How to Quickly Implement Four Technical SEO Tactics
There’s a science to SEO that focuses on how to write content that “wins” in Googles ranking algorithm. We’ve talked a lot about this science in general and some Local SEO tactics that work well. But there are more dimensions to SEO than keywords and localization.
On the backend of a website site, there’s a whole other dimension to SEO that is more technical and dives into its mechanics to enhance user experience — i.e. making the use of your site more enjoyable and accessible.
User experience optimizations are called technical SEO, and while they can involve some light coding and technical know-how, these tactics are simple enough that you should be able to pick up on how they work, why they matter and even try out a few ourself.
Below, here are 4 technical SEO tests and tactics you can try out right now.
Mobile Phone Test
Starting in Summer 2018, Google rolled out its “mobile first” indexing engine. That means that Google will discover, index and rank your website as it appears on a phone before it will crawl the “desktop version” of your site.
So, what does that mean for your site?
San Antonio businesses that don’t have a website experience that is easy to read and navigate on a mobile phone won’t get valuable traffic from Google.
Building a site that is mobile-friendly is now an automatic, built-in part of the coding and design process at WSI, and it’s pretty easy to find out if your website passes the phone web browser test.
First, just open up your website on your phone — are the icons and pictures readable and usable? Is it easy to scroll? Does everything load quickly?
But there’s an even easier way to check for mobile friendliness.
Hop on over to the official mobile friendly test from Google and type in your URL. You’ll get a quick score and a list of technical optimizations to pass on to your digital marketing team or developer.
Get a Sitemap
Your homepage may be showing up on Google, but that’s not a guarantee that Google will find all the content you have on your website. Sometimes,
That’s where a sitemap comes in.
An XML sitemap is a drilldown list of every page on your website that you can manually submit directly to google through a tool called Search Console. While a sitemap isn’t necessary for all your pages to get found by Google in 2020, it can make the process of discovering new URLs faster — especially if you just launched a brand-new website.
Speed Things Up
There’s nothing more frustrating than a website that takes forever to load. Web users have always known this, but now Google does, too, and will give slow websites a rankings penalty.
It’s important to remember that website speed is made of three pieces:
1) Your web server’s speed.
2) The user’s internet connection.
3) The speed of the user’s device.
Google decides how “fast” a website is with a benchmark that takes into account that not every internet user has the fastest internet or fastest devices. That means that your beautiful website that has tons of high-resolution graphics and animations could get a poor speed score because they are too big and complex for the average person’s computer.
This side of technical optimization isn’t necessarily about having the most feature-packed website, but instead a website that is accessible.
Want to find out how quick your site it? You can test out your homepage on a free tool called GTMetrix. This free tool gives webpages a “grade” and a list of code optimizations that can help your site load quicker.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a coder to make some speed optimizations yourself.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to give your site a quick speed score bump is to compress big images. Most images don’t need to be any wider than 1,500 pixels to display properly on a wide-screen format.
Fix Broken Links
Over time, the URLs for website content will frequently change or become inactive — even within your own site! When those changes happen, links to the old URL will stop working, leading to those terrible 404 errors we all hate to see.
A “broken link” is an awful user experience, and Google penalizes sites with links to old or broken URLs heavily. It’s important to check your links periodically to make sure there are no 404 errors.
Staying On Top of Technical SEO
These four technical SEO tactics only scratch the surface of user experience, but they are the four core features of a website that need to be technically optimized for the rest of your SEO strategy to work well.
User experience matters, and with periodic technical audits, sets your local business up for success in Google’s algorithm. If you’d like to learn more about how SEO services could grow your business, please reach out to us with questions or a free consultation.
