Dozens of companies are investing (a lot of) money in Google in order to rank as high as possible in search results. Copywriters are hired, clever PR campaigns generate valuable backlinks, and data analysts optimize landing pages as effectively as possible.
Often, a crucial element is overlooked: technical SEO, which is the foundation of your search visibility and conversions. In this article, you’ll learn how technical SEO affects your search visibility and what you need to keep in mind.
Technical SEO ensures that Google crawls your website effectively and that your visitors enjoy a fast-loading website. Technical SEO enhances the user experience on your website. It helps improve your rankings on Google and increases your conversion rate.
Key components of technical SEO include:
Below, you’ll learn about the impact of each of the above elements on your technical SEO and how to optimize your website for this aspect of SEO.
Your website’s loading speed is crucial for conversion rates and search engine visibility. If your loading time exceeds 2 seconds, visitors will leave and return to the search results.
Your bounce rate goes up, your conversion rate goes down, and Google ranks your website lower. In addition, slow loading speeds consume valuable crawl budget (the number of seconds Google’s crawler spends on your website), causing Google’s crawler to visit fewer pages.
There are many reasons for slow loading times, such as large images, insufficient server capacity, a shared hosting environment, too many HTTP requests, styling files that are too large, or poor code.
To improve your loading speed, you can apply the following optimizations:
Tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and WebPageTest allow you to analyze your website’s load time. They highlight various factors that contribute to your website loading quickly.
By implementing the optimizations listed above and analyzing your website using the tools mentioned above, you can achieve significant speed improvements.
Tip: Be sure to check out our list of useful WordPress SEO plugins.
Google launched its mobile-first index in early 2019, which means that Google ranks websites that aren’t mobile-friendly lower in search results. So make sure your website always displays properly on phones, tablets, and desktops.
If your website is well optimized for mobile devices, it will rank higher in search results. With Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, you can see if your website is mobile-friendly and what optimizations are needed for your website.
Please keep in mind that:
Since an increasing number of conversions are taking place on mobile devices, effective mobile optimization helps boost conversions on your website.
A well-structured page layout contributes to your website’s user-friendliness. Visitors appreciate well-organized content, which allows them to scan the pages and filter out what’s important to them. In addition, Google understands your pages better when you use a logical structure.
To create a good page structure, use HTML headings, which come in six levels: H1 through H6. Want to know which HTML headings are on your pages? Then use our handy HTML heading checker.
The following guidelines apply to the use of HTML headings:
It’s also important to include visuals on your page, such as optimized images, videos, infographics, and calls to action. When building a page, always keep the visitor in mind—the page must ultimately drive conversions and keep the bounce rate low.
Unique and valuable content is very important to Google, so duplicate content is penalized. To prevent Google from treating parameterized URLs as new pages, you should use self-referencing canonical URLs.
When you copy a text—for example, a press release that has been published in multiple places online—it’s a good idea to set a canonical URL. By using canonical URLs correctly, you can prevent the crawler from thinking you have duplicate content on your website.
Want to know if you’ve set the correct canonical URL? Then use our canonical URL checker.
Using the robots.txt file on your website, you can direct Google’s crawler through your site. A robots.txt file contains instructions for crawlers, so they know which pages to visit and which to skip.
It’s important to create a robots.txt file and include guidelines for the crawler in it. With the right guidelines, you can prevent wasting your crawl budget: the number of seconds that Google’s crawler spends on your website per visit.
Adds a ” Disallow ” to parameterized URLs, login pages, and search results pages. For online stores in particular, the robots.txt file has a significant impact on discoverability.
Disallow
To keep your website relevant to your visitors, it is sometimes necessary to delete pages. When you delete a page, it is important to set up a 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect ensures that your page retains its SEO authority and that visitors are redirected to another relevant page. Properly configured 301 redirects contribute to a positive user experience.
301 redirects are also crucial when performing an SEO migration; they help you avoid losing valuable rankings. Be sure to thoroughly check your 301 redirects to ensure they are set up correctly.
Tip: Be sure to check out our step-by-step guide to SEO migrations.
Your website’s crawlability—how easily Google can crawl your website—is important for your search rankings. In some cases, URLs can be accessed in multiple ways, often with and without “ / ” at the end of the URL. This results in two page variants:
/
https://smartranking.nl/diensten/technische-seo/
https://smartranking.nl/diensten/technische-seo
This isn’t an ideal situation because it uses up your crawl budget. Therefore, set up a trailing slash redirect to prevent what’s known as a trailing slash issue. With a 301 redirect, you ensure that the URL without a trailing slash is redirected to the URL with a trailing slash, or vice versa.
Google places a very high priority on the online security of your website. If you don’t have an SSL certificate, or if the certificate is invalid, you’ll see this reflected in your search rankings. Therefore, make sure you have a valid and reliable SSL certificate.
Through the Let’s Encrypt initiative, you can generate a free SSL certificate for your website.
An XML sitemap contains a list of all the pages on your website. Crawlers use the sitemap to visit pages that need to be indexed.
Your XML sitemap should only include pages that are allowed to be indexed; furthermore, these pages should not contain any redirects. Have you included pages that contain a ` noindex ` meta tag in your XML sitemap? If so, please note: this sends conflicting signals to the crawlers. In that case, remove these pages from the XML sitemap.
noindex
An SEO-friendly URL structure helps crawlers better understand a page. By using a good URL structure, you establish the correct hierarchy on your website and ensure that your URLs are easy to read.
Include a few key keywords in your URL structure and use as few parameters as possible. Also, keep your URLs short, since the length of your URL is a factor in determining your rankings in search results.
In addition to the elements mentioned, there are other technical SEO factors that affect your rankings and conversions. It’s a good idea to continuously monitor your website for technical SEO issues and analyze them carefully.
By optimizing the elements listed above, you’ll take your technical SEO to the next level, helping you achieve higher rankings and, as a result, more conversions.
With a passion for SEO and an unmatched drive for results, Jarik Oosting is the driving force behind SmartRanking. With over 15 years of experience in the field, he has built an extensive body of knowledge spanning technical SEO to complex site migrations. As the founder of SmartRanking, he has assembled a team of like-minded SEO specialists who help businesses achieve sustainable online growth.
His academic background in information science at the University of Groningen, with a specialization in natural language processing, gives him a unique perspective on the world of SEO. For Jarik, it’s not just about visibility in search engines, it’s about sharing knowledge and guiding businesses toward sustainable online success. That mission also led him to write a Dutch book about GEO.