List three things you鈥檝e done this year that pertain to search engine optimization (SEO).
Do these tactics revolve around keyword research, meta descriptions, and backlinks?
If so, you鈥檙e not alone. When it comes to SEO, these techniques are usually the first ones marketers add to their arsenal.
While these strategies do improve your site鈥檚 visibility in organic search, they鈥檙e not the only ones you should be employing. There鈥檚 another set of tactics that fall under the SEO umbrella.
Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes elements that power your organic growth engine, such as site architecture, mobile optimization, and page speed. These aspects of SEO might not be the sexiest, but they are incredibly important.
The first step in improving your technical SEO is knowing where you stand by performing a site audit. The second step is to create a plan to address the areas where you fall short. We鈥檒l cover these steps in-depth below.
Pro tip: Create a website designed to convert using 探花精选's free CMS tools.
Many people break down search engine optimization (SEO) into three different buckets: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. Let鈥檚 quickly cover what each means.
On-page SEO refers to the content that tells search engines (and readers!) what your page is about, including image alt text, keyword usage, meta descriptions, H1 tags, URL naming, and internal linking. You have the most control over on-page SEO because, well, everything is on your site.
Off-page SEO tells search engines how popular and useful your page is through votes of confidence 鈥� most notably backlinks, or links from other sites to your own. Backlink quantity and quality boost a page鈥檚 PageRank. All things being equal, a page with 100 relevant links from credible sites will outrank a page with 50 relevant links from credible sites (or 100 irrelevant links from credible sites.)
Technical SEO is within your control as well, but it鈥檚 a bit trickier to master since it鈥檚 less intuitive.
You may be tempted to ignore this component of SEO completely; however, it plays an important role in your organic traffic. Your content might be the most thorough, useful, and well-written, but unless a search engine can crawl it, very few people will ever see it.
It鈥檚 like a tree that falls in the forest when no one is around to hear it 鈥� does it make a sound? Without a strong technical SEO foundation, your content will make no sound to search engines.
Let鈥檚 discuss how you can make your content resound through the internet.
Technical SEO is a beast that is best broken down into digestible pieces. If you鈥檙e like me, you like to tackle big things in chunks and with checklists. Believe it or not, everything we鈥檝e covered to this point can be placed into one of five categories, each of which deserves its own list of actionable items.
These five categories and their place in the technical SEO hierarchy is best illustrated by this beautiful graphic that is reminiscent of but remixed for search engine optimization. (Note that we will use the commonly used term 鈥淩endering鈥� in place of Accessibility.)
Before you begin with your technical SEO audit, there are a few fundamentals that you need to put in place.
Let's cover these technical SEO fundamentals before we move on to the rest of your .
Your domain is the URL that people type to arrive on your site, like . Your website domain impacts whether people can find you through search and provides a consistent way to identify your site.
When you select a preferred domain, you鈥檙e telling search engines whether you prefer the www or non-www version of your site to be displayed in the search results. For example, you might select www.yourwebsite.com over yourwebsite.com. This tells search engines to prioritize the www version of your site and redirects all users to that URL. Otherwise, search engines will treat these two versions as separate sites, resulting in dispersed SEO value. As SE Ranking revealed in its analysis of , the lack of redirects between www and non-www versions is still a problem for 13.31% of websites. This can also lead to duplicate content problems, thus reducing your SEO effectiveness and lower your rankings.
Previously, Google asked you to identify the version of your URL that you prefer. Now, Google will for you. However, if you prefer to set the preferred version of your domain, then you can do so through canonical tags (which we鈥檒l cover shortly). Either way, once you set your preferred domain, make sure that all variants, meaning www, non-www, http, and index.html, all permanently redirect to that version.
You may have heard this term before 鈥� that鈥檚 because it鈥檚 pretty important. SSL, or Secure Sockets Layer, creates a layer of protection between the web server (the software responsible for fulfilling an online request) and a browser, thereby making your site secure. When a user sends information to your website, like payment or contact info, that information is less likely to be hacked because you have SSL to protect them.
An SSL certificate is denoted by a domain that begins with 鈥渉ttps://鈥� as opposed to 鈥渉ttp://鈥� and a lock symbol in the URL bar.
Search engines prioritize secure sites 鈥� in fact, Google announced as early as 2014 that . Because of this, be sure to set the SSL variant of your homepage as your preferred domain.
