Here are some of our top tips to help improve your businesses technical SEO
Introduction
When you read various blog posts which are discussing various ways to improve the businesses technical search engine optimisation, commonly the various marketing businesses will discuss topics such as “how to build backlinks”, “how to write better content marketing” and why it’s so important that you have a well-designed website.
Or let’s say, they talk about how to improve your businesses Google My Business profile for example, yet, we think, that technical seo, well that’s talked about much less by some marketing companies, yet, it’s a really important part of the seo process, that we think marketing agencies should talk about more about. That’s because, let’s face it, if a homepage cant get indexed by the search engines, such as by Googlebot, when its crawling and indexing websites, this simply means, that Google’s algorithm will not put the business anywhere in its index, which means, if the website cant be indexed, it wont appear on page 1 of Google, or on any page of Google’s results for that matter.
Sometimes these blog posts are let’s say 1000 words, so they can’t really go into huge amount of detail, so they simply tell you how to write a piece of content marketing, how to add titles and why a meta title and meta description is so important
Therefore, sometimes technical search engine optimisation is often talked about less, because it requires more expertise in order to improve the businesses technical search engine optimisation.
However, it’s so important that your technical search engine optimisation is right, because if it’s not, then quite simply put the website might never get indexed, which simply means that it will never in one million years rank on page one of Google.
So, for example if by mistake the web designer has left the no indexed have on, or written some code into the website so it can’t get indexed then it will never show up on the first page for that matter any page of Google, so this is why it’s so important that you get will not technical seo right from the outset.
Buy the right search engine optimisation tools
If you are going to have a go at doing SEO yourself, then just make sure that all of the work that you complete is white hat, and get the right tools to help guide you.
For example, there are some brilliant marketing tools out there which can help you find if you have any duplicate content marketing, how fast your website is and also they can also tell you for example if there are broken links.
These are obviously all to do with improving your technical search engine optimisation, you can get other tools as well which can help you to build backlinks, and this can help improve your local search engine optimisation.
To make sure that you purchase quality tools would be our first piece of advice.
Indexation problems, make sure that these are fixed from the get go.
You could spend the whole week writing a piece of content marketing, which you think is ace, you think it’s absolutely brilliant, that anybody reading it is confined it informative, helpful and its going to help them find the answer to a question that they want answered.
You might have made yourself 10 cups of espresso, worked late into the night writing it, and then you spent an equal amount of time on top proofreading it so that all the sentences flow nicely and that you believe it is a brilliant piece of work.
However, they could be one massive problem, that could be your site has codes, written into it, perhaps by the web designer, which means that it can’t get indexed, meaning that will never appear on.
Now, this might leave you scratching your head thinking well why on earth isn’t my businesses search engine optimisation improving, I put 1000 hours into improving the on-site seo and I have seen no improvement you might be thinking, well this could be because of something such as “indexation problem”.
“Indexation problems” might occur on the main pages, you might per on let’s say some of the blog posts, and they might not be apparent to somebody who hasn’t got much web design knowledge, so you need to figure out if there are any indexation issues and these need to be fixed straightaway.
Otherwise, your website will never in one million years appear on the first page of Google.
How fast is your website?
You only have to look at modern society today, and it could be argued that we are more impatient than ever, we want our meals cooked in a short amount of time in the microwave, we want to be answered as quickly as possible on telephone when calling company, and we simply want our items that we deliver on the Internet delivered ultra-quickly.
We don’t want to be a waiting that long breaking, we expected good level of service, and this is exactly the same mindset you should take when designing having your website designed, think about speed.
It’s all well and good having an intricate website, but if it takes ages for it to low, then this is no good to anybody, actually it going to contribute to the customer having what we call a bad user experience (UX).
And by that we mean let’s say that they want to buy themselves a nice pair of trendy trainers will if they have to wait too long that page to load their going to have a bad because the website is not fast instead moving at a snail’s pace, which means that the customer is go elsewhere.
If they go elsewhere this contributes your business having a high bounce rate, if you have sky high bounce rate, let’s say bounce rate above 70% this means that 70% of your customers are leaving your website on the very first page that they visit.
