How important is technical SEO?

Search engine optimisation will only work if the technical SEO is improved. For example, you could write 10,000 words until your fingers fall off, but if the work can’t get indexed, well, what’s the point?

Therefore, technical SEO is what we think of as the foundation of a building. You need this to support everything.

Therefore, we have written a comprehensive guide to improving your business’s technical SEO.

Crawling and Indexing

Can my website be crawled and indexed?

For a website to appear in Google’s organic results, Googlebot must be able to crawl and index the URLs. This means that a spider, or “Googlebot”, needs to crawl the page and decide on whether to index it.

If the website is indexed, it can then appear in Google’s results.

It’s important to know that a website has a crawl budget; this means Googlebot will only spend so much time crawling and indexing it.

Therefore, it’s important to use the crawl budget as efficiently as possible. This means making sure that all the pages you want to appear in Google’s results are listed in an XML sitemap.

Also, all the pages you don’t want to appear have a “no-index” instruction added to the Robot.txt file.

Redirects

How have the redirects been set up?

Redirects are a bit like when you encounter roadworks on a motorway, and you’re redirected somewhere else.

This is the same for a company website: for example, a product page might get taken down, and you could, if you wanted, use a redirect to direct visitors to a new page.

Now, the web developers must use redirects correctly. For example, there are different types of redirects, such as 301 and 302 redirects.

Also, it’s important not to use too many redirects, as it can put a shopper in a redirect cycle.

Hreflang Tags

Hreflang tags are used when a website needs to offer multiple languages. These must be set up correctly by the web developers.

Structured Data

How important is structured data?

Now, because of GEO, LLMs, and, of course, SEO, it’s more important than ever to use schema markup. This is described as a form of structured language, and whether it’s Googlebot or ChatGPT reading the work, it can better understand the text when you add it.

Schema.org is a popular structured data language that helps LLMS and Google better understand what a page is about. For example, if it’s your business’s contact us page, you might want to mark up your company’s address and opening hours.

Site Structure

It is important to consider the website’s structure carefully. For example, how can you set out the pages so a shopper can get to where they want in seconds?

If there is a lot of duplication, if Googlebot has to read a lot of pages that sell or say similar things, well, you could be doing two things: wasting your crawl budget and causing canalisalition issues.

This basically means the pages are being cannibalised, meaning two pages are so similar that Google doesn’t know which to rank.

Therefore, it places the two pages lower, and perhaps a competitor higher. Therefore, all web designers and SEO consultants should consider the site structure. Remove any duplication and set the more frequently sold products higher up on the menu.
Also, review the blog posts and create a content calendar so you don’t repeat the same topics over and over, like a dripping tap!

 

What is a robots.txt file?

It’s a good idea to set up what is called a “robot.txt” file- what this basically can set out, a bit like a shopping list, is which pages should get indexed or not indexed.

This basically means, which pages does the business want to appear in Google’s results?

If the page is, say, a page which you don’t want to appear, let’s say, for example, it’s the terms and conditions, you may want that page on your website, but not for it to be indexed.

Therefore, web developers may set up a no-index instruction and add it to the robots.txt file.

The reason this is so important is simple: if a no-index instruction isn’t added to the page, the company’s “terms and conditions” page will keep getting crawled and indexed over and over again.

Since this page isn’t selling anything, you might want it to appear in Google’s results. Therefore, if Googlebot is crawling and indexing this page daily, it’s wasting your business’s crawl budget.

That crawl budget could be better spent, for example, crawling and indexing a new blog post that your business has just written. That 3,000-word mammoth article that your marketing team has just written!

 

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap, well, that’s essential for every type of business, no matter if you sell 10,000 different product lines or you have a brochure website with just 7 pages.

A sitemap details all the pages on your website. Now, your thinking: well, why is that even needed if the website is live?

Well, it just makes Googlebot’s job a lot easier; it simplifies its crawl and index of a set of links. It therefore helps Googlebot discover new pages and know which pages to index.

Again, this can help improve the company’s crawl budget by actively telling Google which pages you want crawled.

 

Site speed

Now there really isn’t any reason not to use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, because, well, it’s free from Google.

What can happen is that a website looks great but loads really, really slowly.

This means that if the page is slow to load, well, it’s going to cause a poor user experience. This is a rather nice way of saying, “Well, it’s going to frustrate a customer.” Therefore, top web designers spend a lot of time making the website as fast as possible, because, well, this can dictate where the business is ranked in Google’s results.

Broken links, link equity and internal links

You could have a link-building team that is really good at what they do, so much so that they have links from some of the best websites in your business sector.

For example, let’s say you sell used cars, and the link-building team at your SEO agency has managed to get links from, say, Top Gear Magazine.

These are high-quality, relevant links, but what if the link breaks? Therefore, the link equity can’t be passed through, meaning it’s pretty much wasted.

Therefore, part of technical SEO is to check for broken links and use internal links to send link equity to other pages.

 

Does your business need help to improve its SEO?

If your business needs help improving its technical SEO, why not call us today?

Ryan C Walsh is an established SEO agency. We have over 11 years of experience helping Welsh businesses get to the top of Google.
Give us a call today.