Technical SEO – 5 Areas to Start With

On-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO are the three pillars of organic search engine optimization.

Technical SEO is the one that gets the least attention because it’s the most difficult to grasp. However, with the rise in competition in search results, marketers can’t afford to ignore technical SEO’s complexities—having a crawlable, fast, and secure website has never been more vital to ensure your site performs well and ranks high in search engines.

This article won’t go over everything required for a comprehensive technical SEO audit since it covers such a broad range of subjects (and is expanding). However, we will address five essential aspects of technical SEO that you should be looking at to improve your website’s performance and retain its effectiveness and health. Once you’ve addressed these six fundamentals, you may move on to more sophisticated technical SEO tactics.

What is a technical SEO audit?

Technical SEO entails modifications that improve your website’s crawl speed and indexation times. Technical search engine optimization may also allow Google to find your relevant content and provide it to users at the appropriate moment.

The following factors should be a part of your technical SEO evaluation:

Site Architecture

1. URL structure
2. How your site is coded
3. Redirects
4. Sitemaps
5. Robots.txt 
6. CDN / Images
7. Site errors

Getting a Technical SEO Audit Started

These are the basics of technical SEO, any digital marketer worth their salt will have these fundamentals working for any website they manage. It is fascinating how much deeper you can go into technical SEO: It may seem daunting, but hopefully, once you’ve done your first audit, you’ll be keen to see what other improvements you can make to your website. These five steps are an excellent start for any digital marketer looking to ensure their website works effectively for search engines. Most importantly, they are all free, so get started!

#1. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO, sometimes called on-site SEO, is the art of optimizing your page’s content to be as discoverable for search engines as possible.

Due to the abundance of online information, on-page SEO is more important than ever. On-page SEO increases the probability that search engines will link your page’s relevance to a term you want to rank for.

There are several critical phases to consider when optimizing on-page SEO. Look for the following handful of typical issues as an excellent place to start.

#2. Overly-Long Title Tags

The title tag is the title of a webpage that appears in SERPs. Title tags tell searchers what the page’s subject is, but they also indicate how relevant it is to the query to search engines. You are taken to the corresponding page when you click on a title tag.

The average title tag length is around 60 characters, but it varies depending on the website. As a rule of thumb, a title tag should be at least 50 and no more than 60 characters long (since Google can only show 600 pixels of text on results pages). You may use any appropriate SEO writing assistance to double-check the length of your title tags (as well as other aspects of your content).

#3. Lacking an H1 Heading is a Common Issue

Headers, also known as page headers (H1, H2, and so on), are used to separate text sections. Headers help people scan and comprehend material since long stretches of text might be challenging to read. The most general heading is marked by the H1 tag, while descending headers aid in the structuring of more detailed information.

Missing H1 tags restrict Google’s understanding of your website and put holes in its topic knowledge. Always bear this in mind: there should only be one H1 tag on each page.

#4. You Shouldn’t Have Multiple Title or H1 Heading Tags

An H1 and identical title tags may make a site seem overly optimized, damaging your ranking. When composing an H1, consider a related yet distinctive header rather than repeating the word verbatim. Header tags can also be seen as new ways to rank for additional relevant keywords.

#5. Don’t Produce” Thin” Content

Similarly, superfluous or thin content — such as the sort of material that provides no value to users or search engines – can be detrimental to SEO.

After you’ve determined what pages qualify as “thin,” make them more robust by adding high-quality, unique material or instructing the crawler not to index a page (this may be done by adding a no-index attribute).

Content optimization is another equally important topic to get handled with your website. Check the rest of our blog for additional articles on improving other aspects of your SEO processes. Use our contact page to get in touch, or use our FREE SEO Evaluation to send us your details, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Want to read more on the topic of Technical SEO? Check out this guide from Ahrefs.