Technical SEO - Importance and Benefits

Did you know that the top five organic results generate 67.60% of all clicks within a search engine results page (SERP)?

In other words, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial for enhancing your business’s online presence, driving more traffic to your website, and ultimately generating more traffic.

But here’s the thing: SEO is a pretty broad field within itself, as it covers On-Page, Off-Page, and Technical SEO.

Sure, optimizing your content, having a smart keyword strategy, and getting backlinks are surefire ways to push your website up the rankings. But most people, including the greatest SEO companies, say that this is not enough.

You’ll need to work on what’s hiding behind the curtain for maximum effect. That’s where Technical SEO comes in.

So, what is Technical SEO, and why is it important? Let’s take a look.

What Is Technical SEO?

Your website is split into two parts: the front and back end.

The front end includes all the elements visitors can see upon landing on your website, like images, videos, graphics, text, buttons, etc.

The back end is like your website’s engine room. It includes all the code and scripts that make the front-end functional. Technical SEO focuses on the back end.

In other words, technical SEO is the practice of improving your website so it can meet the search engine’s technical requirements, ultimately increasing your website’s position in the SERP.

More specifically, Technical SEO makes it easier for search engine crawlers to navigate your website. Unlike regular users, these little guys can’t visualize what’s going on on your website.

Instead, they rely on your website’s structure and code to discover, understand, and index new web pages.

Additionally, crawlers determine your website’s user experience by evaluating specific factors like page speed and mobile-friendliness.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

In short, Google puts user experience at the top of their list, which goes beyond creating valuable content.

Sure, you could create high-value content that provides visitors helpful information, but if the rest of your website is not up to par, that content will most likely not rank high in the SERPs, or it may not be indexed by crawlers at all.

That said, focusing on technical SEO will let Google know that your website’s performance is optimized to bring the best user experience possible.

Consequently, you’ll not only make Google happy, but your visitors will probably be grateful as well.

What Are the Benefits of Technical SEO?

1. Increased Loading Speed

Website loading times can be a massive deal-breaker for Google.

First off, page speed is a direct ranking factor. That means slow websites will rank lower than sites with a fast loading speed.

Secondly, 53% of mobile visitors will abandon a webpage if it doesn’t load within the first three seconds. This leads to increased bounce rates and decreased dwell times, which are also some of Google’s ranking factors.

And third, search engine bots have a crawl budget. In short, the crawl budget represents the number of web pages search engine bots can crawl through within a specific timeframe.

Many factors influence the crawl budget, and your website’s loading speed is one of them.

In other words, the slower your website is, the more time search engine bots will spend crawling through each specific web page, and the fewer web pages they will index within that timeframe.

To put it differently, having a slow website is a quick way to upset both Google and your visitors.

However, technical SEO ensures that you take all the necessary measures to boost website performance.

Some best practices include compressing images, minifying CSS, HTML, or JavaScript files, upgrading your hosting, etc.

2. Mobile Optimization

A crucial part of technical SEO is optimizing your website for mobile. Given that mobile devices generate 54.4% of all web traffic, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites.

Moreover, Google plans to set mobile-first indexing as the default for all websites. Consequently, engine bots will only consider mobile-friendly websites when ranking them in the SERPs while leaving desktop versions aside.

Consequently, optimizing your website for mobile devices is now a must rather than a recommendation.

You’ve got three options to do this: you can go for a responsive, adaptive, or mobile-first approach.

In terms of cost-effectiveness, the responsive approach might be a suitable option. That’s because responsive websites automatically change their layout based on the devices used to view them.

That said, it’s more of a one-size-fits-all solution, as there’s no need to build different website layouts dedicated to specific screen sizes.

However, note that although responsive websites offer a consistent user experience across all types of devices, the mobile experience is not 100% optimized.

On the other hand, the mobile-first approach ensures that your website is specifically designed for mobile devices, offering the best user experience.

But keep in mind that this design approach offers little room for creativity.

Lastly, you’ll create different layouts dedicated to specific screen sizes with adaptive design.

Although this method allows your website to offer the best user experience possible regardless of the user’s device, adaptive websites are harder to maintain.

3. Enhances Security

Website security is a vital ranking factor. More specifically, your website has to use the HTTPS protocol.

Otherwise, the “Not Secure” label will appear next to the URL. Consequently, the chances are that you may drive users away within a heartbeat. Not to mention that you’ll also drag down your website’s position in the SERPs.

To avoid this, you’ll need to get the SSL certificate to authenticate your website’s identity and ensure a safe connection between your site and visitors.

To put it differently, the SSL certificate will allow your website to switch to the HTTPS protocol. This encrypts the data transferred between websites and users, so any potential hacker won’t be able to modify or read it.

4. Improves Crawlability

Another significant benefit of technical SEO is improving your website’s crawlability. The easier it is for search engine bots to crawl through your site, the more pages they will index and rank.

The first step you should take is to create an XML sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console.

In layman’s terms, a sitemap is a file that lists the URLs of every single webpage of your website. This allows crawlers to understand your website’s content and the relationship between web pages.

Remember that the sitemap should place the URLs in a hierarchical order. Think of it as the headers of an article. For instance, the H1 tags could be buttons on your home page that lead to the “Contact Us” and “About Us” page.

You can then expand each section and create different subsections. For example, the “About Us” section of the sitemap will lead to the “Our Team” and “Mission Statement” pages. These act as the H2 tags of your sitemap.

Another thing you could do to improve crawlability is to create a robots.txt file. This file is placed at the root of the website and instructs search engine bots on how to crawl through your site.

This could come in handy if you want to block specific pages from indexing, like pages that offer no value to visitors or pages that share the same content.

Lastly, consider implementing breadcrumb navigation. On the one hand, this helps users navigate your website more easily.

On the other hand, breadcrumb navigation improves crawlability. That’s because it helps crawlers understand how your website is structured and creates internal links across multiple pages.

5. Identifies Potential Issues

Lastly, focusing on technical SEO can help you identify issues that you may not have been aware of otherwise.

These issues can take the form of duplicate content, a chaotic website structure, or a high number of broken links, which all impact your website’s ranking in the SERP.

That said, it’s best to conduct a website audit before you dive into any technical SEO practices. This way, you’ll be able to quickly fix any underlying website problems and maximize your SEO efforts.

Start by grabbing yourself a few auditing tools. Google Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and Schema Markup Testing tools should give you all the information you need to see where your website might need some work done.

After running the audit, make sure to create a checklist containing what issues your website has and how you can fix them to pass this information to your team.

Final Words

All in all, technical SEO is a crucial part of the SEO spectrum that should never go overlooked.

Regardless of how valuable or optimized your content is and how many backlinks you generate, your website will likely not improve rankings if it’s not in tip-top shape from a technical point of view.

Moreover, technical SEO allows you to feed two birds with one seed. More specifically, you’ll manage to improve your website both for users and for search engine crawlers.

That said, start by conducting a website audit to identify any potential issues that may need to be addressed.

Secondly, emphasize page speed and mobile optimization, as these are some of the most critical factors influencing your website’s position in the SERPs.

Also, make sure that you’ve got the SSL certificate. And last, improve your website’s structure and create a robots.txt file so bots can crawl through your website more quickly and index more pages.

Author’s Bio

Christopher is a Digital Marketing specialist, Project Manager and Editor at Find Digital Agency and a passionate blogger. He is a devoted and experienced author who loves to pay attention to quality research and details. Focused on new digital trends and voice distribution across different channels, he starts the day scrolling digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee. In his free time Christopher plays drums and Magic: the Gathering.