What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the build of a website to improve its organic performance.

This process includes steps such as:

• Optimizing site speed.
• Ensuring the site is crawlable.
• Making sure the site preserves link equity.
• Creating a mobile-friendly site.
• Ensuring the website is secure.
• Using structured data.
• Using an XML sitemap.
• Maintaining a good site structure.
• Maintaining a good URL structure.
• Optimizing your robots.txt file.
• Conducting log file analysis.
• Ensuring there is no issues with duplicate content & keyword cannibalization.
• Auditing redirects.
• Fixing HTTP & HTTPS errors.
• Using tools like Google Search Console’s ‘Page Indexing Report.’

Technical SEO creates a strong base that helps search engines find and rank content.

Think of your website as a library. Technical SEO is like placing books on shelves with clear labels – that’s your URL structure. It’s also about setting up signs for easy navigation, which are your internal links. Plus, creating a welcoming atmosphere reflects your site speed.

When the library is organized and inviting, more visitors can find the books they need. This means users can discover your content. Librarians, or search engine bots, can also sort and recommend books, which is like indexing and ranking.

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is very important for most websites. It forms the foundation for search engine visibility and performance. Yes, the content you publish is crucial. But without proper technical optimization, search engines might not discover, index, or rank your content.

Technical SEO matters for several reasons:

First, it ensures that search engines can crawl and index your content. By optimizing elements like your website’s structure and navigation, you help search engine bots move through your site. This accessibility is vital for your content to get noticed and indexed.

Our website is, in our opinion, a site with excellent architecture.

Second, technical SEO directly affects your search engine rankings. Website speed and mobile-responsiveness, are ranking factors. Also, having well-structured HTML markup helps search engines assess your site’s quality. A well-optimized website is more likely to rank higher in search results.

Finally, technical SEO contributes to a great user experience. Working on technical aspects like:

• Speeding up page load times
• Improving URLs

Will enhance user satisfaction. A better user experience leads to lower bounce rates and higher engagement. This can indirectly boost your website’s performance in search.

In the end, technical SEO is the cornerstone of effective SEO strategies. It ensures your content is not only high-quality but also accessible. This appeals to both search engine bots and, more importantly, users.

What are the traits of a technically optimized website?

All websites have the same traits when it comes to technical SEO. These traits are the same whether the site is:

• A brochure website.
• A news website.
• An ecommerce website.

Or any other website for that matter.

The website is fast

A well-optimized website will load quickly across all devices and network conditions.

Fast-loading pages enhance the experience a user has on your website and are favoured by search engines. This will lead to higher rankings. Especially if the other websites you are competing with aren’t as fast.

Passing Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor. So ensuring your website passes these tests is crucial.

The website can be crawled easily

This should be a no-brainer, but websites should be crawlable by search engines.

If a search engine bot cannot crawl your website effectively, you are going to find issuews with your page’s ranking on the SERPs.

Robots.txt files and meta robots tags should be properly configured. This will help guide search engine bots on which pages to:

• Crawl & index
• Leave alone

Not every page on your website should be crawled. Especially admin pages and pages containing customer data.

The website preserves link equity

Websites that are well-optimized technically do everything they can to preserve link equity.

First, the website uses internal links that guide users and bots to relevant content. This improves site navigation, helps distribute link-equity, and keeps users on the site longer.

Secondly, the website is completely free of broken links and redirect chains. This ensures a seamless user experience and efficient crawling by search engines.

Pro Tip: You can use ScreamingFrog to find broken links and redirect chains.

The website is mobile responsive

All websites must be functional on mobile devices. Mobile-responsiveness is a crucial factor in both user experience and rankings.

On July 5th, 2024, Google stopped indexing websites that don’t work on mobile devices.

As of 2023, 63% of Google’s US organic traffic came from mobile devices. This should indicate how crucial your website being mobile-responsive is.

The website is secure

All websites must ensure their website uses the secure HTTPS protocol.

This ensures your website has adequate data encryption in place. It also boosts the trust that users have when they use your website. This trust is especially important when financial data is being handled. A good example of this is on ecommerce sites, where card information is being entered.

Google also confirmed that the use of HTTPS is a ranking factor. We don’t know the weight Google places on this, but we can make educated guesses. For example, this is probably more important when dealing with YMYL (Your Money Your Life) sites.

