What business owners need to know about technical SEO

Learn the basics about the importance of optimizing for this type of on-page SEO

As a business owner, you have a lot on your plate from managing your team and keeping clients happy to completing annual budgets and choosing services to outsource like marketing. 

When it comes to the marketing portion of your responsibilities, it’s important to gain a basic understanding of the services your marketing team has implemented like search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be complicated, but if you gain a basic understanding, you can better support your marketing team in their efforts.

Today, we’ll be diving into what you need to know about technical SEO to be able to keep up with the conversation when meeting with your marketing team. 

What is technical SEO? 

Part of on-page SEO, technical SEO encompasses a variety of tactics utilized to directly influence the indexing and crawling of your website by search engines like Google. 

Some technical SEO tactics include site speed optimization, canonicalization, and improving XML sitemaps all with the goal of making your website faster for users and easier to crawl for Google.

Why is technical SEO important? 

Technical SEO is important for search engines like Google and all other visitors to your website. 

Optimizing your website for technical SEO allows Google to better understand and crawl your website, which can assist in earning your site higher rankings on Google search results. 

In addition to helping search engines, technical SEO is also essential for your users who want to visit a website that’s fast and easy to use. 

Overall, technical SEO results in a better experience for both search engines and users—a win-win for everyone. 

How can you tell if a website is optimized for technical SEO? 

Although there are certain highly-technical ways that SEO and web development professionals can tell if a website is optimized for technical SEO, there are a few ways that SEO beginners can tell as well. 

When you’re on a website, if it passes the following checkpoints, it’s been optimized for technical SEO: 

• It loads within seconds when you open it.
• You’re met with little to no 404 error pages when you click on links.
• There’s no duplicate content across pages.
• There’s a small padlock to the left of the website address, which signifies the website is secured with HTTPS—a protocol that secures communication and data transfer between your web browser and the website you’re on.

How should the technical SEO of your website be maintained?

If you want to improve how your website appears on Google with technical SEO, Google regularly releases up-to-date information on what matters most to them when it comes to technical SEO. 

Google’s in-depth guide on how to control the way they crawl and index your site can be found here, but some of their tips include:

• Ensure that images and pages that you want Google to crawl are accessible and not blocked by any robots.txt rules.
• Optimize your sitemaps to help Google learn and prioritize which pages to crawl.
• Place vital information in text, not images/graphics, because it’s easiest for Google to comprehend the context of the page in that format.

As a business owner, you shouldn’t concern yourself with the minute details of optimizing your site for technical SEO. It’s best to leave it to your marketing team that’s well-versed on the ins and outs of your business and best practices for SEO. 

Ready to improve your site’s technical SEO?

At Different Perspective, our team of qualified and experienced SEO professionals can support your business in its on-page, off-page, and technical SEO efforts from optimizing images and creating keyword-rich website content to improving site speed and auditing XML sitemaps.

We can create an SEO campaign that will effectively increase your online visibility in search engines like Google and help you create connections with your target audience. 

Interested in learning more about our SEO offerings?
Explore our ongoing agency support services page.