For tech companies operating in a digitally-focused industry, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for improving online visibility and attracting organic traffic. While there are many aspects to SEO, one critical component is technical SEO, which involves optimizing a website’s technical aspects to improve its ranking in search results. Throughout this post, we will discuss what technical SEO services are and which services are key to improving a company’s online visibility, increasing organic traffic, and succeeding in digital marketing.
Differentiating between SEO and technical SEO
SEO refers to the practice of improving a website’s visibility ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) through various techniques and strategies. SEO strategies aim to boost a website’s organic search ranking, which refers to the position of a website or webpage in the SERP based on its relevance and authority for a particular search query, without any paid promotion or advertising. SEO also involves both on-page optimization (improving content through keyword research, metadata, and user experience) and off-page optimization (earning backlinks and social media signals).
Technical SEO, on the other hand, is a subset of SEO that focuses on improving the technical aspects of a website to boost visibility and ranking in search engines. It involves optimizing a website’s infrastructure, server settings, and code to ensure that search engines can easily crawl, index, and understand the website’s content. Technical SEO also involves addressing issues that can negatively impact a website’s performance, such as slow page speed, broken links, and duplicate content.
Put simply, SEO is a broader term that encompasses both on-page and off-page optimization, while technical SEO focuses specifically on improving the technical aspects of a website to enhance its visibility and ranking in search engines.
Strong technical SEO strategy and execution also drive more organic traffic. In fact, according to a recent study, websites that rank on the first page of search results receive 34% of organic traffic, and 91.5% of Google traffic stays on the first page, highlighting the importance of a strong technical SEO foundation.
What technical SEO services should you invest in?
Investing in technical SEO services can help improve a website’s visibility and search engine rankings, but which services are most essential for achieving optimal results?
Site speed optimization
Site speed optimization is the process of making a website load faster, which is crucial for providing a positive user experience and improving website performance. Modern users are used to fast loading times and have little patience for slow-loading websites. If your website’s pages are too slow, it can lead to page abandonment and reduced engagement, negatively impacting website metrics such as bounce rate and time on site. Therefore, optimizing load speed is an essential aspect of technical SEO.
There are several ways to optimize site speed, including:
Image optimization: Involves reducing the file size of images on web pages, which can significantly improve page load times.
Minification of code: Removing unnecessary characters and spaces from code, reducing its size, and improving its load speed.
Caching: Storing frequently accessed data on the user’s device or server, allowing it to be quickly retrieved and improving load times.
Site speed optimization is a critical component of technical SEO, impacting user experience and website performance. By implementing best practices such as image optimization, minification of code, and caching, businesses can ensure that their website loads quickly, providing a positive user experience and improving their chances of ranking higher in search results.
Mobile optimization
Web browsing is increasingly becoming more mobile-focused as users gravitate towards the convenience of their phones. In fact, over 60% of Google’s organic search traffic originates from mobile devices. It’s clear that mobile optimization is an essential aspect of technical SEO. Mobile optimization ensures that a website is easy to navigate and interact with on mobile devices, reducing the bounce rate and providing a high-quality user experience.
One of the primary ways to optimize for mobile is by implementing a responsive design, which adjusts the layout of a website based on the screen size of the device. This ensures that users can easily navigate the site and access its content on any device.
Reducing page size is also crucial for mobile optimization since mobile devices typically have slower internet connections than desktop devices. This can be achieved by optimizing images and reducing unnecessary code and plugins.
Implementing mobile-specific features such as click-to-call buttons and streamlined checkout processes can also improve the user experience on mobile devices. Additionally, using Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) can significantly improve load times on mobile devices.
Structured data markup
Structured data markup is a crucial aspect of technical SEO that can significantly impact SEO performance. It involves adding a code to a website’s HTML that provides additional information to search engines about the content, which can help search engines understand the website’s context and relevance, and ultimately improve search performance on the SERP.
Various types of structured data markup can be used, including Schema.org, JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa, to provide search engines with more context about the content on a website. This can include information such as product prices, ratings, reviews, opening hours, events, and more.
One example of how structured data markup can improve SEO performance is by displaying rich snippets in search results. Rich snippets provide additional information about a website’s content, such as ratings, prices, and reviews, which can make it more attractive to users and improve click-through rates.
Website security
Website security is a crucial aspect of technical SEO and has become a major ranking factor in search engine algorithms. The increased importance of website security is due to the growing number of online security threats, and search engines have responded by prioritizing secure websites in their search results. A secure website not only protects against potential penalties and hacks but also helps to establish trust with users and customers.
Secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates and firewalls are two common methods of securing a website. SSL certificates ensure that data is encrypted when it is transmitted between the user’s device and the website, protecting against data theft and unauthorized access. Firewalls, on the other hand, provide an additional layer of protection by blocking unauthorized access attempts and filtering out potentially harmful traffic. Implementing these security measures not only helps to protect your website from potential attacks but also signals to search engines that you are taking the necessary steps to prioritize user security.
Failing to secure your website can harm your search performance and cause a drop in rankings on the search engine results page. In addition to affecting your search engine ranking, a lack of website security can also lead to a high bounce rate and low-quality user experience, as users may feel hesitant to interact with a website that they perceive as being insecure. It is essential to ensure that your website’s security is up-to-date and that you are taking the necessary measures to protect it against potential hacks and attacks. By prioritizing website security, you can not only protect your website and your users but also improve your search engine ranking and SEO performance.
