Websites are complex things. From the DNS (Domain Name Server) to the CMS (Content Management System) there are myriad sophisticated systems that all work in harmony with each other.
However, like many things, from bicycles to cars and houses – if they’re not maintained properly, they can cause issues or suffer from suboptimal performance. Keeping up a programme of regular maintenance will ensure that your website is as good, if not better, than the day it was built.
And so, these are the reasons why websites need technical SEO…
Search Engine Visibility
By conducting technical SEO, the very first thing you will benefit from is having visibility with the search engines. Without that initial first sweep, your website might not even be visible to the search engines, so you want to remedy this first and foremost.
Some years ago, a client came to Clever Marketing asking why they weren’t being indexed in Google. Within five minutes of looking, we discovered that the website developer had left an instruction in the robots.txt file to block all crawlers. And so, for quite a few years, their website had neither been crawled nor indexed. They had zero visibility in the search engines.
And that leads us on nicely to the next reason why websites need technical SEO…
Crawlability and Indexing
How does your website get indexed in Google, Bing or the other search engines?
Well first the search engine sends out a web crawler, “bot”, or “spider”, to crawl your website. Using your website’s URL, either found in a link or submitted directly to the search engine, the bot visits your website and starts to crawl all the pages.
Crawling does not involve “viewing” your site in the human sense, so it’s not about seeing the logo, the visuals, the layout etc. But the bot can ascertain all that merely from parsing the HTML of your webpages.
The crawl fetches the HTML code and identifies and follows links. So, in a single crawl, the bot should visit, fetch, and follow all the links in your website and fetch every webpage.
Technical SEO goes beyond the simple “on-page” SEO of optimising titles, meta descriptions, and your body copy, and enters the realm of looking at your HTML in detail.
Those crawls can be interrupted by:
- Broken links
- Redirects
- Poorly marked-up HTML
- JavaScript rendering
- Slow loading pages and websites
- Poorly structured websites
- Duplicate content
- Server problems
So crawling needs to be optimal. Because if a bot or spider can perfectly crawl your website then it can therefore index it properly too.
By conducting technical SEO on your website you can fix those broken links, eliminate those redirects, and make sure that the code of your website is as perfect as possible to allow these web crawlers to use their crawl budget as best as possible.
Improved Ranking
Once your website is indexable, and crawlable, it gets… crawled and indexed. Or at least it should do.
In an ideal world, your website is full of helpful content that satisfies user intent and has been well designed and well optimised by your designers and marketers. If this is the case then it should rank well. That is considering your website is better than your competitors’ websites.
However, define better.
This is where technical SEO gives you those insights that only technical SEO can…
Website speed is a major factor in ranking, and technical SEO work can identify and improve this. Everything from the server speed to the site structure affects how search engine bots “see” your website. Technical improvements to make your site slimmer (in terms of reducing “code bloat”, optimising image sizes), faster (Hosting speed, response times…) and mobile-friendly, will all improve your chances of am improved rank in the search engines.
Better User Experience (UX)
Whilst User Experience is a front-end concept, and technical SEO is more back-end, what happens “behind the scenes” can have a very direct effect on how a user sees and interacts with your company website.
Work from a technical SEO specialist will help your site load faster, and whilst that performance also translates into better crawling, indexing, and ranking, it also means a superior user experience too.
Think about visiting a website on mobile. They do tend to load slower, often because you may be on a 4G or, heaven forbid, a 3G network. Just form the nature of bandwidth, this can be an impediment to load speed, and a slow loading website means a potentially frustrated user.
If you have your server optimised, and your website has had technical SEO work, it should be faster on mobile, and thus you’ll have satisfied users.
So technical SEO improves the user experience and keeps your customers happy.
A Basis for On-Page SEO
Technical SEO is the bedrock for all work built on top of it.
Once you have a well-designed, well-developed website, with beautifully crafted helpful content, then conducting regular SEO is an absolute breeze.
As an SEO practitioner with over 20 years’ experience myself, there’s nothing better than to work on a website that has been lovingly crafted from the ground up, including all that technical SEO work.
A good server, great CMS, optimal theme, and all the best practice beforehand mean that “doing SEO” on such websites is an absolute delight.
This is why a watertight design brief ensures a perfect project that easily benefits from technical and on-page SEO.
Because Competitors Will be Doing Technical SEO Too
Running a company website is like all things in business – you’re not the only one doing it.
Your competition will all have their own websites, and if they’re not dong as well as you, they will seek to improve and conduct SEO and technical SEO to catch up with and try to overtake you.
Conclusion
Websites need technical SEO like cars need a regular service, race cars need tuning, or houses need regular maintenance. If you “let them go” they suffer, and you have to remember that if you’re not looking after yours, intelligent competitors will see that and take advantage.
Technical SEO is a specialist discipline, so if you know a technical SEO agency, like Clever Marketing, then take advantage! They will give you the edge on your competitors.
Put it this way – if you both have identical websites, then by having a masterful technical SEO specialist on your side will work wonders. It could be the exact thing you need to push your competition into second place, and by being in the top slot, you’ll take the lion’s share of the clicks…
Take advantage of our hundreds of years of combined experience and expertise and you’ll see why your website needs technical SEO.
Call us now on 01276 402 381 or complete the easy contact form.