Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO Services (with a DOWNLOADABLE Checklist)
Last update: 19 August 2024 at 08:52 am
5.00/5SEO consists of two main components: content SEO (on-page and off-page SEO) and technical SEO. The latter refers to the process of tweaking the technical aspects of your website to improve its ranking in search engines. Through the Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO Services, we explain how you can actually do this and make your site visible and crawlable by Google.
What Is Technical SEO?
As we’ve said before, technical SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your site’s architecture and technical elements to improve its visibility and ranking in Google and other search engines. In short, it’s the various actions you take to make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, and index your various pages.
What is the Difference Between Technical SEO and SEO?
Technical SEO is a big part of your SEO efforts. It’s the one that handles all the behind-the-scenes work, including crawling, indexing, page speed, core web vitals, and more. Both components, content SEO and technical SEO, should be included in your company’s SEO strategy. Otherwise, you will have a site filled with amazing content that is not findable or crawlable by Google, and as a result, will never rank in its SERPs.
Technical SEO Services List
Typically, technical SEO services include
- Page speed optimization
- Technical SEO audits
- Structured data (schema markup) implementation
- Content deduplication
- Sitemap submission to Google
- Mobile optimization
- SEO friendly site architecture
- Canonicalization
- Optimization for crawling and indexing
- Fixing broken pages
- etc.
Why Technical SEO Services Matters?
There are three main reasons why you need to include technical SEO services in your SEO strategy.
First, it’s designed to help search engines access, understand, and index your website’s content. Ignoring it will only hurt your content and ranking efforts by making your site invisible in the SERPs.
Second, it helps fix technical errors that may be affecting your site’s performance, load time, and mobile visibility.
Finally, it’s the perfect way to address sudden drops in your organic traffic.
Remember, you can always turn to an SEO agency to help you through this process and achieve the best possible results.
How To Do Technical SEO?
Technical SEO seems a lot harder than it actually is. However, there are many terms and processes that may seem complex. We designed our Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO Services to make things easier for you and guide you every step of the way.
Ensure search engines can crawl and index your site
These two concepts, crawlability and indexability, are the main component of your technical SEO strategy. The former is responsible for allowing search engine bots to use links and content on your site to find newly published pages and rank them in the SERPs. And indexability is exactly what happens next. The process by which search engines include your site in their databases with millions of other sites.
There are several ways to make your website crawlable and indexable by Google and other search engines.
Design a logical and user-friendly site architecture
Site architecture refers to the way the pages of your site are linked together. But if you want to make it easy for Google’s bot to crawl, you need to be careful and create a structure with a logical hierarchy.
This is what most businesses tend to do:
- Have the home page link to the category pages.
- Have the category pages link to individual subpages.
This ensures that your users can quickly access any of your pages, and reduces the risk of having orphaned pages (i.e., internal pages that have no internal links redirecting traffic to them).
We highly recommend that you use Ahref’s Site Audit to find your site’s orphan pages and add them to your site’s architecture in a logical way.
- Go to Ahref’s Site Audit.
- Click on New Project.
- Follow the prompts and make sure you check Website, Auto-detect Sitemaps, and Backlinks as URL sources.
- Click Next and let the system perform the analysis.
- When the audit is complete, you are ready to go:
- Page Explorer
- Links
- Orphan Pages.
These are the ones you need to check carefully and look for a logical way to have other pages link to them.
Submit your sitemap to Google
Another way to make it easier for Google to find and crawl your site is to submit your Sitemap to them. This is basically a file that contains a list of the most important pages on your site.
To find your site’s sitemap, try using one of these options:
- yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
- yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
To submit it to Google, simply follow these steps:
- Go to the Google Search Console.
- Click Indexing and then click Sitemaps.
- Enter the URL of your Sitemap and click Submit.
It may take Google a few days to a few weeks to successfully add your Sitemap. Be patient and monitor the status.
Manage duplicate content and using canonical tags
Websites often have similar or duplicate content on different pages. If this is your case, you’ll want to tell Google which page to index and show in search results.
To do this, you need to rely on canonical tags. These are tags in the source code of the main page you want Google to index. To insert them, you simply need to add rel=”canonical” to the head section of the desired page.
Review your Robots.txt file
This file specifically tells search engines which URLs within your site they need to crawl and rank. It was created as a mechanism to avoid overloading Google with requests from your site and to keep pages out of the SERPs.
To create a robots.txt file and make it accessible, you need to
- Create a file called robots.txt. You can use a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit. Make sure that the name of the file is robots.txt.
- Add rules to the robots.txt file. Make sure there is only one rule per line, and that it is specific about which directories or files it can and cannot crawl.
- Upload the robots.txt file to the root of your site. You will probably need assistance from your hosting company to do this.
- Test the robots.txt file. You can use the robots.txt report in Google Search Console to see your live files and fix any problems.
Secure your website with HTTPS
Security is an important ranking factor when it comes to website optimization.
A quick way to check if your site is secure is to look closely at the URL in the navigation bar of your web browser.
