Why Technical Optimization is Essential in SEO

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Site owners use technical optimization to tell search engines, such as Google, that their website is worth crawling and indexing. But there's more. 

The current pandemic has forced thousands of businesses to shut down their stores. Instead, they now depend on digital marketing to maintain contact with their customers and sell their products.

While businesses occasionally find new digital marketing tactics to invest in, Search Engine Optimization continues to be an essential part.

For most marketers, it begins with choosing high-ranking keywords to target and integrating them into high-quality content. Then, you also have to build backlinks to rank higher on SERPs.

Yes, these on-page and off-page elements are essential for creating a reliable SEO. But, there’s another equally important piece, and that’s technical optimization.

Technical SEO tells search engines such as Google that your website has relevant, valuable content. It focuses on your website’s architecture and ensures that search engines can quickly and easily crawl your site.

Over the years, search engines have gotten better at crawling, indexing, and understanding information on a website. But, they’re still far from perfect.

That’s where technical SEO comes in. It covers essential setups and elements of a site such as:

Search engine bots prioritize websites that offer faster and less buggy experience. That means, having an issue with any of the elements above could significantly harm your traffic.

So, what can you do?

Although we can’t possibly list all the solutions in this article, here are technical SEO tips to consider.

First, you want to optimize for mobile devices. This is particularly important since more people are accessing the internet from their mobile devices.

According to Google, 51 percent of smartphone users have found a new product when searching on mobile.

So, it’s not surprising that the search engine recommends that websites switch to mobile-first indexing. Even if you have to choose between optimizing your mobile site and the desktop version, Google’s John Mueller suggests picking mobile.

Website speed also plays a vital role. Pages on sites that load quickly rank significantly higher on search engines than pages on sites that load slowly.

Consider using essential audit tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to get a picture of your website’s current speed. After getting the baseline, you may want to optimize your page speed using the following:

Although these are small steps, they can combine to make your website significantly faster.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates are responsible for moving your site from HTTP to HTTPs. But why is it essential in technical optimization?

According to a study by Searchmetrics, nearly 50 percent of pages found on the first page of Google use HTTPs encryption.

SSL certificates provide an extra layer of security for the visitors on your website. Not only does it protect data, but it also confirms the identity and improves customer trust.

In summary, purchasing an SSL certificate improves your search ranking and provides an additional layer of security. So, obtaining it should be a no-brainer.

Finally, consider submitting your sitemap to search engines.

Think of XML sitemaps as the “roadmaps” for your site. Aside from providing a structure of your website, site maps also let the search engines know how often you refresh the content on specific pages.

Using this information, Google can quickly crawl and index the new content on your website.

Luckily, sitemaps are not difficult to create. For example, you can quickly find a WordPress plugin to help with the creation process. When the sitemap is ready, submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools.