Websites must be fast, crawlable and user-friendly to achieve local search prominence. Of all the quality SEO services available, technical SEO provides a way to achieve noticeable improvements. By optimizing the technical foundation of a website a business can enhance the user experience, an action that is likely to be rewarded by Google. Let’s explore why technical SEO should be a top priority for anyone involved in local search marketing.
Where to Start With Technical SEO for a Business Website
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s backend elements to make it easier to crawl, understand and index the pages. Essentially, every part of this process will fine-tune the site’s functionality and performance, and this will influence how the website performs in the search results.
1. Improve Search Engine Accessibility and Indexing
A technical SEO audit involves checking whether search engines can discover and index your pages. Google uses over 200 ranking factors to determine a site’s visibility. However, if a page can’t be crawled or Google won’t index it, there’s little benefit to optimizing the many other factors. The XML sitemap and robots.txt file is key to this process.
2. Optimize Site Structure and Navigation
Improving navigation is a quick SEO strategy to give your website a bump in search. Your site should have a clear hierarchy that usually involves broad categories, with sub-pages falling underneath. Internal linking helps distribute page authority throughout the site. Simple, descriptive URLs also provide clarity for the search engines and for users.
3. Upgrade Website Performance and User Experience
A slow, poor-performing site contributes to a substandard user experience. Technical SEO identifies and repairs the causes of slow loading times, optimizes images, enables browser caching, while minimizing Javascript and CSS files. With a significant number of website visits coming from mobile devices, you also need a responsive design that performs across all devices.
4. Bolster Site Security
Website security and data privacy are vital components for building trust with visitors and search engines. To secure your site, get an SSL certificate and use HTTPS encryption. The changes will likely benefit your search engine visibility as well. Also, make sure to check Google Search Console (GSC) regularly to monitor and fix errors. If your site is older and vulnerable to threats, a comprehensive website redesign service can enhance both appearance and backend security.
5. Enhance Content With Schema Markup
Adding schema markup helps search engines understand the context of your content, and this often results in rich snippet placement. In a study by EngineScout, featured snippets received 35.1% of the click share. While featured snippets are not as common with smaller, lesser known sites, they are still quite possible to get.
By integrating structured data, websites can capitalize on traffic from featured snippets and other rich snippet sources such as the “People also ask” section.
6. Periodically Conduct Internal Site Audits
Don’t just count on Google Search Console to identify site errors.
- Broken links still happen that they don’t catch.
- Redirect errors (like redirecting from one redirect to another) aren’t caught with GSC.
- While not a technical SEO issue, pages with thin count are still an issue.
- Missing page titles, meta descriptions and alt text need to be corrected.
- Phone numbers missing hyperlinks, forms that are not submitting and broken buttons are technical issues.
There are tools like Screaming Frog that will help identify these gaps, but a manual audit of the site will also be necessary.
This is where hiring a top-notch digital marketing agency comes into play. Not every agency takes the time to access these issues and correct them.
Contact Us for Technical SEO and Website Optimization Services
When you want to increase the visibility of your business website, trust the team at Rocks Digital. We cover all the essential aspects of local business marketing, including technical SEO, website optimization and much more. Call (214) 989-7549 or request a website evaluation today.