This is not good, it’s kind of like having hundred people visit your restaurant, the enter the reception area, have a look at the menu any simply walk out the door straightaway.
If 70% of people were doing this, entering the reception and then walking away straightaway, well this is not good news is obviously something wrong that menu fixing, whether it be the food, the prices or simply the lack of range.
So, just as you would sit down chef and fix the menu, need to sit down with your web designer fix your website if it is too slow.
Site structure
If you’re in a car park, any going to want to find your car as quickly and easily as you possibly can, that’s the say car parks normally colour-coded explore give it a number, and also have passed escalators so that you can quickly get to your car.
This is exactly the same mindset the you should take with the website, obviously not colour coding each product, but what we mean is that you should help your customers to quickly get to the page that they need to get to, in terms of the product or the service as quickly as possibly possible.
So, consider your site structure, consider hand the services, all the products should be put on each different page, consider how make them pages get crawled easily, also consider the menu design to the customers can get the product easily as well.
Image size
Let’s say that your business has 1000 different various products, let’s say that you sell, skiing equipment, but let’s say that the web design company makes the mistake of using really large images each product, that’s the say they are huge pictures which take a long time to load on a smart phone, let’s say each set of scheme boots that you sell.
This is no good, because what will actually happen is that the load time, that is how fast your website is on say a smartphone will just be way too slow, so your website needs to be well designed, but it also needs to incorporate into it search engine optimisation, in terms of the pictures need to be fast to load, and there are various ways that web designers and web developers can design a website so that it helps to improve your businesses search engine optimisation.
Algorithm updates
Now what we have talked about so far in this article is all about how to improve your technical seo at the moment, but what you need to figure out is how to future proof your website, in terms of algorithm updates that might happen in the future.
So, what we mean by this is a forward-thinking search engine optimisation agency will always be thinking of about how they can make their website better, how they can make the user experience better, how they can make the search engine optimisation better.
Now sometimes the algorithm might not put a huge emphasis on some parts of that work seo work, but in the future in might become more and more important.
So let’s say for example that at the moment the bounce rate is important, but it might not be weighted that importance at this current time, but that’s not to say that in a years’ time the algorithm totally changes in the bounce rate is super important.
So really good search engine optimisation agency will consider how to improve the website now, but they will also consider how to future proof the SEO so that now with an update doesn’t adversely affect the business that badly.
Breadcrumb navigation
Consider using breadcrumb navigation, what we mean by this?
Well let’s return to our example of selling skiing equipment you might have over 700 pairs of different ski boots that you sell, so let’s say that you have breadcrumb which allow you to buy the brand, and also then by price, you might want to use breadcrumb navigation so the customers can go back forward easily to each page that they want to visit.
So, for example, let’s say that the customer sorts the ski boots bar a brand, then they decide to go back into the page which has all the ski boots and they can easily navigate using the breadcrumbs.
So, if your website doesn’t use breadcrumb navigation, then you might wish to have a conversation with your web designers, and have breadcrumb navigation added to your website.
URLs
URLs, you may wish to have your website designed so that it has good URLs, and by good URLs we mean descriptive, so for example let’s return back to our example of ski boots, you may wish to have brand of ski boot, also the word ski boot in the URL.
This just simply helps the search engines to understand that that page is about ski boots and the brand of the ski boot that your customers can find it more easily.
XML Sitemap
Your web designers definitely should add an XML site map and when the pages are changed on your blog post is added XML site should be updated.
Now if you are using let’s say a WordPress CMS, then sometimes with some plug-ins, XML site keeps itself updated, but sometimes depending on the website you have you might need to do this yourself, or of course the XML site map can be updated by your web designers.
XML sitemap find URLs to crawl.
Make sure that you get rid of any duplicated content
Now, when you’re having your website designed, your web designers might about duplicated content, it’s important to all duplicated content removed from your website, you just want a unique high quality content marketing.
Mobile Usability
You want to make sure that your website is easy-to-use on a smart phone.
Internal Linking
You should also add internal links, this is an absolute piece of cake to do, but you need to make sure that all the internal links are built using white hat methods.