The website uses structured data

Schema markup will provide additional context about your website’s content. This will enable search engines to show rich snippets within the SERPs when showing your website. These rich snippets help to improve click-through rate and bring more traffic to your site overall.

Technical SEO can filter down to four key parts:

• Crawling
• Rendering
• Indexing
• Ranking

In this next section, we will explore these activities in more detail. We will also discuss different technical SEO factors that make up the four steps above.

Crawling

Crawling refers to the process of search engine bots examining your site. The goal of crawling is to gather more information about web pages, this includes:

• Their content
• Their structure
• Other relevant information

Search engines use this data to index and rank content. Leading to your content being visible on the SERPS.

Search engines use bots to navigate the huge amount of web pages online. These bots start by visiting well-known web pages. From there, they follow links to ‘discover’ new pages. Once this process is complete, they can render, index, and rank the pages.

There are important things you need in place in order for your content to be crawled efficiently.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that gives search engines a structured list of all the URLs on your website. It’s a tool that helps crawlers understand the organization of your website’s content. This ensures they can discover and index all your important pages effectively.

Ensuring you have an XML sitemap on your website and that it is validated is essential when it comes to technical SEO. This is because it helps to get your content crawled in several ways:

Having an XML sitemap on your site provides search engine bots with a centralized list of URLs that you want to have crawled and indexed. This will help you ensure that all essential pages are included in search engine indexed. And because of that, search engine results pages.

This will include pages like:

• Blog posts
• Product listing pages
• Product display pages
• Feature pages
• Customer testimonials

You can use your sitemap to set how important each page is and how often it changes. Remember, search engines might not follow these settings exactly. But, by doing this, you help crawlers understand which pages are most important. As well as how frequently they are updated.

Your sitemap can help highlight important or newly-updated pages. This can guide search engine bots to these pages and can help get them crawled faster. If you don’t have a sitemap in place, you would be relying on crawlers finding your content manually. This requires them to crawl internal links and is a much slower process.

For large sites, explore the prospect of having multiple sitemaps. This will help manage crawl budget more effectively. This is not an issue for smaller sites, but will become more important as a site grows.

Site structure

The structure of your website will play a crucial role in determining how search engine bots navigate its content.

A well-organized site structure will help facilitate efficient crawling and enhance user experience.

Here is an example of an ecommerce website with a good site structure. The most important pages are easily accessible from the navigation bar. This passes on as much link equity as possible, and ensures crawlers can find them easily.

When pages are organized into simple categories, it becomes easier for crawlers to follow links and systematically index content. This hierarchical arrangement ensures that crucial pages are closer to the homepage. Which increases their chances of being discovered and crawled quickly.

Adding internal links to your website helps search engine crawlers navigate your site more easily. Well-placed and relevant internal links help distribute link equity across pages. Which allows crawlers to uncover a broader range of content than they could without internal links being present.

Orphan pages (pages with no links pointing to them) should be avoided. They present a huge challenge for crawlers. A robust site structure, with proper internal linking, avoids this.

The structure of your website serves as a framework that shapes how search engines crawl your content. Webmasters and marketers can positively influence how search engines crawl their content. This can be done through:

• Implementing a clear site hierarchy
• Adding relevant internal links
• Optimizing crawl budget

URL structure

Your website’s URL structure directly impacts how search engines crawl your site. A well-organized and descriptive URL structure helps crawlers understand each page’s content more efficiently.

Clear and short URLs provide valuable context about:

• The topic of the page
• The page’s place within your site hierarchy

A URL like https://example.com/blog/head-topic-1 tells a search engine crawler that this page is an important part of your blog and covers a key topic of your website.

Convoluted or nonsensical URLs can confuse crawlers as they navigate your site. For example, https://example.com/12642/test-category/test-page does not provide clear information. This confusion hinders crawlers’ ability to:

• Interpret the content
• Assess the page’s relevance and importance

A clean URL structure should:

• Exclude unnecessary parameters
• Avoid symbols

This increases the chances of your pages being crawled effectively.

Additionally, your URL structure affects user experience and click-through rates. Even though this is not directly related to crawling, it’s important. A concise and relevant URL is much more likely to attract clicks. This increased engagement can indirectly boost your website’s overall search engine ranking.

