Technical SEO: The Foundation of Your Visibility

Technical SEO is the starting point of any SEO project

Every SEO project should start with technical optimization. Technical issues with your website—such as 404 errors, slow load times, or a redirect chain—ruin the user experience on your website.

Google penalizes this by ranking your website lower in search results. This puts you at a 1-0 disadvantage right from the start, even before you’ve begun optimizing your content or building links.

Google’s algorithm determines your website’s ranking in the search results. This algorithm takes all sorts of factors into account, including a whole host of technical considerations.

Technical SEO involves improving the technical aspects of your website. This results in a user-friendly and fast website, which Google rewards with a higher ranking.

It is often thought that technical SEO is solely about improving page load speed, but it also includes optimizing the crawl budget, improving the user experience, and addressing duplicate content and indexing issues.

Why Start with Technical Optimization?

The main reason many companies start using technical SEO is to improve their rankings in Google’s search results. But just as important—and perhaps even more so—is that it benefits your visitors.

A technically optimized website ensures that you don’t lose visitors—for example, due to a slow website or 404 errors. A technically optimized website ensures that your visitors enjoy using your website.

This increases your website’s relevance, which in turn is rewarded with a higher ranking from Google.

Components of Technical SEO

Technical SEO, therefore, involves optimizing various technical aspects of your website and encompasses more than just page load speed. The complete list of technical factors that influence your rankings consists of more than 50 items.

Components of a technical SEO process include:

Server Speed
HTTPS Implementation
Trailing Slash Issues
Canonical URLs
XML Sitemaps
The robots.txt file
Redirect chains
Caching
JavaScript rendering
International targeting (using hreflang tags)
The URL Structure
Crawler traps
Optimalisatie van crawlbudget
Laadsnelheid optimalisatie
Structured data

With so many things demanding attention, technical SEO is a specialty in its own right. In many cases, simply optimizing the technical aspects of your website can lead to higher search rankings.

Many marketers, at both large and small companies, tend to lose track of the big picture when it comes to SEO—and technical SEO in particular. This can cost you rankings on Google, because if your competitor has everything in order, there’s a good chance they’ll rank above you in the SERP.

A Technical SEO Audit

In addition to a comprehensive SEO audit, we can also perform a technical SEO audit. In this audit, we focus specifically on all aspects that are important for the technical SEO optimization of your website.

A technical SEO audit includes a report detailing issues and specific action items, which are prioritized on a scale of 1 through 5 (from most important to least important). In doing so, we take into account the time required versus the impact of the optimizations.

The areas we examine as part of a technical SEO audit include:

A crawl analysis using log files
The Mobile Performance
Duplicate Content Issues
The URL Structure
The internal link structure
The charging speed
The XML sitemaps and their content
The robots.txt file and its contents
Existing crawl errors
Image Optimization
Page Indexing and Indexing Issues
Existing redirects and redirect loops
Page rendering
Types of Structured Data Used and Their Potential Applications

Recovering from a penalty through technical SEO

Due to existing technical SEO issues, you may receive a (real-time) penalty from Google. Consider, for example, a situation where dozens of variations of duplicate content are created unintentionally, resulting in a penalty. Or the absence of canonical URLs, which causes Google to treat pages with parameters as duplicate content.

By optimizing your technical approach—if that is the cause of the penalty—you’ll quickly recover and regain your traffic and rankings.

Technical SEO as the Starting Point for Rankings Drops Following Google Updates

On average, Google rolls out a major algorithm update —the Google Core Update—four times a year. This Core Update is designed to improve search results, which benefits Google users.

A Core Update involves significant changes to the algorithm that can have a major impact on your SEO performance. One aspect of these algorithm changes is technical factors. As page load speed becomes more important and your page load speed falls short, you’ll see this reflected in your rankings.

In the May 2020 Google Core Update, there is also a visible correlation between websites with many pages that perform poorly and drops in rankings. These pages can result from technical errors, in which a large number of pages are unintentionally created in the background.

So, have you seen a drop in rankings due to a Google Core Update? If so, your website’s technical aspects are often an important starting point for recovery.

Can we help you with technical SEO advice?

Our technical SEO specialists are ready to help you optimize your website—whether it’s a one-time SEO audit or ongoing optimization. Feel free to contact us to see what we can do for you.

Technical SEO