Technical SEO Services

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO as the name suggests is centred on those elements that would be deemed more technical and functional. It focuses on your websites ability to be crawled and indexed by a search engine easily and effectively. In short, technical SEO  can help search engines to access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems.

On-Page SEO will largely deal with the content on the page but Technical SEO will delve a bit deeper and go behind the scenes so to speak. If we use the analogy of a car, on-page SEO would be looking at the car exterior and interior like the colour and seats but technical SEO would be looking at the engine that makes the car work. Technical SEO can cover a broad spectrum of work and include everything from sitemaps, site structure, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, search term research, site speed, code/text ratio and more. Schema Microdata for many clients tend to prefer to leave this to an Technical SEO Consultant

How to Improve your Website’s Technical SEO

Improving your website’s Technical SEO may not be straightforward dependent on who built your website, how much control you have over your website etc. If our Web Developers build your website, we will build SEO placed into the heart of the build and establish with the client what the conversion goal is and how the site will act as a tool for your business. You may have an existing website you want us to optimise and this may involve us liaising with your Web Design Agency or in-house Web Developer. If this is the case you may want to in the first instance opt for one of our SEO Audit & Recommendation Reports which your developer could then work with.

Do SEOs and Web Developers get along?

This may sound like bit of an odd or silly question but it’s worth tackling just in case you’re handling a situation where you have a disgruntled Web Designer or Design Agency on your hands. SEOs and Web Developers can sometimes have very different priorities and sometimes these complement each other, overlap and sometimes can be polarised. For example, a developer passionate about clean code and lightening fast loading websites will please an SEO greatly because they are both focused on an aspect that will promote a positive user experience (and ultimately impact on SEO performance in a positive way). However, a Web Designer more concerned with how the website “looks” with lots of pretty full screen parallax images and a minimalistic look with virtually no text may get annoyed with the SEO recommendations. When an SEO is asking to add 1000+ words on a page the designer may feel his work of art will be ruined.

Areas we focus on top improve your sites Technical SEO and overall SEO effective and performance:

• Site structure
  • Site Structure can often be an area that is overlooked or not scrutinised to the level it warrants. A site rebuild or a brand new site build allows for the opportunity to restructure your website. If you have an SEO Strategy this will cover site structure and user journey with in the planning stage. If you are dealing with a site rebuild you will need to ensure a redirection exercise is factored in to ensure your site health is not negatively affected and left riddled with dead pages and 404 errors.
• Sitemaps
  • Once you got a great site structure, you’re going to want to ensure Google knows about it and continually is updated about your ever improving and growing website. Be careful of some of the automatic sitemap generators out there. For example, Yoast include an automatic in-built sitemap generator which create different sitemaps but from our experience at SEO Consultants for smaller websites this sitemap doesn’t always tend to be appropriate and we’ve send better results with other sitemaps.
• Crawling and indexing
  • A Technical SEO consultant will talk about the importance of having Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools set up for your website. These tools can alert your Consultant on any issues and errors with your site and if Google is unable to crawl and index your website. Crawling is concerned with if the search engine’s crawlers / spiders are able to read the code and content on your site’s pages. Indexing is whether your pages are eligible to be indexed. You will need to ensure both areas are covered in order for your site to have the best possible of ranking highly.
• Mobile optimisation (Mobile First Web Design)
  • Over the last 10+ years the proliferation of mobile device usage has been undeniable and is only continuing to grow with more and more sites being accessed on a mobile device. We cater for mobile SEO as a separate area because quite simply it warrants that much attention. It will be more of focus for some businesses and not for others but when you adopt a strategic to your SEO it will be placed on the radar and rationalised to how much attention it will get. However, you may want to future proof your investment in further web development and consider mobile first web design.
• Site speed / Image Optimisation
  • This is an area that has gained momentum and a lot of focus but rightly so. Websites can abandon a site even if they are kept waiting more than a few seconds. Wordpress CMS is a wonderful in the sense it can allow the client to manage their own content, however, this can often (usually unknowingly) impact negatively on a websites speed and performance. Phone cameras have only improved over the years producing lovely high quality images. The problem is when these large image files are uploaded to a website and have not been appropriately optimised for the web, they can slow your website down and leave a potential client with a poor user experience.
• Website Hosting / SSL certificates
  • This is certainly a technical area and can make a big difference to your site’s performance. There are a lot of website hosting companies all battling for your money. Having a site with an SSL certificate so your site resolves on https:// is imperative. Google wants the web to be a safer place and this has just become a prerequisite. We do offer website hosting at SEO Consultancy but for those who like to maintain more control we would currently recommend www.20i.com. Paying high hosting costs does not always mean you will be receiving the best possibly hosting solution and service provider. WP Engine do a fabulous job of marketing but unfortunately is not in our top recommendation list of hosting providers.
• Canonical URLs
  • This subject area can get quite involved and technical and MOZ have a great page on canonicalisation but essentially you will want to avoid duplicate content.