Creating and implementing a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is vital to improving your online presence. However, there are a multitude of tasks involved in SEO and unfortunately, the technical tasks are often pushed aside. Technical SEO tasks are vital for your visibility and performance in the search engine results pages. Search engines such as Google are constantly releasing algorithm changes, and if you pay close attention to them, a large part of compliance with these algorithms is the technical health of your website.
If you are new to SEO or have found yourself plateauing in progress, then here are some of the most important technical aspects you need to consider to help you drive more qualifying leads to your website.
1. Create a Strategy for Your Technical Tasks
Technical tasks are important, so creating a strategy will help you create a timeline, and actionable steps to ensure they are completed. Creating a strategy will first entail a review of the current health of your website and what issues need resolving. You can use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush to provide you with a technical report of your website. As you create a strategy to resolve technical issues, you can also compare this with your other marketing strategies that are ongoing to grow your business. This will help you to predict any more technical issues that may arise in the future that you can stay on top of.
2. Security
A secure website is one of the most important factors for Google, as well as customers. If you put yourself into your customers’ shoes, would you be happy to enter your personal and financial information into a website that is not secure? Google Chrome now flags up any website that is not secure to its users.
One of the first things you can ensure is that you use security protocols such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to safeguard your users.
3. Speed and Performance
40% of users will abandon a website because it is taking too long to load. The speed and performance of your website are vital for the trust of your users, as well as search engines, as it is now a factor that is considered in ranking results. Increasing the speed and performance of your website can be done in a variety of different ways. Every site will be different and have different components that are slowing down the website. It is important to ensure you have the right infrastructure and VPS in place to help with performance and storage, as well as compressing and optimizing large images and rich files that are taking a long time to load.
4. Crawlability
If you do not have a website or pages that Google can successfully crawl, it is likely to negatively impact your rankings and lose your authority. It is important to check your website for broken pages, marked with 404 errors. If you have any, make sure that they are set up with a 301 redirect properly, and no other pages are linking to the broken page.
Technical SEO is an important aspect of your digital marketing strategy that should not be missed. Keep on top of your strategy, security, performance, and crawlability, and you’ll see great results.
