Why technical SEO is essential
Technical SEO is how easy it is for search engines like Google, and AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, to find, understand, and index your content. And that comes primarily from how your website is built and structured.
If you have good technical principles in place, your website is easier to crawl, allowing search engines to build connections between your pages and index the right ones, so that relevant content appears in search results.
But if you don’t have a strong foundation, the opposite is true, leading to reduced visibility in search, less references and mentions in AI results, and in some cases, disappearing from Google completely. And that has a huge impact on your revenue. If people can’t find you, they can’t buy your goods or services!
What technical issues can affect search rankings?
There are many technical factors that impact search rankings and your AI visibility. Some of the most common include:
- Site speed: The time it takes for a webpage to load, display its content, and become fully interactive.
- Mobile friendliness: How well your webpages scale down and operate on mobile devices.
- Site structure: How your pages and content are organised, categorised, and associated with one another.
- Accessibility: How easy it is to navigate and use your website regardless of physical or cognitive ability.
5 technical SEO quick wins
1. Use next generation file formats
This one sounds like something out of a sci-fi film, but trust us, it makes all the difference! Many next generation file types, like .webp, significantly minimise file sizes decreasing load speed.
And if you have lots of images with transparent backgrounds, don’t worry — .webp files can handle those easily, giving you great quality images exactly how you want them to display (I do love a rounded corner).
And if you don’t have specialist image software, there are loads of online converters you can use for free.
es, there’s been a shift in general search behaviour following the introduction of AI. Traditionally, we’d use short keywords or phrases as search terms, scrolling through results, clicking through to any relevant websites, doing some research and then returning to the search engine to start the process all over again.
2. Get lazy (loading)
Another way to reduce your load speed is by lazy loading, telling web browsers not to worry about loading an image if it doesn’t need to be seen right away. The image will then only load when a user scrolls to the relevant section it’s meant to display in.
Most website content management systems will have this available as an option when you add an image to a page. Here’s an example from the Good Yolk site:
3. Organise your site
Having a clear structure to your website and the pages it contains make it much easier for crawlers (those little bots) to locate and understand your content. The easier it is for them, the easier it is for your users, acting as a clear signal that you’ve taken the time to organise your content.
My advice would be to group your content into categories or themes, and go from there. The easiest way to do that? Sit down and draw out a diagram of how your pages are connected. Here’s an example from the Good Yolk website:
This is also a great way to identify orphan pages, those that don’t have any connection with your other content and exist in isolation from the rest of your site, and associate them with your other pages.
4. Check to see if you have a sitemap
A sitemap is a document that lists all of the different pages of your site. This tells search engines the URLs of your pages, when they were last modified and the languages they are available in. Having a sitemap in place ensures Google and other search engines can discover your content more quickly and index it.
You can typically find a sitemap by typing in your website address followed by /sitemap.xml. For example: yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml.
If you can’t locate your sitemap, have a look in the back end of the system you’re using for your website. Here’s how it looks on HubSpot:
Once you’ve found it, check to make sure the pages you’re expecting are there. Thankfully, most websites use XML sitemaps that automatically update whenever you publish pages.
5. Look for your robots.txt file
A robots.txt file tells crawlers what content they can look at and what they can ignore. This helps to ensure that your most important pages are identified as these are the ones you want to show up in search results, like product pages and blogs.
Similar to your sitemap, you can find this by typing in your website address followed by /robots.txt. For example: yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt.
Once you’ve found your file, the two most important things to check are that:
- You’re giving search engines access to crawl your site — User-agent: *.
- Your sitemap is being referenced — Sitemap: https://yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml.
Technical SEO affects your search rankings
You can have the best keyword research, content strategy, and on- and off-page SEO tactics you can think of, but if you fail to fix the fundamental technical issues for your website, it will all be for nothing. Technical issues will also impede your organic performance.
But, there are quick wins you can benefit from, from improving your site speed by using next generation file formats and lazy loading, to ensuring search engines can crawl your website by having your sitemap and robots.txt files available to them.
And when things get too technical, that’s when you bring in SEO experts, like us, to do the heavy lifting.