After you set up SSL, you鈥檒l need to migrate any non-SSL pages from http to https. It鈥檚 a tall order, but worth the effort in the name of improved ranking. Here are the steps you need to take:
Do you know how long a website visitor will wait for your website to load? ... and that鈥檚 being generous. that the bounce rate increases by 90% with an increase in page load time from one to five seconds. You don鈥檛 have one second to waste, so improving your site load time should be a priority.
Site speed isn鈥檛 just important for user experience and conversion 鈥� it鈥檚 also a .
Use these tips to improve your average page load time:
If you want to see where your website falls short in the speed department, you can use .
Once you have your technical SEO fundamentals in place, you're ready to move onto the next stage 鈥� crawlability.
Crawlability is the foundation of your technical SEO strategy. Search bots will crawl your pages to gather information about your site.
If these bots are somehow blocked from crawling, they can鈥檛 index or rank your pages. The first step to implementing technical SEO is to ensure that all of your important pages are accessible and easy to navigate.
Below we'll cover some items to add to your checklist as well as some website elements to audit to ensure that your pages are prime for crawling.
Remember that site structure we went over? That belongs in something called an XML Sitemap that helps search bots understand and crawl your web pages. You can think of it as a map for your website. You鈥檒l submit your sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools once it鈥檚 complete. Remember to keep your sitemap up-to-date as you add and remove web pages.
Your crawl budget refers to the .
Because crawl budget isn鈥檛 infinite, make sure you鈥檙e prioritizing your most important pages for crawling.
Here are a few tips to ensure that you鈥檙e maximizing your crawl budget:
Your website has multiple pages. Those pages need to be organized in a way that allows search engines to easily find and crawl them. That鈥檚 where your site structure 鈥� often referred to as your website鈥檚 information architecture 鈥� comes in.
In the same way that a building is based on architectural design, your site architecture is how you organize the pages on your site.
Related pages are grouped together; for example, your blog homepage links to individual blog posts, which each link to their respective author pages. This structure helps search bots understand the relationship between your pages.
Your site architecture should also shape, and be shaped by, the importance of individual pages. The closer Page A is to your homepage, the more pages link to Page A, and the more link equity those pages have, the more importance search engines will give to Page A.
For example, a link from your homepage to Page A demonstrates more significance than a link from a blog post. The more links to Page A, the more 鈥渟ignificant鈥� that page becomes to search engines.
Conceptually, a site architecture could look something like this, where the About, Product, News, etc. pages are positioned at the top of the hierarchy of page importance.
Make sure the most important pages to your business are at the top of the hierarchy with the greatest number of (relevant!) internal links.
URL structure refers to how you structure your URLs, which could be determined by your site architecture. I鈥檒l explain the connection in a moment. First, let鈥檚 clarify that URLs can have subdirectories, like blog.hubspot.com, and/or subfolders, like hubspot.com/blog, that indicate where the URL leads.
As an example, a blog post titled How to Groom Your Dog would fall under a blog subdomain or subdirectory. The URL might be www.bestdogcare.com/blog/how-to-groom-your-dog. Whereas a product page on that same site would be www.bestdogcare.com/products/grooming-brush.
Whether you use subdomains or subdirectories or 鈥減roducts鈥� versus 鈥渟tore鈥� in your URL is entirely up to you. The beauty of creating your own website is that you can create the rules. What鈥檚 important is that those rules follow a unified structure, meaning that you shouldn鈥檛 switch between blog.yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.com/blogs on different pages. Create a roadmap, apply it to your URL naming structure, and stick to it.
Here are a few more tips about how to write your URLs:
Once you have your URL structure buttoned up, you鈥檒l submit a list of URLs of your important pages to search engines in the form of an XML sitemap. Doing so gives search bots additional context about your site so they don鈥檛 have to figure it out as they crawl.
When a web robot crawls your site, it will first check the /robot.txt, otherwise known as the Robot Exclusion Protocol. This protocol can allow or disallow specific web robots to crawl your site, including specific sections or even pages of your site. If you鈥檇 like to prevent bots from indexing your site, you鈥檒l use a noindex robots meta tag. Let鈥檚 discuss both of these scenarios.
You may want to block certain bots from crawling your site altogether. Unfortunately, there are some bots out there with malicious intent 鈥� bots that will scrape your content or spam your community forums. If you notice this bad behavior, you鈥檒l use your robot.txt to prevent them from entering your website. In this scenario, you can think of robot.txt as your force field from bad bots on the internet.
