No matter what industry your company or brand is in, or whether you own a small business, a large company, or an e-commerce store, the principles of Technical SEO have never been so important. A major step in any SEO strategy is improving your technical SEO.
So What is Technical SEO?
Why is it so important? And how do you optimize it?
Let’s answer these commonly asked questions in this blog, helping ensure that your marketing efforts are going in the right direction.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical elements of your website and server that directly impacts your page performance and user experience. These two primary elements determine how search engines will recognize your website.
A website free from errors and displaying meticulous page and user experience will eventually lead to better rankings, more traffic, and conversions.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawlability, indexability, and improve search visibility.
Google launched its Google Page experience update in 2021 which includes page experience as an important factor for ranking making Professional SEO Services that include on-page, off-page, and technical SEO as its core, even more important. Let us now see the ultimate SEO checklist to implement for better rankings and traffic.
Technical SEO Checklist
1. Page Experience
One of the first steps to boosting your technical SEO is nailing your page experience. It is essential because page experience encompasses many other technical SEO factors like:
- Core web vitals
- Mobile-friendliness
- HTTPS security
- Intrusive interstitial elements
Core Web Vitals are google’s three metrics for measuring user experience when a page loads. These are LCP, FID, and CLS.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures a webpage’s loading speed and google recommends it to be within 2.5sec of when a page starts loading.
- First Input Delay (FID): It is a measure of how interactive your page is. In order to have a positive UX, your webpage should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): It measures how stable your webpage is as it loads. A lot of elements moving around results in high CLS. An idea; CLS should be 0.1 or lower.
These core vitals can be found in the Google search console under the enhancements section. There are plenty of tools to improve core web vitals and load speed, the top one being Google Pagespeed Insights.
Some optimization to improve these includes:
- Implementing lazy-loading for non-critical images
- Optimizing image formats for the browser
- Improve JavaScript performance
Mobile-friendliness
A mobile-friendly website comes as nothing new when it comes to rankings and traffic but surprisingly many websites till now are lagging in providing a mobile-first experience. All search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites over the ones that aren’t.
HTTPS security
If a website is secure then users feel safer in browsing and interacting more freely and for a longer duration. So HTTPS is one such metric for measuring page experience. It is highly recommended to migrate your site from HTTP to HTTPS as it is encrypted and search engines will always try to send users to a safer domain.
Intrusive interstitial elements
It is an element on a page that covers most of the content on a web page, making it difficult to access on a mobile screen like full-screen popups. Search engines mark it as a negative user experience impacting your SEO hence ranking and traffic.
2. Crawl errors
Crawl errors occur when search engines try to reach a page on your website but fail. Google search console gives a detailed list of any crawl errors it encounters.
Broken links: Making changes in the website in terms of navigation, internal linking, and link structure can be an ongoing process so there are bound to be broken links. Always monitor these errors and create a redirect or remove the link altogether if it doesn’t exist anymore.
Redirect chains: When scanning for crawl errors, you need to correctly implement all redirects with 301 redirects. Also, go through any 400 and 500 error pages and redirect them to relevant pages.
Always be on the lookout for redirect chains or loops where the URL redirects to another multiple times.
3. User-friendly Site Architecture
How the pages on a website are grouped, organized, and linked together determines the Site architecture. If it is implemented well it signals to the search engines that the website offers a positive UX and valuable content allowing users to spend more time on the website as they got what they were looking for. The factors that influence the architecture includes:
- Navigation menu
- Categorization
- URL structure
- Breadcrumbs
- Internal Linking
Site architecture is one significant element of UX so optimizing it is highly necessary for SEO.
4. Robots.txt file
Every website has a crawl budget, and the limited no. of pages to be crawled so it’s imperative to make sure that only the important ones are crawled and indexed. Robots.txt files are instructions to search engines on how to crawl your website. Some pages that should be excluded from this file include admin pages, cart, and checkout pages, log in, or pdfs. For large websites optimizing robots file helps maximize the crawl budget.
5. XML Sitemap
XML Sitemap is a blueprint of your website, it helps search engines easily find, crawl and index your content. It tells about your site structure and what to index. An optimized XML sitemap should include any latest content like blog posts, product descriptions, or service pages. Only 200 status and not more than 50K URLs are to be included. If your website has more pages then multiple sitemaps need to be generated.
Google search console shows the index coverage report for any indexing errors in your sitemap.
Exclude the following: duplicate pages, URLs that are 301 redirecting or contain canonical or no index tags, or URLs with parameters.
6. Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be caused by many different factors like page replication from faceted navigation, copied content, or multiple versions of the live site. It’s must that you allow search engines to index only one version of your website as google and other search engines treat different URL structures with the same content as different webpages. So fixing it becomes utterly important.
The best way to solve this problem is 301 redirect all duplicate pages to the original webpage.
Another way out is to add a canonical tag to the URL you want the search engine to index. This indicates to search engines that the canonicalized URL is the original one to be indexed.
7. Schema Markup
Structured data helps provide information about a page and its content, giving context to search engines in a language it understands about the various page elements. For search engines to better recognize your website it needs to be structured in a bot-friendly manner which includes a collection of standardized tags.
Schema markup is the most common and important structured data which helps search engine show “rich results” in SERPs resulting in improved CTRs.
There are many different types of schema markup for structuring data for people, places, organizations, local businesses, reviews, and much more.
Google’s structured data testing tool helps to generate one for your website or you can use other schema markup generating tools available online. Even with outstanding content, the ranking will be an uphill battle if your technical SEO is poor. Use this checklist to lay a strong foundation for your SEO efforts. Reach out to our SEO experts at MicrocosmWorks, one of the best SEO company for a complete website audit.
