When businesses try to improve their online visibility efforts, they tend to put too much emphasis on the popular content and link-building, among others. What are they, or you, missing out?
The answer: Technical SEO.
If you want great search engine rankings, just having smashing content and robust link-building won’t cut it. They’re important, definitely, but you need technical SEO to beef up your entire SEO efforts and stay current in the ever-changing search world.
Technical SEO covers areas such as mobile-friendliness, site speed, SSL certificates, URL, and site architecture. It also means strictly no broken links, cloaking, duplicate site versions, and hacked content.
For example, one crucial part of technical SEO is being mobile-friendly. Mobile is the way to go. There’s just no denying it. Searches on mobile devices have long surpassed that of the desktop. You’d be doing your business a great favor by ensuring that it’s fully compatible on such devices.
Additionally, with the move towards mobile-first indexing, it has become key to get the mobile aspect right. That’s checking off just one part of your technical SEO.
Next, look at your website’s loading speed. How long does it take to load? Would you have the patience to wait for any site that takes more than 10 seconds? Without batting an eyelid, I can tell you: absolutely not.
Let’s take one other example – duplicate content. If “appreciably similar” content, as what Google says it is, shows up at more than one URL, that’s what it is.
You won’t get penalized for it, but your search engine rankings may be affected. That’s because it’s hard for search engines to tell which content version is better. They wouldn’t know which version to rank either, resulting in loss of traffic and poor rankings.
Also, broken links put an abrupt stop to search engines crawlers trying to index your page. Therefore, your search rankings become negatively affected. Change that, and you’ll see almost instantaneous results, according to this experiment.
Boosting and perfecting your technical SEO strategy can’t be done overnight, but its phenomenal results are worth every ounce of effort spent.
For a crash course on what you should and shouldn’t do in technical SEO, devour the detailed infographic below!
Ted Chong runs Ice Cube Marketing, a digital marketing agency that helps local small businesses in Asia acquire leads from channels such as Facebook and Google.
