Technical SEO: Building a Solid Foundation for Your Website
When most people hear “SEO,” they imagine keywords, blog posts, and backlinks. While these are certainly important, the technical side of SEO is just as crucial—if not more so. Technical SEO deals with everything behind the scenes to ensure your website is fast, secure, and easy for search engines to crawl. Essentially, it’s the backbone that supports all your other optimisation efforts.
Here at Digital Six, we see technical SEO as a key piece of the puzzle in an effective SEO Management strategy. Without a solid technical foundation, even the best content can struggle to rank highly in search engine results.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO covers the behind-the-scenes elements that directly impact how search engines (like Google) crawl, index, and rank your site. Think of it as tuning up a car’s engine: You might not see the work happening on the surface, but it’s essential for optimal performance.
Key Areas of Focus:
- Site Speed & Performance: A faster site keeps users engaged and reduces bounce rates.
- Mobile Responsiveness: Ensuring your site looks and functions perfectly on smartphones and tablets.
- Secure Connections (HTTPS): Data security and user trust are more important than ever.
- Structured Data: Helps search engines understand your content more precisely, often leading to enhanced search results (like rich snippets).
By addressing these core areas, you help search engines efficiently crawl your site and accurately index its content. In turn, this makes your pages more likely to appear in relevant searches—boosting visibility and traffic.
Why Technical SEO Matters
1. Improves User Experience
First and foremost, many technical fixes (like optimising page load speed or using HTTPS) greatly enhance user experience. When a site runs smoothly and feels secure, visitors are more likely to stick around, explore multiple pages, or complete a purchase.
2. Boosts Search Engine Visibility
Google prioritises websites that meet certain technical standards. For instance, a site with a mobile-friendly design and clear structured data is generally rewarded with higher rankings. Ignoring these elements puts you at a disadvantage compared to competitors who have their tech game in order.
3. Forms the Bedrock of SEO Management
Your on-page content, off-page strategies, and local SEO efforts all rest on a foundation of strong technical SEO. If your site isn’t crawlable or keeps throwing up errors, even the best content strategy might go unnoticed. Having these fundamentals in place makes every other aspect of your SEO Management more effective.
4. Works Hand-in-Hand with Other Digital Channels
Whether you’re running Google Ads or focusing on social media management, a technically sound website provides a seamless experience for users, no matter how they find you. This synergy ensures people landing on your site—from ads or social posts—stay engaged and convert.
Core Components of Technical SEO
Ready to dive into the specifics? Below are some of the main elements to tackle when optimising your website’s technical side.
Site Speed & Performance
- Why It Matters: People hate waiting. Slow-loading pages often lead to high bounce rates, meaning visitors leave before they even see your content.
- How to Improve: Compress images, enable browser caching, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN). Minimising code (HTML, CSS, JS) also helps your site load more quickly.
Mobile Friendliness
- Why It Matters: Over half of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. Google also uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of a site for ranking and indexing.
- How to Optimise: Use a responsive design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes. Test your pages using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool for any further tweaks.
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and HTTPS
- Why It Matters: A secure website (with HTTPS) indicates to users—and search engines—that their data is protected. Google has also confirmed it uses HTTPS as a ranking signal.
- How to Implement: Obtain an SSL certificate from a trusted provider (your web host often offers this) and ensure all site pages redirect from HTTP to HTTPS.
Site Architecture & Crawlability
- Why It Matters: Think of your site like a well-organised library. The easier it is for search engines to navigate (or “crawl”) through your content, the more efficiently they can index it.
- How to Fix: Use clear URL structures, logical site hierarchies, and properly set up robots.txt files. Don’t forget to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.
Structured Data (Schema Markup)
- Why It Matters: Structured data helps search engines understand what each piece of content actually represents—like reviews, recipes, or events. This can lead to richer search results, known as “rich snippets.”
- How to Implement: Add schema markup to relevant pages (e.g., product schema for an e-commerce site) using JSON-LD. Check Google’s guidelines to ensure you’re adding the right code.
Canonical Tags
- Why It Matters: Sometimes, multiple pages or URLs display the same content (like printer-friendly versions). Canonical tags help you avoid duplicate content issues by telling Google which version is the main page.
- How to Implement: In your HTML header, add <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/the-true-page” /> so search engines know which URL should be treated as the original.
Technical SEO Best Practices
- Keep an Eye on Error Pages: Regularly monitor 404 (not found) errors in Google Search Console and set up 301 redirects if needed.
- Enable GZIP Compression: This reduces the size of your files, speeding up load times.
- Optimise Images: Compress images and use next-gen formats like WebP where possible.
- Minimise Redirects: Too many redirects can slow down user experience. Keep them to a necessary minimum.
- Regularly Update & Patch: Keep your CMS (e.g., WordPress) and plugins up to date to avoid security vulnerabilities.
Common Technical SEO Pitfalls
- Ignoring Mobile: A desktop-only focus can severely limit your search visibility, especially since Google switched to mobile-first indexing.
- Excessive Page Speed Load Times: Oversized images, unoptimised code, and too many third-party scripts can drag your performance down.
- No SSL Certificate: Not having HTTPS can not only deter privacy-conscious users but also impact your rankings.
- Poor Site Structure: If you bury important pages too deep or neglect internal linking, search engines might have trouble finding valuable content.
- Duplicate Content Issues: Caused by session IDs, printer-friendly pages, or e-commerce product variants. Solved by canonical tags and consistent site settings.
Conclusion
Technical SEO might not be the most glamorous part of digital marketing, but it’s absolutely critical if you want your website to be found and trusted. By optimising your site’s architecture, speed, security, and structure, you’re giving your content a real chance to shine—and ensuring visitors have a positive, hassle-free experience.
Whether you’re aiming for top spots in organic search or using Google Ads to funnel traffic, a well-structured, user-friendly site will always perform better. Remember, strong technical SEO works hand-in-hand with on-page content, off-page link building, and even social media management to support an all-encompassing SEO Management strategy.