An In-Depth Guide to Technical SEO Optimization
Table of Contents
Introduction
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to behind-the-scenes website optimizations that make it easier for search engines to discover, crawl, index, and render pages on your website more effectively. The goal of these optimizations is to improve your organic search rankings and increase organic traffic. While on-page SEO and content optimization focus on the front end, technical SEO is all about what’s happening on the back end that affects website health and performance. Optimizing your technical SEO isn’t a one-off effort. It’s a continuous process of making your site easier to navigate and your pages more likely to appear on SERPs and rank well.
With this goal in mind, it helps to break technical SEO optimization down into four buckets: discoverability, crawlability, indexability, and user experience.
How to Optimize for Discoverability
Optimizing for discoverability involves improving certain aspects and signals on your pages to increase the likelihood of your pages being discovered quickly by search engines. Once your page is discovered, a search engine can crawl the page and add it to its index of content. If a search engine can’t discover your content, it won’t appear on SERPs or drive organic traffic to your site. Discoverability is the first core pillar to optimizing your technical SEO.
Your site structure, or information architecture, helps search engine bots make sense of your site and understand what your most important content is. The more logical your site structure, the easier it becomes for search engine bots to find and understand what your content is trying to answer. Topic clusters and pillar pages are important aspects of your site architecture. Grouping related pages together via clusters, pillar pages, or subfolders helps bots understand the relationship between your pages and how they work together.
Internal links point to another page on your website. Search engine bots rely on links to discover new content, using links from previously indexed pages to find new or updated pages. Improving your link structure helps these bots find your pages and updates more efficiently.
Key Areas to Focus on:
Google needs an XML sitemap to find your site’s URLs. Create a clean, up-to-date, and optimized sitemap so that Google can quickly navigate to your pages, and implement regular audits to ensure new pages are getting indexed.
IndexNow is a solution that notifies search engines when you add, update, or delete one of your pages so the search engine can reflect that on SERPs. While Google doesn’t participate in IndexNow, several other search engines do, including Bing and Yandex.
Google’s Indexing API allows site owners to notify Google directly of any updates or additions to their website. Google then schedules a fresh crawl of the page, which can lead to traffic improvements. This function can currently only be used for certain content types (job postings, events, etc.).
Crawlability is the second pillar of technical SEO optimization. Optimizing for crawlability is about answering the question: How easy is it for Google to crawl your website? If you can make the crawling process more efficient, your pages will get indexed faster.
SEO-friendly URLs are short, descriptive, readable, and consistent. Creating a clear URL structure is important for your site’s information architecture, defining the accessibility of your content to visitors and search engines.
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages search engines will crawl on your website within a certain timeframe. Factors that waste crawl budget include duplicate content, low-quality content, poor internal link structure, slow-loading pages, and broken/redirecting links. Optimize these aspects to improve crawl efficiency.
Crawler traps are structural issues that result in crawlers finding an infinite number of irrelevant URLs. To avoid crawler traps, monitor your website for duplicate content, ensure pages that don’t exist return an HTTP status code 404, disallow URLs that search engines shouldn’t crawl, and avoid dynamically inserting content.
Duplicate content confuses search engines and can lead to keyword cannibalization. Ensure each piece of content is unique to avoid competition between pages and improve SEO performance.
Site speed is crucial for user experience and SEO rankings. Optimize site speed by removing duplicate content, minimizing redirects, optimizing images, and implementing website caching. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to test and improve your page speed.
Indexability ensures search engines can digest, understand, and add your content to their index. Many actions to make indexing more efficient are handled when optimizing discoverability and crawlability, but there are still opportunities to maximize your pages’ potential.
Schema is a structured markup that helps specify the type of content on your website. Correct Schema implementation makes it easier for search engines to understand the content, increasing the likelihood of appearing in different result types like featured snippets. Use resources like Schema.org for implementation guidelines.
JavaScript SEO refers to how search engines interact with, crawl, and index sites using JavaScript. Ensure essential content isn’t hidden by JavaScript, which can hinder search engines from fully understanding and indexing your page.
The hreflang attribute indicates the language and geographical region of your content, ensuring the correct content is shown to users based on their region and language. Implement hreflang using the link element in HTML, HTTP headers, or the XML sitemap.
Proper heading structure signals the importance of content on your page. Use H1 and H2 headings for the most important information and smaller headings for less critical content. Structured headings can also help your content appear in ‘People also ask’ result types.
Canonical tags specify which version of content should be indexed, reducing risks of keyword cannibalization and duplicate content. Use canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, internal links, and external links to signal the preferred version of a page to search engines.
User experience (UX) is a ranking factor for Google, but optimizing UX also enhances user satisfaction, traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Core Web Vitals measure user experience aspects like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Improve LCP by optimizing rendering paths, CSS, and images. Enhance INP by reducing JavaScript execution time and minimizing main thread work. Prevent unexpected layout shifts to improve CLS.
Accessibility ensures your site operates well on different devices and for users with specific needs. Implement alt tags on images and transcripts for videos to make your site accessible for visually impaired users.
Technical SEO optimization is a continuous effort that should be integrated into your existing processes. Here are some tools and solutions to help seamlessly incorporate technical SEO into your workflows:
Technical SEO is the backbone of your entire website strategy. While on-page SEO like content gets most of the attention, your website’s technical health and performance are just as important. Providing users with a fast, smoothly operating site ensures better rankings on SERPs, improved user experience, and higher engagement and conversions.
If you’re looking to maximize your site and brand’s growth potential, optimizing your technical SEO is crucial. At Sapient eCommerce, our Website Optimization & Intelligence experts provide actionable SEO, content, and technical insights paired with real-time website monitoring. We help you deliver digital experiences that attract and convert website visitors.
For expert assistance in optimizing your technical SEO, contact us today.
