By: Frank DePino | February 15, 2023

Most people are familiar with on-page optimization practices, but technical SEO can intimidate some users. Although there can be a bit of a learning curve for some of the backend work that goes into optimizing your webpage, it can be beneficial to understand how it all works and helps.

Technical SEO refers to the back-end work of site optimization. Technical SEO includes many elements, such as page speed, internal linking, Schema markup, and many more. A strong technical SEO approach will give your content and web pages a fighting chance to be #1.

If you want to learn more about how to improve your website’s technical SEO, you’re in the right place! We’ll go over how technical SEO factors work, how to run technical SEO audits, and how to effectively implement them into your SEO strategy.

So, we already mentioned that technical SEO focuses on the backend work for search engine optimization. But what exactly does that mean?

There is typically more of an emphasis for on-page SEO, which is on-page content and how it is optimized. However, if your page is lacking basic off-page techniques and structure, your content won’t hold up to the technical checks that site crawls consider. Things like a xml sitemap, breadcrumbs, and other features implemented on the backend are essential indicators to help Google categorize your content.

There’s a reason why Google puts out so many guidelines and tips for people to follow. It’s essentially impossible to even rank competitively if your site isn’t up to par with the competition. And chances are, all of the pages on the first page of SERPs are very well optimized.

However, there’s always room for a new page to bump them lower down to snag that top spot. That is, if your page is optimized for success. This guide will walk you through exactly how to optimize your website to improve your rankings.

There are so many factors that go into technical SEO that it can easily get overwhelming. So, this section is devoted to going over each of the technical SEO factors one by one in a straightforward way.

It’s likely that you’ve seen the term “crawling” come up pretty frequently in SEO spaces. Crawling your site is essential “the start” of the SEO journey. In order for a page to even be indexed on search engines, they must be crawled.

When crawling your site, search engines are looking for these things:

Once your web page has been crawled, it will be indexed! However, it can take up to a week for the indexing process to complete, meaning you may not see your new site ranking for a while.

When optimizing a page by updating it, it’s also important to request an index on Google Search Console. Doing this will send a request to Google to prioritize your page getting crawled even sooner.

In general terms, hreflang is an attribute that will specify the language of your webpage. So, using hreflang tags will be essential if you have content in multiple languages.

However, hreflang tags can also help discern geographical locations that have the same native language. For example, they can help separate pages meant for American-English and United Kingdom English, and so on.

So if you have a target audience in both and want to separate them, it’s good to make separate pages and utilize hreflang tags for them.

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The URL is a factor that has little effect on rankings. However, it’s still important that you are mindful of how your URLs are structured and that you keep track of them.

Generally, a shorter URL makes it easier for search engines and users alike to better understand the page destination at a glance.

However, if you still really want to change the URL, it’s good practice to send an email to the sites that have your link. This is just letting them know the URL has changed and providing them with the updated one to replace it with. A quicker and better solution is to set up a 301 redirect that will immediately redirect any visitors to the new URL.

When SEO refers to structured data markup, they are referencing Schema markup. Schema is a great way to help Google and users alike learn more about what you’re promoting on your page.

With structured data markup, you can indicate tables, lists, recipes, product descriptions, and more. In relevant cases, Google will also display this in the search results (e.g when Google shows you full recipes in a search query). Although it can seem tricky at first, there are some tools and plugins to help you with writing Schema markup and even automatically embed it on your site.

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a security feature that established encrypted links between computer networks. The great news about SSL certificates is that most browsers and web builders will already automatically have this enabled.

However, it’s still a good idea to be mindful of it to make sure your SSL certificate stays active on your site. If your site does not have SSL implemented, it is more likely to get flagged by browsers as an “untrusted site” due to an insecure network.

In most cases, mobile users will make up the vast majority of internet traffic (and in some cases up to 70%). Not optimizing your website to provide an excellent mobile experience for such a large amount of traffic could hold your site back.

As we mentioned above, most traffic will be from mobile users. So, it’s important to also understand how fast your page load speeds are for them, too. Having too many visuals and moving parts can bog down load times – especially for mobile users!

Luckily, PageSpeed Insights is a tool that will provide you with plenty of specs and insight when it comes to your web speed. They also even give you the option to run the test for mobile or desktop users, so you can get a clear idea of both!

We’ll go more into using PageSpeed Insights to ensure you’re providing your audience with both a great user experience on mobile and desktop in a later section.

There are several ways that duplicate content can harm your ranking in keywords you’re targeting and the overall site ranking, too. The primary reason is that you may end up cannibalizing your own content by having multiple posts target the same keyword. Another common reason is landing pages that use nearly the same content, duplicated to target very similar keywords.

