Technical SEO is the nuts and bolts of SEO but it is often seen as dark art. It can also be a bit of a Cinderella, not much invited to pitches or new business meetings. That’s generally because clients naturally expect agencies to be good at this type of work and as it’s a bit geeky and nerdy, it’s not a great conversation starter. Agencies say they do it, clients nod along, and then the conversation moves on to more compelling creative matters.
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself but the problem is, when we come to work on technical aspects of SEO, clients don’t always know what we mean. So this blog post is aimed at redressing that balance so that any client who is told that their agency is focussing on technical SEO, will have a better understanding of how their agency’s time was spent.
Why is technical SEO so important?
Technical SEO is best described as a website health check. It involves improving under-the-bonnet aspects of a website to enhance search engine rankings, ensuring search engines can easily crawl, index and understand the site’s content.
These adjustments – some of which might simply be small tweaks and others, more substantial changes – can and sometimes do have an almost immediate impact on a website. Therefore, it can be an extremely gratifying area of work.
Understanding crawl budget
To understand technical SEO, it’s first helpful to understand how search engines work.
Search engines use web crawlers (also known as bots or spiders) to discover new content. That said, they don’t hang out on dark corners of the web simply waiting for updates to be made. Each website has what is known as a ‘crawl budget’, which is the amount of time that a search engine allocates to crawling and indexing a particular site. A national newspaper website will have a much larger crawl budget for example than a small furniture retailer.
Contrary to popular belief, search engines do not trawl the entire web every single time someone undertakes a new search. When new content is found (crawled), a search engine indexes that information for future reference. Search engines then refer to their indexed content and then rank that content in what they perceive as the order of importance based on a specific user search.
There are various features and tools (such as robots.txt files, sitemaps and structured data) that should be integrated into a website and regularly checked to help improve a search engine’s ability to crawl, index and understand what has been created.
Is site speed considered technical SEO?
Site speed is a critical factor for both user experience and search engine rankings. A site that is slow to load will not win any favours with search engines or searchers and will struggle to rank or convert well.
Amongst other factors, large, uncompressed images, too many requests for different files, poor hosting, and excessive or badly written code can all impact site speed.
Site speed also needs to be considered alongside something known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is when a page judders, jumps around or has an erratic layout as it downloads. Not only is this frustrating for users but as Google prioritises pages that load smoothly and provide a stable experience, poor CLS can negatively impact SEO.
Site architecture is another important aspect of technical SEO
Site architecture refers to how a website’s pages are structured and linked together.
A clear, logical hierarchy ensures users can easily navigate a website, while also helping search engines crawl and index pages effi