When digital marketers talk about technical SEO, the conversation tends to go silent as they course through a checklist of jargon and key terms. Technical SEO is part of the bigger digital marketing picture that isn’t discussed enough and is often left out of SEO strategies. It has a direct impact to your site’s organic search visibility and neglecting technical practices can leave teams vulnerable to a variety of complex issues.

In simplest terms, technical SEO refers to the non-content related work and mechanics behind search engines that evaluate the essence of your site’s content. Websites are designed to present information in a specific way. These design choices can affect how search engines rank, index, and contribute to the health of your site.

How Does Technical SEO Work?

Technical SEO involves identifying issues and exposing opportunities that boost a site’s performance and indexing. Here are some ways that Technical SEO can directly influence your organic search visibility:

  • Recovery from Site Migrations and Expansions

Rebranding your website or changing domains can create a myriad of technical challenges that hurt organic search visibility, rankings, and traffic. While losses are to be expected during the transition, best technical SEO practices like page redirects and metadata ensures that the baton is passed smoothly with interruptions being temporary.  

Organizations that are expanding their current line of products, services, or properties under a single domain may also face interruptions to their organic search visibility. Pages that aren’t linked properly can create errors or affect page loading times and user-experiences.

  • Monitoring Page Performance

Monitoring the performance of your web pages does more than give your site visitors a great experience. Search engines like Google also rank site speed as a factor in their search algorithm.

[1] The speed of your site reflects how quickly your site responds to user-requests and the use of best technical SEO practices.

Issues with the website’s design, 301 redirects, excessive links, and heavy content can all negatively impact your page performance. Having efficient code and programming can help make your site load faster.

  • Streamline Sitemaps for Search Engines

When search engines crawl a page to be indexed, they use information from previous crawls and the sitemap. Regularly polishing your sitemap can help inform search engines about all the links on your page to be indexed. This involves crawling, culling, optimizing for mobile and restructuring URLs to ensure that crawlers aren’t led to 404 errors or 301 redirects. If your pages have too many issues with their sitemaps, search engines are more likely to discredit your site and organic rankings will suffer.

Technical SEO is the backbone of your site’s marketing efforts as it has a direct effect on its organic search visibility. Ignoring the backend of your site can leave you vulnerable to complex issues that can permanently damage your credit with search engines. Having a handle on technical SEO can also open new opportunities for optimization, boosting the value of your best content.

With 10-years of experience in developing successful digital strategies, Strongpages has generated significant results for clients in a variety of competitive industries. Learn more about how our SEO services can help you reach your digital marketing goals, fill out our form and a digital marketing expert will reach you soon!

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[1]Amit S. “Using site speed in web search ranking”. Google Webmaster Central Blog. https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html