Another part of optimizing content is going through and checking it for any broken links. Broken links are no longer active and will take the user to either an error page or a redirect. Having too many broken links all throughout your site can negatively affect your page authority, thus bringing your rankings down overall.

So, it’s important to make sure your internal and external links are consistently accurate and updated!

There are several response codes that can occur. The ones you will most likely deal with (and your audience are most likely to see) are 404 pages and 301 redirects.

It’s likely you’ve encountered a 404 error while browsing, and some companies will have a quirky tagline for their 404 “lost” pages. A 400 or 404 error can mean several things on the backend, whether the page has been deleted, broken, or the server is down. Regardless of the reason, this will result in the user likely backing out of your site completely. Not only does it squander your traffic, but it can also negatively affect your domain authority as well.

301 redirects are beneficial when used correctly. As mentioned before, when changing the URL of a page, all of the backlinks to it will be lost or dropped. That is, without a redirect. If you are able to set up a successful redirect, you won’t have to worry about your backlinks dropping off from the page as they are safely being redirected to the new URL.

An orphan page is simply a page with no internal or external links to it. Internal linking your own stuff is highly beneficial: it’s also a free and easy way to help improve your on-page SEO. Even including just one internal link will resolve an orphan page.

Throughout this article, we’ve mentioned several times how there are tools available to help you optimize your website. In this section, we’ll overview some of our favorite tools to get insights and run successful technical SEO audits.

Google Search Console is the starting point for many technical SEO experts. At a basic level, Google Search Console provides valuable insights that help you see exactly what terms are bringing your audience in and even how pages compare.

You can even set time filters so you can see how a page’s performance has increased or decreased over time.

Although Google Search Console isn’t as feature-rich as some of the other adjacent clients, it’s free and a versatile starting point for any SEO goal you have.

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As mentioned above, PageSpeed Insights is an incredible tool that offers you valuable insights on how your web pages are performing. The categories PageSpeed Insights will focus on are performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. In each of these categories, you will receive a ranking between 0-100, and they will also tell you where you can improve.

Some recommended tips for generally improving your webpage speed for mobile are:

Keep in mind that they will likely indicate many other yellow flags for you to address. Of course, these are a case-by-case basis, so it’s hard to narrow down what you may see for your site.

So we’ve talked about how optimizing for mobile is important, and that speed checks are also important too. But how would you go about figuring out how to optimize your site to be mobile-friendly and fast?

An easy way to do a mobile-friendly test for your website is to use Google Search Console’s mobile-friendly test tool. This test will provide you with some general insights regarding speed and performance. The main You can even see the mobile usability issues that were detected on your site with their Mobile Usability report.

SEO suites will be your main hubs when it comes to doing research. Semrush and Ahrefs are extremely powerful tools that provide a lot of value. Both services offer audits for backlinks, keywords, and the overall site. They both also have the ability to be able to help you track your rankings for your target keywords and web pages.

Both of these offer a ton of value but come with a bit of a learning curve. If you find yourself stuck, there or many resources to help you learn how to utilize these tools. Or, you can hire a technical SEO expert to handle it for you.

In short, these tools will practically be your right-hand when it comes to anything with on-page and technical SEO.

Many technical SEO experts will utilize both SEO suites and Screaming Frog. What sets Screaming Frog apart from Semrush and Ahrefs is that Screaming Frog focuses on web crawling and excels at providing technical SEO audits.

Of course, usage will depend on your site size. If you have a smaller site with less pages to manage, then tools like Semrush and Ahrefs will still provide excellent audits. However, if you have a large site with a lot of pages indexed, Screaming Frog will give you a more in-depth look with their audit.

Merkle has a lot of straightforward features, such as a robots.txt tester, sitemap generator, and even Schema markup generator. And the best part is they aren’t locked behind a paywall, nor do they force you to sign up for anything.

This makes Merkle a great solution for beginners who want to test the waters and familiarize themselves more on these skills and concepts.

All of these techniques involve a lot of trial and error, and can take months to see real and consistent results. Most places with a dedicated marketing team can have some room to target more ambitious SEO goals. On the other hand, many companies will still opt to outsource their SEO needs to technical SEO agencies.

A technical SEO agency can help you with local SEO, onsite and offsite SEO, and analytics. Even if you do want to give it a try yourself, a technical SEO agency can provide you with a rock-solid foundation by providing a site audit and a plan for you to implement yourself.

By: Frank DePino