Optimizing for indexing and crawling
Indexing refers to the process of adding a website’s pages to a search engine’s database, while crawling is the process of discovering new pages to index. Indexing and crawling are both essential components of SEO. Without proper indexing and crawling, search engines cannot understand a website’s content and, therefore, cannot rank it in organic search results.
To optimize a website for indexing and crawling, webmasters can use tools such as XML sitemaps and robots.txt files. XML sitemaps are files that contain a list of all the website’s pages and help search engine crawlers understand the site’s structure. Robots.txt files tell search engine crawlers which pages to crawl and which pages to ignore.
However, there are common issues that can prevent indexing and crawling, such as duplicate content and broken links. Duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to lower rankings. Broken links can prevent search engine crawlers from accessing a website’s pages, resulting in incomplete indexing.
To avoid these issues, webmasters can use SEO tools to identify and fix any indexing and crawling problems. For example, crawl budget refers to the amount of time search engine crawlers spend on a website. Webmasters can optimize their crawl budget by eliminating duplicate content, fixing broken links, and using canonical tags to indicate the preferred version of a page.
Optimizing website navigation and site architecture
Optimizing website navigation and site architecture is an essential part of SEO. It’s critical to have a clear and intuitive navigation structure that makes it easy for users to find what they are looking for on the website. A well-designed navigation structure can also help search engines understand the website’s content and rank it accordingly.
One of the ways to optimize website navigation is to use strategies like internal linking to connect related content and guide users to other relevant pages on the website. This can help increase the time users spend on the website and reduce the bounce rate, which can have a positive impact on search engine rankings.
In addition to improving user experience, optimizing website navigation and site architecture can also help with website performance. A well-designed navigation structure can reduce the number of clicks required to access specific content, making the website faster and more efficient. This is particularly important for WordPress websites, which can be more prone to performance issues if the navigation and site architecture are not optimized.
Technical SEO audits
Technical SEO audits are crucial to ensure that a website is optimized for search engines and can help identify technical issues that may be affecting its SEO performance. Some of the most common technical SEO issues include slow page speed, broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors.
During an audit, technical SEO specialists analyze various factors that impact a website’s ranking and identify areas that need improvement. This includes analyzing the website’s structure, content, and technical elements such as sitemaps, robots.txt files, and canonical tags. Technical SEO experts use tools like crawl analysis, log file analysis, and manual inspection to identify issues that may be affecting a website’s SEO performance.
A typical technical SEO audit involves several phases, including:
Website analysis: During the website analysis portion of a technical SEO audit, an SEO expert will thoroughly review and evaluate a website’s technical structure and content to identify any issues or potential areas for improvement. This typically involves using a combination of SEO tools and manual inspection to assess key factors such as site speed, mobile optimization, site architecture, internal linking, on-page optimization, and more.
The website analysis will also often include a review of the website’s analytics data, usually provided by Google Analytics, to assess its current performance and identify areas for improvement. This can help the SEO expert to gain insights into how users are interacting with the website and to identify any issues that may be negatively impacting its performance.
On-page optimization: Involves optimizing individual pages for specific keywords and ensuring that the website’s content is relevant and high-quality. Doing on-page SEO boosts a website’s visibility and helps it rank higher in SERPs. This, in turn, can lead to increased organic traffic, higher engagement, and better conversion rates.
Off-page optimization: During the off-page optimization phase of a technical SEO audit, the focus is on improving the website’s reputation and authority in the eyes of search engines. This involves analyzing the website’s backlink profile and identifying any potential issues or opportunities for improvement.
The audit will typically analyze the quality and relevance of the website’s existing backlinks. This involves looking at the domain authority of the linking websites, the relevance of the linking pages to the content of the website, and the anchor text used in the links.
Technical optimization: The technical optimization part of a technical SEO audit involves analyzing the website’s technical elements to identify and fix any issues that may be hindering its search engine visibility and ranking. This includes evaluating the website’s code structure, site architecture, and site speed, as well as identifying and addressing any broken links, duplicate content, or missing meta tags.
A site audit can help businesses stay ahead of the competition by identifying and fixing technical issues before they impact their SEO performance. It’s also a good way to identify any problem areas on your site if you’re considering launching an SEO campaign or if you’ve recently completed a website migration. This is especially important in the ever-changing world of search engine algorithms, where regular updates can significantly impact a website’s ranking. That’s why a technical SEO consultancy is highly recommended to ensure that your website is optimized for search engines and can compete in the highly competitive digital marketing landscape.
Prioritize technical SEO services to improve your website
For tech companies, especially those who use their website as an ecommerce platform, investing in technical SEO services is particularly important to ensure their websites are optimized to meet the ever-changing algorithm updates of search engines.
A technical SEO agency like SWARM NYC has a proven track record of delivering results for their clients by providing customized solutions tailored to each client’s specific needs.
Don’t miss out on the potential benefits of investing in quality SEO services for your tech company. Contact SWARM NYC today to learn more about how their technical SEO experts can help your business improve its online visibility, search engine rankings, and overall SEO performance.
