, you need to consider your desktop and mobile website. After all, consumers are more likely to check their phones while they’re shopping. Consumers also use Google to look for your phone number, address/directions, customer reviews, and hours.
All of this information is available on your Google My Business listing.
Make sure to optimize your site for mobile devices. Your website should adjust based on the consumer’s screen size. If it doesn’t, visitors will have to zoom in and out to navigate your pages, which can become tedious.
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to make sure you’re optimized. If not, work with a pro!
Google uses mobile-first indexing (it looks at your mobile site first) to determine rankings. If you’re not optimized, you could drop to the bottom.
7. Improved Overall UX
These components of technical SEO have one major factor in common: the end-user.
As you optimize your site, keep your customers in mind. What are they looking for? Make sure that content is easy to find.
Do you have buttons they can click on and forms they can fill out? How will they convert?
Is your text large enough to read? Is your navigation easy to use?
Make sure to improve the overall UX as part of your technical optimization to-do list.
Every Business Site Needs Technical SEO
Technical SEO can make or break your online ranking. If you want to increase the ranking for your site, you need to start optimizing. Once you do, you can keep consumers on your site!
An easy-to-use website will encourage consumers to explore and convert.
Need help optimizing your site? Contact us today to discuss your technical optimization.