Robots.txt files

Your robots.txt file has a lot of control over how search engines crawl your website. This document sits at the core of your site and gives guidelines to search engine crawlers. It tells them which pages they can crawl and which pages they should leave alone.

But this does not guarantee that your pages won’t be crawled through other means. Some search engines may still find pages that are excluded from crawling. They may do this through internal links on your site, for example.

If your robots.txt file contains errors or overly strict rules, it may prevent search engines from crawling important content. This can hurt your website’s performance in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s important to regularly check your robots.txt file to ensure all the rules work correctly.

Log file analysis

Analyzing your website’s log files can greatly impact how search engines crawl your site. Marketers can do this themselves with the right tools.

Log files are records that show:

• Which parts of your website search engines visit
• How often search engine crawlers visit these parts

This information lets you determine which pages search engines see as important. You can use this to gain an advantage.

This helps marketers decide which pages are worth more time and money. It ensures search engines pay attention to the right content.

Also, log file analysis shows if search engines find your website easy to understand and navigate or if they have trouble. This can guide changes like:

• Organizing web addresses better
• Fixing how pages are connected through internal linking

Rendering

Rendering is how search engines process your website’s content and structure. This helps them decide your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Rendering involves two main steps: crawling and indexing.

During crawling, search engine bots browse the web. They visit pages and collect HTML data. But not all content is visible in the HTML code. This is where rendering comes in.

Rendering does more than just read HTML. It processes dynamic elements on modern websites that might not show up in the basic HTML. These include:

• Content loaded with JavaScript
• AJAX
• Other scripting languages
• The page’s CSS stylesheet

Search engine bots try to mimic user experience. They run JavaScript and collect the fully rendered content. They then use this content to build an index—a database of information about the web page.

To get the best SEO results, make sure search engine bots can easily render your website. This involves using techniques like:

• Server-side rendering (SSR)
• Pre-rendering for sites that use a lot of JavaScript

Adding metadata—like meta tags and descriptions—helps search engines understand your content. Handling canonical tags correctly and managing redirects also prevent duplicate content issues.

Indexing

Indexing is when search engines collect, organize, and store information about web pages. This helps them show pages quickly when someone searches.

Once a web crawler visits a page and reads its content, it adds that information to the search engine’s index.

The index is a big database with information about websites all over the internet. Search engines use this database to answer user queries quickly. They find relevant pages in the index and show them in search results.

During indexing, search engines take important information from the web pages they visit. This includes:

• Content
• Metadata
• Images
• Links

They store this information in an organized way. This helps them quickly match user searches with relevant pages.

You can do several things to help search engines index your pages better.

Address duplicate content and keyword cannibalization issues

Fix duplicate content and keyword cannibalization to help your pages get indexed faster.

Removing duplicate content prevents search engine confusion. This shows search engines the main version of your content.

Fixing keyword cannibalization is important too. Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages target the same keywords. By fixing this, you give clear signals to search engines about each page’s focus. This helps with efficient indexing and ranking. Search engines understand the purpose of each page.

An image shows the Keyword Cannibalization Report in SEOTesting. This report helps you find and fix keyword cannibalization issues on your website.

Optimizing metadata and adjusting internal links help with quick indexing. Doing these actions correctly guides search engines to the most important pages.

Also, combining similar content and avoiding keyword cannibalization focuses authority on one page. This increases the page’s authority. Search engines will prioritize and rank that page higher in search results.

Audit redirects

Examining your website’s redirects improves how quickly search engines index your content. It also enhances your website’s overall performance. Redirects guide users and search engines to different pages when needed. If not managed well, they slow down the indexing process or stop it altogether. By performing a “redirect audit,” you enhance indexing in several meaningful ways.

First, addressing excessive redirects helps search engines index your website more effectively. Sometimes, search engines encounter multiple redirects, which slows down indexing. By finding and removing unnecessary redirects, you:

• Help search engines access your content quickly
• Give your pages a better chance of being indexed and ranked promptly

Completing a redirect audit also allows you to tackle redirect chains. Redirect chains happen when one redirect leads to another, then another, and so on. They confuse search engines and consume too much of their time. When a search engine bot takes too long to index a page, it moves on and does not index that page. An audit lets you find and fix these chains, enabling search engines to reach your content without issues.

