Technical SEO Techniques For Businesses in 2023
In this blog, we discuss Technical SEO Techniques For Businesses in 2023.
Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can change the face of your business if only you give it the attention it deserves.
Read this blog to discover why technical SEO is vital to your business and what you need to create an effective technical SEO strategy.
Why Is Technical SEO Important For Your Business?
There are 3 popular types of SEO, namely On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, and Technical SEO.
Over the years, many business owners have invested significantly in On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO, paying little or no attention to technical SEO because of its technicalities.
However, if you factor in the impact of technical SEO on search rankings, you will realize why it shouldn’t be neglected.
Websites with technical SEO can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines, leading to more traffic, more leads, and ultimately, more customers. Hence, paying attention to technical SEO fundamentals on your site is essential to your business.
How To Create An Effective Technical SEO Strategy for Your Business
Now that you know the importance of technical SEO, you can take the next step — creating an effective technical SEO strategy.
To make this happen, you must carry out a technical SEO audit.
Tools like Google Search Console and SEMRush come in handy during a technical SEO audit.
They can help you analyze what you are getting right or wrong.
Technical SEO helps you:
- Map out actionable plans to outdo your competitors,
- Recognize opportunities on your site,
- Discover and rectify exit points
- Establish an improved user experience.
Without further ado, below are 8 technical SEO tips you can apply to enhance your site’s organic traffic.
1. Apply SSL
SSL or Security Sockets Layer is a standard security technology that creates an encrypted link between a browser and web server.
It keeps your internet connection secure and safeguards every sensitive data transferred between 2 systems. This prevents criminals from reading and altering any sent information like potential personal information.
You can tell a website with SSL from another without SSL using their Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).
A website URL structure with SSL begins with HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) while the non-secure website URL structure begins with HTTP (HyperText Protocol).
Google prefers sites with HTTPS to the ones with HTTP. The reason is as clear as day — Google wants to ensure that every user is guaranteed a safe and secure website experience.
This also influences the ranking signal that Google and other search engines use to rank and understand sites.
Furthermore, in July 2020, Google Chrome and most search engines began to mark websites without the SSL certificate as “Not Secure.” And this can drive users away from your page.
So, it’s only right that you make sure your website is secure. You can achieve this by installing an SSL certificate on your site. Fortunately, these days, many recognized site builders come with SSL.
2. Improve your site speed
Users prefer a website that loads fast over another that loads slowly. Hence, the longer your site load time, the higher the bounce rate or probability of users abandoning your page. And that’s not good for your business.
If the site load time goes from:
- 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%
- 1 second to 10 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 123%
An increase in bounce rate tells search engines that your page is not relevant to users, leading to a dip in search engine rankings.
However, any slight improvement on your site speed can reduce bounce rate, enhance conversion rate, and boost your search engine rankings.
Here are some steps you can take to improve your site speed:
- Use a fast hosting company
- Use Domain Name System (DNS) provider
- Reduce the HTPPS requests — ensure your use of plugins and scripts is minimal.
- Use one Cascading Style Sheet(CSS) rather than inline CSS or multiple CSS
- Compress your images to make them smaller
- Also, compress the pages on your website. You can achieve this by using the Gzip tool.
- Minify your site’s code — Get rid of irrelevant spaces and line breaks in your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. (Refer to the Google minify resources page for more details)
3. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
The mobile-friendliness of your website is essential. If your website has a responsive design, it will adjust itself automatically, making navigation and reading on all devices stress-free.
The responsiveness of your website serves as a key ranking signal on Google’s algorithm. And with the emergence of Google’s mobile-first indexing, having a responsive website is now a must for every business owner.
So, make sure that your entire site is highly responsive and displays effectively on desktop, tablet, Android, or iOS devices.
4. Fix duplicate content issues
Having duplicate content on your site means one thing — one or more pages have similar content. This confuses the algorithm of search engines like Google, making it difficult to rank one web page over the other on the first page.
If your site has duplicate contents, your ranking on search engines will falter, affecting your website’s traffic rate.
Use SEMRush’s Site Audit tool to confirm if you have duplicate content on your website. Once you discover duplicate content on your page, fix it by creating unique and high-quality content.
Also, you can use the “canonical link element” to tell search engines the page to display in the search results.
5. Eliminate 404s or Broken links and pages
If you notice 404 errors on your site, it implies that you have non-existent pages or pages linked that don’t exist. And this is not good for the user’s experience.
Furthermore, a broken link or page prevents search engines from crawling it. This can hurt your search rankings.
Most times, these crawl errors occur when you move from an old website URL to a new one. And in other cases, you possibly deemed the page irrelevant and unpublished it.
You can use webmaster tools like SEMRush and Google Search Console to discover broken web pages.
Immediately you find these broken links or pages, set up a 301 redirect. This makes it possible for the old web page to bring visitors to the new web page.
6. Disavow toxic links
After some time, many backlinks may accumulate on your website. This might seem like good news, especially when these backlinks are trustworthy.
However, some of those backlinks can be toxic. Simply put, they can affect your search rankings negatively. Hence, you should identify these links and disavow them.
7. Create an XML sitemap
XML sitemaps are files that help search engines to have a good understanding of your site when crawling it. These sitemaps tell search engines the exact location of every page on your site.
Additionally, it contains vital information about every page on your website such as:
- How frequently the page is updated
- The priority of the page on your website
- The last time the page was modified
8. Add structured data markup to your site
Adding a structured data markup to your site helps search engines to understand your content better. The structured data encourages effective search engine indexing on your site, leading to productive results, such as a higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) and improved site traffic.
Final Words
As a business owner, you need to prioritize SEO to get more out of your business. You can’t make sales if your potential customers don’t know you exist.
Applying technical SEO techniques for Businesses in 2023 requires knowledge and allocation of ressources.
However, if you get the SEO right, you can draw their attention to your offer, and ultimately, make more sales.
You must combine Off-Page SEO, On-Page SEO, and Technical SEO to achieve this. Although technical SEO can be demanding, it can be a game-changer for your business. Do not neglect these technical aspects of SEO.