Technical SEO isn’t an easy function to optimize. It requires a steep understanding of web development and general marketing best practices, and it’s even more difficult to implement and execute.
Because today’s internet is so saturated, even with the best technical SEO practices, it can be difficult to improve your website’s ranking, creating headaches, sleepless nights, and a loss of motivation, among other things.
Luckily, there are platforms, tools & software, and knowledgeable agencies available for your benefit.
In this article, we’ll be discussing what technical SEO is, how it works, and what tools are available for you to use in order for best optimization practices. Unlike the name suggests, however, we won’t be taking a technical approach to our explanation.
Instead, we’ll lay it out in an easy-to-digest, understandable, and comprehendible manner so that you can get a grip on your organic search results and begin to take your website’s functionality to new heights!
What is Technical SEO?
In order to define technical SEO, we need to first understand what SEO means. In short, SEO refers to search engine optimization; a process that aims to improve your ranking in the search results, which brings traffic to your website, and conversion of that traffic, which brings you leads that you can hopefully turn into customers, clients, patients, or students.
SEO comes in two parts, onsite and offsite SEO.
Technical SEO falls in the onsite SEO side and refers to the technical requirements of a website that improves the SEO score and ranking of the website.
In other words, it’s a process whereby one seeks to improve a website’s functionality and optimize content elements and coding in order to improve the site’s “score”.
In order to optimize the user experience and improve technical SEO, a website should consider its Core Web Vitals. What are Core Web Vitals, you ask?! Great question!
Core Web Vitals, in short, are three pillar measurements used to gauge a user’s experience and understand the technical soundness of a website. These three pillars are: performance, responsiveness, and stability.
One example of this would be a website’s speed at which its web pages load. We’ll get into more detail about examples of technical SEO shortly.
How Technical SEO Works
As mentioned, technical SEO requires the improvements of a website’s functionality in order for crawlers to index and rank the site more efficiently and effectively.
With that said, it’s called “technical” SEO for a reason. While the broad concept of SEO is easy to comprehend, technical SEO requires a deeper understanding of web development and technology.
In order to outline how technical SEO works more clearly, here’s a quick and easy real-life example for you to refer to!
Consider this:
You’re a social media expert seeking assistance with your digital marketing strategy. You decide that a digital marketing agency is your best option, so you find yourself on Google searching for the best Digital Marketing Agencies in your area.
By typing into the search engine “the best digital marketing agencies for digital marketing strategies”, you receive several results. You decide to click on a couple of websites for consideration.
The first website loads immediately. The second, however, takes a few seconds to load. In addition, you notice that some of the site’s pages are glitchy, and you even come across a dead link that brings you to an error page.
No wonder the first website is ranked higher. It gave you a better user experience. And that’s what Google wants you to have because they want you to be happy with the results they serve up.
While this is quite the elementary example, it’s simply a lens into the value of website’s functionality in relation to its organic search ranking. Of course, technical SEO is much more complex than the speed at which a website loads. With that said, a website’s load-time is a primary characteristic of technical SEO.
Below are the Main Characteristics Necessary for Optimizing for Technical SEO:
- A Website’s Speed/Load Time
- An Efficient and Effective Internal Linking Structure (Ensuring its Crawlable)
- Register with Google Search Console
- Fix Content Issues and Bugs (i.e. Duplicate Content, Dead links, Etc.)
- Make Sure Your Site is Mobile-Friendly
- Ensuring Your Site is Safe and Secure
A technically adept website is one that’s fast, user-friendly, and easy to crawl for search engines to index. While the sound of crawling spiders may give you the heebie-jeebies, in technical terms, it’s exactly what you want!
Effective SEO Tools to Use
Improving your website’s technical functionality is crucial for the success of your website’s organic search ranking. Unfortunately, technical SEO isn’t so simple. Luckily, there are tools, platforms, and agencies (including Six Degrees Media) that can help.
Below are some of the top three (3) most effective SEO tools that you can use to scale your search results and improve your SEO rank score:
SEMRush
SEMRush is an all-in-one marketing, SEO, and visibility management SaaS platform built to help optimize your marketing efforts, boost audience monetization, increase organic traffic, and run technical SEO audits, among other beneficial features.
Yoast
Dubbed WordPress’ #1 SEO plugin, Yoast is another incredibly helpful SaaS tool for boosting your SEO score, optimizing website content, and ensuring your site meets the highest of technical SEO standards.
Screaming Frog
Remember when we discussed the value of crawling spiders and how it isn’t something you should be afraid of?! In comes Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog is an industry-leading website crawler that aids in improving your website’s SEO, uncovering any technically unsound issues, ultimately making your website a more technically efficient destination for its viewers.
Contact Six Degrees Media
Improving your SEO score is the solution to scaling your online presence, boosting conversion, and gaining traffic. If you want to learn more about technical SEO and how it can be implemented in your business, Six Degrees Digital Media can help. Contact us today to book a consultation!