Finally, such an audit helps search engines accurately understand your website. When redirects are well-structured, search engines better interpret the importance of your content. With a clear understanding of your content’s importance, your important pages have a better chance of being indexed quickly.

Fix HTTP & HTTPS errors

Fix HTTP and HTTPS errors to ensure search engines index your pages properly. When search engine bots find these errors, they struggle to access and understand your content. If a bot can’t access or understand your content, it can’t index it.

Addressing these issues improves indexing in several ways:

• Resolve HTTP errors like “404 Not Found”:
  • Ensures your pages are accessible to users and search engines.
  • Prevents search engines from seeing pages as missing content.
  • Gives crawlers a clear path to index your content.
  • Increases the chances of your pages being indexed and ranked.
• Transition from HTTP to HTTPS:
  • Improves security and indexing.
  • Search engines prioritize secure websites (HTTPS) over non-secure ones (HTTP).
  • Google has confirmed this preference.
  • Migrating to HTTPS enhances your site’s credibility.
  • Improves its ability to be indexed and ranked.
• Ensure consistent HTTPS implementation and fix HTTPS-related errors:
  • Prevents “mixed content” issues.
  • Mixed content occurs when secure and non-secure elements load on the same page.
  • Avoids security warnings.
  • Enhances user experience.

Fixing HTTP and HTTPS errors removes barriers that block search engines from accessing and understanding your content. This proactive approach optimizes the indexing process, increases visibility in search results, and enhances user experience on your site.

Look at your ‘Page Indexing Report’ in Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a valuable tool for checking how your content is being indexed. In the Page Indexing Report, you can see every page on your website that hasn’t been indexed. You can also see why those pages haven’t been indexed.

Here’s an example:

In SEOTesting’s Page Indexing Report, we see:

• 20 pages have been crawled but are not currently indexed.
• 126 pages have a proper canonical tag.
• 47 pages have been excluded by the ‘noindex’ tag.
• 17 pages are found to have been duplicates, with no user-selected canonical.
• 17 pages have a redirect in place.
• 8 pages have returned a 404 error.
• 3 pages have returned a 5xx server error.
• 1 page has been blocked due to another 4xx issue.
• 5 pages have been found as duplicates, and Google has chosen a different canonical.

Not all these reasons are issues. However, as a marketing team, it’s worthwhile to find out why certain pages haven’t been indexed and fix as many of these issues as we can.

Ranking

Search engine ranking is the final step after crawling, rendering, and indexing. Search engines decide the order in which web pages appear in the SERPs. The goal is to show users the most relevant and valuable content based on their search queries.

Ranking depends on complex algorithms that assess factors to determine a web page’s relevance and authority.

One fundamental aspect is keyword relevance. This means how well your content matches the words and phrases users search for. Pages with high keyword relevance tend to rank better.

Keyword relevance alone is not enough. Search engines also consider:

• The quality of your website
• The authority of your website

Backlinks from reputable, authoritative, and relevant sites are strong indicators of a page’s credibility. The more high-quality backlinks a page has, the more likely it is to rank higher.

User experience on your website plays a huge role in ranking. Search engines heavily favor pages that:

• Load quickly
• Are mobile-friendly
• Provide a smooth browsing experience

Engaging and valuable content that keeps users on your site longer also signals to search engines that your website deserves a higher ranking.

Personalization is another aspect of ranking. Search engines consider the user’s:

• Location
• Search history
• Preferences

They tailor search results to give the best experience possible. This means the same query may yield different results for different users.

Remember, we do not know the exact weight Google and other search engines place on different factors for different queries. For one query, you may need to focus more on authoritative and relevant backlinks. For another, you may need to ensure your user experience is excellent. Success comes with time in the industry, learning the algorithms, and continuous improvement.

Wrapping things up

Understanding diverse SEO aspects is vital to success in the SERPs. This article explored technical SEO’s importance, the traits of optimised sites, and the mechanics of technical SEO from crawling to ranking.

Technical SEO builds a strong base for your website, optimising elements for better speed and structure. This improves navigation, content understanding and user experience.

In short, technical SEO is key. By fixing errors and optimising site structure, you will be able to enhance your online presence.

Want to supercharge your use of Google Search Console and take your SEO to the next level by implementing SEO testing into your routine? Give SEOTesting a try. We’re currently running a 14-day free trial, with no credit card required to sign up. Give the tool a try today, and let us know what you think!