- If it contains a lock icon, it’s secure.
- If it says “not secure,” you need to take action and install a Secure Socket Layer SSL.
We strongly recommend that you get your SSL/TLS certificate from a certified provider such as Wik, DigiCert, Sectigo, SSL.com, or GoDaddy.
Measure and improve site speed
Search engines take into account how fast your page loads when ranking your website. In fact, they recommend that it load in less than 3 seconds to provide a great user experience on both mobile and desktop versions.
To check your page speed, we recommend using Google’s Page Speed Index. This free tool allows you to see the load time and the different issues that can affect it:
- Image size
- Unused JavaScript
- Unused CSS
- Third-party resources and code
- etc.
Performing this analysis will help you understand where your web development team needs to focus to reduce the average load time of your site.
Ensure your website is responsive and optimized for mobile devices
In today’s world, you need to ensure that your website is responsive and automatically adjusts to any screen size and resolution. This not only improves the user experience, but also has a positive impact on search engine rankings.
To see if your site is responsive, go to Google Search Console and look for the Mobile Usabilityreport. It will tell you which pages have problems and what exactly they are.
You can also go to Page Speed Insight and see if your site has passed the audit for meta viewport tags, legible font sizes, and proper spacing around buttons and clickable elements.
Use breadcrumbs
The term breadcrumbs refers to a trail of text links that tells the user exactly where they are on your site and how they got there. It’s there to help them navigate through the different pages of your site by clearly pointing out how to access higher-level pages.
This is especially convenient for web pages that are very large and complex. To implement it, simply check if your WordPress theme has it or use the Yoast SEO plugin.
Optimize for the Core Web Vitals speed metrics
Google is very specific about the metrics they use to measure user experience. To the point that they have introduced the Core Web Vitals, which serve as a starting point for you to understand how that serves as a starting point for you to understand how the site is performing in terms of
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – visual load.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – visual stability.
- First Input Delay (FID) – interactivity.
Make sure your site scores at least:
- LCP 2.5 seconds
- FID 100 milliseconds
- CLS 0.1
To check your site’s Core Web Vitals, go to Google Search Console and click Core Web Vitals. You will need to open the reports for both the mobile and desktop versions.
Implement schema markup effectively
Schema markup is code that helps your site better communicate with Google so it can use your information in various rich snippets. As a result, you get more clicks, organic traffic, conversions and sales.
Google is very specific about which schema markup it supports. Some of them are:
- Article
- Carousel
- Event
- Frequently Asked Questions
- HowTo
- Image Metadata
- Job Posting
- Local Business
- Product
- Review
- Video
- etc.
If you work with Yoast SEO, you can quickly add/edit your schema markup in the plugin. Click Schema and choose the best options to describe your content and page.
Fix broken pages
Finally, you need to find and fix broken links in your site. These are usually URLs that take you to a page that does not exist (404 errors).
To find your broken links, you can use Ahref’s Broken Link Checker. Just go to the tool and enter the URL of your website. In seconds you will get a complete report with all your broken pages.
Once you have this report ready, you can start working on eliminating these links and replacing them with the correct ones. Doing this in a consistent manner will help improve the user experience and your SEO.
Another option is to hire a technical audit that will guide you through the areas of opportunity of your site, including broken links and duplicate content.
As promised!
Here’s the Downloadable Tech SEO checklistprepared by Sortlist.
This checklist ensures a comprehensive approach to maintaining and improving technical SEO according to Google’s latest standards for 2024. We’d be happy to hear from your feedback!
Technical SEO Agency vs. Technical SEO Expert
When it comes to implementing technical SEO, you have two options. You can do it in-house by hiring experienced people and building your own dedicated team. Or you can work with one of the best technical SEO agencies.
Both options have their benefits and challenges. For starters, having your own team increases your spending on HR, benefits, tools, and onboarding. While working with a third party gives you less control over how and when your tasks are completed.
It’s up to you to weigh your options and choose the one that best fits your budget and needs, and that can grow with you. At Sortlist, we firmly believe that technical SEO agencies are far better options because they have trained SEO experts with vast experience helping businesses like yours improve their websites and achieve great results.
Conclusion
In short, you or your team can spend hours creating and optimizing amazing content for your site, but if it’s not indexed or crawlable, it won’t show up in search results.
If this sounds familiar and you’re struggling to improve your site’s ranking in the SERPs, it’s time to address the technical issues that are impacting your site’s performance and results.
Improving page speed, enabling crawlability, fixing broken pages, submitting sitemaps, implementing structured data are just some of the basic actions you need to take. In addition, it’s always a good idea to run an SEO competitor analysis that will allow you to understand how your key competitors’ sites are performing in terms of user experience, mobile optimization, page load time, etc.
Remember, you can do this yourself by following the steps described above, or you can simply hire a third party and ask them for help. They have the tools, knowledge, and experience to improve the way your site communicates with Google, telling it what content to rank for and what content to ignore.
