By Technical SEO is a broad term that covers all of the different factors – from on-page design elements to server configuration – that together determine how well a website ranks in search results.
By optimising across some or all of these different criteria, you can improve your website’s ranking for your target search keywords and phrases, helping to drive more traffic to your landing pages.
What is Technical SEO?
A technical SEO review will look at the most relevant characteristics of your website and server configuration. For an in-depth review, this can include over 250 different criteria, including things like:
- ‘Robots’ meta configuration to ensure the search engines can crawl your pages.
- Page load time.
- Sitemap structure and format.
- Canonical page references.
- Broken links and page crawl problems.
- ‘Bloated’ page source code that slows loading speed.
A site audit will also look at page-by-page factors like URL structure and formatting, and can look at whether external links pointing to your website could be harming your ranking.
Why is Technical SEO so good?
A lot is said about what affects website search rankings, and over the years the most important factors have changed – a website now needs to load quickly and display correctly on mobile devices, should offer a secure connection and should not have external sites linking to it just because you paid them to do so.
Technical SEO is an effective way to apply deep experience and expertise to website audits, to flag up any immediate causes for concern and to identify ways to optimise the site structure and page content for improved rankings.
In particular, the depth of a detailed technical SEO audit can flag up problems that might otherwise be missed and make sure all the elements of your SEO are working in harmony.
Do I need a Technical SEO Audit?
An in-depth technical SEO audit certainly will not harm your search engine rankings, and can be applied to a website even if you have carried out SEO on your pages in the past.
Most basic SEO campaigns will focus on page elements like the title, meta tags, keyworded headings and so on; with a detailed technical SEO audit you can check that external factors like page load speed, server configuration and third-party hyperlinks to your site are not undermining those efforts.
Crucially, a technical SEO audit puts the experience of an SEO professional at your disposal, so that you benefit from their insight across every aspect of your website.
What happens after a Technical SEO Audit?
The audit will give you actionable recommendations of how to improve your SEO using proven, recognised techniques.