Organic search is by far the most efficient way to increase visibility and drive traffic to your website. What is the best way to make this happen? By implementing good search engine optimization (SEO), which includes strategies to help improve the appearance and ranking of web pages in organic search results.
Depending on your company’s needs, there are several types of SEO that you can use, but one thing is for sure: every online business needs server optimization and improvement of user experience. This is where technical SEO comes in.
If you are looking for strategies to rank higher on google and your business is based in London, in this article we will tell you all you need to know about technical SEO in London.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the optimization of the structure of your website and the backend components that make up your website. Unlike on-page SEO optimization, which specifically deals with keywords and content, you often need a technical SEO agency in London to review and perform technical changes to your website backend and content structure.
Typical things in ensuring sound technical SEO include fast page loading times, a secure website, no duplicate content, schema & sitemap structures, and well-structured content that google can easily crawl and categorize for better search results.
Technical SEO helps search engines index your site more effectively by improving the technical aspects of a website, which ultimately increases the ranking of the website in search engines. This practice, in addition to on-page SEO, helps to maximize proper search engine ranking techniques. A technically optimized website is faster, more secure, has fewer dead links and it has structured data Google can easily read.
The technical nature of the required changes is usually not suited for a standard SEO company, which is why you should be looking for an SEO agency in London to review and optimise your website both on-page and behind the scenes.
Why Should You Perform Technical SEO on your London-based website?
If you’ve engaged a skilled SEO content writer and have fantastic content with lots of backlinks and helpful information that draws people in, but you’re struggling to beat some of your competitors, it’s entirely possible that the technical aspects of your website are letting you down.
If your page loads too slow, or there are parts of your robots.txt that block or misdirect google and other search engines, or you simply don’t have a sitemap to help show the structure of your website, your pages may not be getting ranked optimally or found at all.
A technical SEO agency will be able to perform a full review of your site to ensure that all technical aspects of your website and backend servers are giving you the best chance to rank the highest for your search terms.
What Do Technical SEO Companies Check?
A technical SEO company should perform a full review of your website, which does include checking your on-page optimizations and off-page optimizations; however, a technical SEO agency will perform additional checks on your website for maximum search engine rankings.
Some of the primary checks that will be performed on your website for technical SEO reviews will include the items listed below.
Website Speed
We live in a fast-paced world, and waiting is a buzz killer for everyone. No wonder more than half of the website users will leave if a page does not load in a few seconds.
Search engines attempt to provide the best results and experience for users. A slow website or one which is constantly going down and not available is a poor experience that search engines don’t want to include in their results.
Whether or not you have optimal content that provides the best information, if your site is slow or down, then people will become frustrated and leave the site. Search engines know this, so they won’t include you in the results or at least in top-ranking results.
A technical SEO agency will analyse the speed of your overall website and specific pages of your website. You may be paying too little for a budget hosting company, or you could have an overloaded server with too many websites for the amount of traffic coming in.
It’s also possible you have code or add-ons that are causing pages to load too slowly, especially if they need to pull off-site information.
Make sure you optimize visuals by adjusting the image sizes correctly on your website to enable fast loading. Another element to take into consideration is using the correct format: jpg for photographs and png for graphics.
Search Engine Crawling Issues
Your website may or may not have a robots.txt file; this is a message left for search engines that indicates how you would like the crawling bot to search and index the pages on your site. You may also not have a sitemap.xml which is a map of your ensure site, including all pages.
A technical SEO company will be able to review and optimize your robots.txt and sitemap.xml and make sure that there haven’t been any typos or malicious blocks left that tell the search engine not to index or display certain pages on your site.
A common mistake with robots.txt is to block access to JS or CSS files, which can make a search engine believe that your website is poorly structured or may be broken, so it doesn’t want to include broken links in search results.
This is probably one of the most important aspects of a technical SEO- as making your website accessible should be your main objective.
The indexing process means the organization of the information by the search engines to allow fast response to queries.
Therefore, your site needs to be configured in a way which allows Google to access all the relevant content.
Metadata is also a key component of a technical SEO. It helps search engines filter and determine which page is relevant to their specific search. The text you decide to put in the metadata should be eye-catching or interesting to attract users and make them click on your page.
Dead Or Broken Links
Dead or broken links refer to pages on your website that used to exist that no longer do. These dead links can often be a problem after your website is optimized poorly, you perform upgrades, or migrate your website to a new content management system.
Search engines will recheck pages that they’ve historically listed before, and if there are a huge number of pages that are now missing, it can devalue your website. Search engines may be concerned that if they index and provide results from your website, they may go missing, which is another poor user experience.
The other issue you can face is external websites that link back to your site using old links, and when search engines follow them, they have the same issue of missing content.
An SEO agency will be able to review your backend web server logs to see how many pages are missing and then implement redirects to the new or best alternative pages.
Duplicate Content
If you’re trying to rank for specific keywords, then you have a stronger position on search engines if there is a specific page on your site dedicated to that keyword.
You can run into a few issues with duplicate content; either you really do have two pages with the same or very similar content, which can be confusing as to which page should rank for the keyword.
Another issue you can face is that you have two paths to the same content, this can be the result of a content management system that provides a long URL and then tries to optimize it with a short SEO URL, but the result appears to be duplicate content.
A technical SEO agency can analyze your website to ensure that you don’t have duplicate links to the same content or that multiple pages don’t rank for the same keywords.
Website Security
Search engines are concerned about the websites their users go to; if the links in a search engine take users to unsecure or compromised websites, that’s a poor user experience that they don’t want to provide.
One of the essential security aspects of your website should be that it uses SSL / HTTPS for encrypted data communication between your browser and website.
While search engines aren’t checking the versions of your website, if you’re not keeping them up to date, they could become compromised. You may not notice it, but somebody may have loaded a JS or other file for malicious purposes on your site; if search engines detect this type of compromise, your website will show a warning or may be removed from listings.
A technical SEO company can perform a full security audit of your system to ensure the software is up to date, there are no security issues on your pages, and implement optimized HTTPS for your site.
Mobile-Friendly Site Design
Your website may be the most beautiful thing that anybody has ever seen, but if search engines determine it not to be optimized for all browsers and specifically mobile-friendly, your website will be penalized and be listed lower than competing sites that are mobile-friendly or responsive.
A technical SEO agency can determine if your website is responsive and works well on all major OS, devices, and browsers to ensure search engines find it a valuable resource for all users.
Is Technical SEO in London worth it?
Having your website reviewed by a technical SEO agency will ensure that all of the work you do for standard SEO is not hindered by problems on the backend that you may not be aware of.
The issues listed above are a small sampling of what you can expect from a technical SEO review of your website.
If competitors have implemented a technical SEO strategy and you haven’t, then it’s highly likely that you will never outrank them.
Google is the most important search engine for most people around the world, and it has specific technical SEO requirements and guarantees that if you don’t follow them, it will rank you lower than sites that do.
A skilled technical SEO company in London can be the difference between a successful business and a business that never ranks high enough to do more than break even with mediocre sales & traffic.
The importance of implementing technical SEO in your business strategy is key to gaining the desired visibility and organic traffic to your website.
If you think your Google ranking is low because of possible technical SEO issues, most of them can be fixed and, if implemented correctly, you can see the benefits quite rapidly.
If you’re interested in optimising the technical aspects of your site, our team at 50 Creative Solutions can help! Contact us to learn more.
