Are you looking to increase the online presence of your small business? Increasing your website’s loading speed is one great way to make your business more visible in search engines. However, that’s just one small component of a great technical SEO strategy.
If you’re a small business owner, you may have heard about technical SEO, but what does it actually mean (and more importantly) how can it help your business?
Technical SEO is all about the various aspects of website optimization that are focused on optimizing the underlying structure of a website rather than its content. It focuses on ensuring search engine bots can crawl and properly index your site for ranking purposes.
In effect, good technical SEO practices allow businesses to make sure their online presence is as visible and competitive as possible. Keep reading to learn all about technical SEO, along with five helpful tips you can implement today.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO involves optimizing your website’s architecture, content, and HTML code to create a better user experience. While the work is more, well, technical in nature, the goal is the same as investing in regular SEO: to improve your search engine results.
How do you achieve great technical SEO results? It usually involves thorough research and analysis of the following key factors:
- Site structure
- Page speed
- Titles & meta descriptions
- Mobile usability
Through this analysis, an SEO expert can help your business identify areas of improvement that will lead to greater visibility in search engines.
The bottom line? By properly leveraging technical SEO tactics, your website can rank higher in organic search results and deliver more qualified leads. This boosts your bottom line over time.
Technical SEO vs. On-Page SEO
Technical SEO and on-page SEO are both important tools for driving web traffic and ensuring your website is properly optimized.
However, technical SEO involves making sure the infrastructure of your website is correctly configured. On-page SEO focuses more on content optimization. The results are different, too.
Technical SEO can help improve site speed, “crawlability,” and server uptime. This kind of SEO also helps ensure users have an optimal experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
On the other hand, on-page SEO focuses on keyword research, linking structure, and proper content formatting. The goal there is to create compelling content that will attract users.
Basically, on-page SEO helps attract users to your website. Technical SEO ensures they have a great experience once they’re there. Both are crucial elements of a great SEO strategy.
How Technical SEO Helps Boost Business
You might understand different kinds of SEO, but how does technical SEO help boost your business?
It all starts with making sure your website has some fundamental technical elements. This includes:
- Having proper tags and descriptions across all pages
- Making sure every page is indexed
- Using robots.txt to block any URLs you don’t want Google to feature
This way, it’s easier for potential customers to find you when they’re searching for products or services.
Other technical elements such as page speed and performance are just as important, too. If your website takes too long to load people might leave before they’ve even had a chance to check out what you offer.
Overall, making sure you pay close attention to technical SEO will help ensure your website or eCommerce store stands out from the crowd. This can ultimately lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates.
5 Technical SEO Optimizations to Make Today
Are you ready to improve your site’s technical SEO? While we suggest speaking with a professional SEO agency in Charlotte, there are some steps you can take today to improve your website.
1. Improve Your Website Speed
No matter how great your content may be, if your page takes too long to load, visitors are likely to get frustrated and move on.
To fix this:
- Compress image files
- Enable browser caching
- Minify code where possible
All of these changes can drastically improve your page loading times. Additionally, consider optimizing your server settings and leveraging a content delivery network (CDN) to further boost speed and improve user experience.
2. Use an SSL
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a security protocol that encrypts the data being exchanged between your website and its users.
When you have an SSL certificate on your website, it makes it more secure and private, as well as helps with other technical optimizations. Often, Google will rank sites with SSL certificates higher because they want to promote trustworthy websites to users.
3. Delete Duplicate Content
Duplicate content occurs when the same content crops up in multiple locations. While it might not seem like a big deal (hey, you’re only plagiarizing yourself, right?), it can adversely affect SEO ranking and make it harder for search engines to understand your site.
Delete that content or canonicalize it to ensure that all of the attention is pointed toward one source.
4. Create an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is the fastest way to tell Google that it needs to crawl your website and look at which pages you’d like indexed in its search results. It makes it simpler for crawlers to see which parts of your site are updated most often and prioritize them.
Plus, an up-to-date sitemap can help strengthen the relevancy of your website, giving you a better chance of appearing near the top of Google’s search rankings.
5. Add Structured Data Markup
Structured data helps search engines better understand the content of your website and can be used for rich snippets and other types of advanced search results.
If you’re trying to boost your overall ranking in search engine results, applying structured data to your current pages is a great place to start.
It won’t directly improve your rankings. However, it can help search engines better process the information on each page, allowing them to more accurately direct traffic to take desired actions.
Get a Free SEO Consultation in Charlotte
At WSI Proven Results, we understand the importance of technical SEO and its role in improving your website’s search engine ranking.
With our free consultation, you can rest assured knowing that our scalable SEO services are more than capable of handling projects ranging from small businesses to major enterprises reaching both local and global customers.
We won’t promise you that you’ll land at the top spot on the SERPs but we do guarantee a significant spike in rankings, web traffic, and sales. Get in touch today to schedule your free SEO consultation in Charlotte!
Learn more about SEO for small businesses at WSI Proven Results and check out our reviews.
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