Regarding indexing, search bots crawl your site to gather clues and find keywords so they can match your web pages with relevant search queries. But, as we鈥檒l discuss later, you have a crawl budget that you don鈥檛 want to spend on unnecessary data. So, you may want to exclude pages that don鈥檛 help search bots understand what your website is about, for example, a Thank You page from an offer or a login page.
No matter what, your depending on what you鈥檇 like to accomplish.
Remember the old fable Hansel and Gretel where two children dropped breadcrumbs on the ground to find their way back home? Well, they were on to something.
Breadcrumbs are exactly what they sound like 鈥� a trail that guides users to back to the start of their journey on your website. It鈥檚 a menu of pages that tells users how their current page relates to the rest of the site.
And they aren鈥檛 just for website visitors; search bots use them, too.
Breadcrumbs should be two things: 1) visible to users so they can easily navigate your web pages without using the Back button, and 2) have structured markup language to give accurate context to search bots that are crawling your site.
Not sure how to add structured data to your breadcrumbs? .
Remember when teachers would require you to number the pages on your research paper? That鈥檚 called pagination. In the world of technical SEO, pagination has a slightly different role but you can still think of it as a form of organization.
Pagination uses code to tell search engines when pages with distinct URLs are related to each other. For instance, you may have a content series that you break up into chapters or multiple webpages. If you want to make it easy for search bots to discover and crawl these pages, then you鈥檒l use pagination.
The way it works is pretty simple. You鈥檒l go to the <head> of page one of the series and use
谤别濒=鈥渍别虫迟鈥� to tell the search bot which page to crawl second. Then, on page two, you鈥檒l use 谤别濒=鈥漰谤别惫鈥� to indicate the prior page and 谤别濒=鈥渍别虫迟鈥� to indicate the subsequent page, and so on.
It looks like this鈥�
On page one:
On page two:
Note that is useful for crawl discovery, but is no longer supported by Google to batch index pages as it once was.
You can think of log files like a journal entry. Web servers (the journaler) record and store log data about every action they take on your site in log files (the journal). The data recorded includes the time and date of the request, the content requested, and the requesting IP address. You can also identify the user agent, which is a uniquely identifiable software (like a search bot, for example) that fulfills the request for a user.
But what does this have to do with SEO?
Well, search bots leave a trail in the form of log files when they crawl your site. You can determine if, when, and what was crawled by checking the log files and filtering by the .
This information is useful to you because you can determine how your crawl budget is spent and which barriers to indexing or access a bot is experiencing. To access your log files, you can either ask a developer or use a log file analyzer, like .
Just because a search bot can crawl your site doesn鈥檛 necessarily mean that it can index all of your pages. Let鈥檚 take a look at the next layer of your technical SEO audit 鈥� indexability.
As search bots crawl your website, they begin indexing pages based on their topic and relevance to that topic. Once indexed, your page is eligible to rank on the SERPs. Here are a few factors that can help your pages get indexed.
You鈥檒l likely take care of this step when addressing crawlability, but it鈥檚 worth mentioning here. You want to ensure that bots are sent to your preferred pages and that they can access them freely. You have a few tools at your disposal to do this. Google鈥檚 will give you a list of pages that are disallowed and you can use the Google Search Console鈥檚 Inspect tool to determine the cause of blocked pages.
Duplicate content confuses search bots and negatively impacts your indexability. Remember to use canonical URLs to establish your preferred pages.
Verify that all of your redirects are set up properly. Redirect loops, broken URLs, or 鈥� worse 鈥� improper redirects can cause issues when your site is being indexed. To avoid this, audit all of your redirects regularly.
If your website is not mobile-friendly by now, then you鈥檙e far behind where you need to be. As early as 2016, Google started indexing mobile sites first, prioritizing the mobile experience over desktop. Today, that indexing is enabled by default. To keep up with this important trend, you can use Google's mobile-friendly test to check where your website needs to improve.
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, but you probably don鈥檛 care about that. What you do care about is when HTTP returns errors to your users or to search engines, and how to fix them.
HTTP errors can impede the work of search bots by blocking them from important content on your site. It is, therefore, incredibly important to address these errors quickly and thoroughly.
Since every HTTP error is unique and requires a specific resolution, the section below has a brief explanation of each, and you鈥檒l use the links provided to learn more about or how to resolve them.
Whatever the reason for these errors, it鈥檚 important to address them to keep both users and search engines happy, and to keep both coming back to your site.
