No doubt every aspect of the SEO is vital for a website to rank high in the search result. However, the foundation of a successful SEO campaign takes place around a technically perfect site. Without a technically right site, your SEO efforts may not bring the desired ranking at all.
The Technical SEO service involves a lot of analysis and evaluation to find out errors and remove unnecessary contents. Hiring the best SEO company pays off well if you don’t have expertise and experience to handle these problems aptly.
Whether you are doing yourself or outsourcing the project to a company, let us look at the main aspect of technical SEO essential to maximize usability, crawling, indexing and top ranking in the end -
1. Review your sitemap.
A sitemap tells search engines about the structure of your site to reveal fresh contents. If you don’t have a sitemap, it is the right time to create now. You can do so at Website auditor.
Things to check in the sitemap and make sure it is -
l Clean and error-free, redirects and allows URLs to index in search engines.
l Updated.
l Google doesn’t crawl a sitemap with over 50,000 URL. Keep it shorter with only important pages to crawl faster.
l Get registered on Google search console.
2. Check pages indexing.
It is important to keep checking pages indexed by search engines. The number of indexed pages should be near to total pages of your site, except the pages you disallowed search engines to crawl them. If indexed pages are too low or high, it is the right time to review the pages in detail.
3. Ensure all resources are crawlable.
All critical pages will be indexed if they are crawlable. To see the crawlability of all page, use an SEO crawler. The no-index meta tag, X-robots tag, and orphan pages restrict pages from crawling. So, it is better to check all the resources to ensure its crawling ability. Even the Website Auditor can give a full list of blocked pages and resources to review.
4. Increase crawl budget.
The crawl budget means the number of site’s pages that Google bots crawl in a specific time. It is not a ranking factor but a frequency stating how frequently the crucial pages are crawled.
To avoid waste of the crawl budget, remove the duplicate content from your site. Or, you should block the bot and canonical URLs from crawling. Restrict the pages which have no SEO value which may be privacy policy, old promotion, and others. Don’t forget to take care of broken links and fix redirects on your site.
5. Audit internal links.
Having a logical site structure is essential for users and search engine bots to spread link juice in the pages. Auditing the internal link structure is vital. Here are some critical things to check -
l Click depth of your site.
l Broken links.
l Orphan pages.
6. Check on your HTTPS content.
Did you know Google started using HTTPS as a ranking signal back in 2014? If you don’t have this tag, it is essential to do HTTPS migration. Over 70% of pages ranking in the top are from HTTPS.
If your site has HTTPS, monitor the related issues in your site audit. The mixed content is a standard issue in HTTPS which occurs when a secure page loads on a nonsecure HTTP connection weakening the security of the page. You must check this issue and correct with the help of Website auditor.
7. Test and improve page speed.
Google expects web pages to load in less than 4 seconds, faster the better. Page loading speed is already a ranking factor as it has a massive impact on user experience and bounce rate which eventually lead to low conversion.
Make sure each of the pages pass the Google speed test to get top ranking on mobile and desktop result. If your pages are slow, it is the right time to fix them.
8. Mobile friendliness
Google has started giving more importance to a site on mobile friendliness. A mobile first index is a reality now indexing website separately for mobile and desktop version. Sites with mobile friendliness are bound to get more critical than others in a search result.
If you don’t know whether your website is mobile friendly or not, conduct Google’s mobile-friendly test now.
9. Ask Google to re-crawl your site.
After analyzing your site, if you have found any technical issue and fix it now. Solve and invite Google to re-crawl your pages to ensure refreshed pages are indexed.
To ensure faster crawling of your page, go to Google’s search console and fetch as Google. Now, enter the URLs that you want Google to re-crawl. Ping is another way of inviting Google to crawl and index the content.
Conclusion
Technical SEO activities help to create a site ready for an SEO campaign. But, it requires skills and understanding of how the search engine works to make suitable changes. That is where you need to hire SEO experts from a digital marketing agency in India to manage your project successfully.
How do you manage your technical SEO? Do you follow other methods in rectifying your site errors and pages? Share your experience in keeping your site’s technical problems at bay.