Even if your site has been crawled and indexed, accessibility issues that block users and bots will impact your SEO. That said, we need to move on to the next stage of your technical SEO audit 鈥� renderability.
Before we dive into this topic, it鈥檚 important to note the difference between SEO accessibility and web accessibility. The latter revolves around making your web pages easy to navigate for users with disabilities or impairments, like blindness or Dyslexia, for example. Many elements of online accessibility overlap with SEO best practices. However, an SEO accessibility audit does not account for everything you鈥檇 need to do to make your site more accessible to visitors who are disabled.
We鈥檙e going to focus on SEO accessibility, or rendering, in this section, but keep web accessibility top of mind as you develop and maintain your site.
An accessible site is based on ease of rendering. Below are the website elements to review for your renderability audit.
As you learned above, server timeouts and errors will cause HTTP errors that hinder users and bots from accessing your site. If you notice that your server is experiencing issues, use the resources provided above to troubleshoot and resolve them. Failure to do so in a timely manner can result in search engines removing your web page from their index as it is a poor experience to show a broken page to a user.
Similar to server performance, HTTP errors will prevent access to your webpages. You can use a web crawler, like , Botify, or DeepCrawl to perform a comprehensive error audit of your site.
If your page takes too long to load, the bounce rate is not the only problem you have to worry about. A delay in page load time can result in a server error that will block bots from your webpages or have them crawl partially loaded versions that are missing important sections of content. Depending on how much crawl demand there is for a given resource, bots will spend an equivalent amount of resources to attempt to load, render, and index pages. However, you should do everything in your control to decrease your page load time.
Google admittedly has a difficult time processing JavaScript (JS) and, therefore, recommends employing to improve accessibility. Google also has a host of resources to help you understand how search bots access JS on your site and how to improve search-related issues.
Every page on your site should be linked to at least one other page 鈥� preferably more, depending on how important the page is. When a page has no internal links, it鈥檚 called an orphan page. Like an article with no introduction, these pages lack the context that bots need to understand how they should be indexed.
Page depth refers to how many layers down a page exists in your site structure, i.e. how many clicks away from your homepage it is. It鈥檚 best to keep your site architecture as shallow as possible while still maintaining an intuitive hierarchy. Sometimes a multi-layered site is inevitable; in that case, you鈥檒l want to prioritize a well-organized site over shallowness.
Regardless of how many layers in your site structure, keep important pages 鈥� like your product and contact pages 鈥� no more than three clicks deep. A structure that buries your product page so deep in your site that users and bots need to play detective to find them are less accessible and provide a poor experience
For example, a website URL like this that guides your target audience to your product page is an example of a poorly planned site structure: www.yourwebsite.com/products-features/features-by-industry/airlines-case-studies/airlines-products.
When you decide to redirect traffic from one page to another, you鈥檙e paying a price. That price is crawl efficiency. Redirects can slow down crawling, reduce page load time, and render your site inaccessible if those redirects aren鈥檛 set up properly. For all of these reasons, try to keep redirects to a minimum.
Once you've addressed accessibility issues, you can move onto how your pages rank in the SERPs.
Now we move to the more topical elements that you鈥檙e probably already aware of 鈥� how to improve ranking from a technical SEO standpoint. Getting your pages to rank involves some of the on-page and off-page elements that we mentioned before but from a technical lens.
Remember that all of these elements work together to create an SEO-friendly site. So, we鈥檇 be remiss to leave out all the contributing factors. Let鈥檚 dive into it.
Links help search bots understand where a page fits in the grand scheme of a query and gives context for how to rank that page. Links guide search bots (and users) to related content and transfer page importance. Overall, linking improves crawling, indexing, and your ability to rank.
Backlinks 鈥� links from other sites back to your own 鈥� provide a vote of confidence for your site. They tell search bots that External Website A believes your page is high-quality and worth crawling. As these votes add up, search bots notice and treat your site as more credible. Sounds like a great deal right? However, as with most great things, there鈥檚 a caveat. The quality of those backlinks matter, a lot.
Links from low-quality sites can actually hurt your rankings. There are many ways to get quality backlinks to your site, like outreach to relevant publications, claiming unlinked mentions, providing relevant publications, claiming unlinked mentions, and providing helpful content that other sites want to link to.
We at 探花精选 have not been shy about our love for content clusters or how they contribute to organic growth. Content clusters link related content so search bots can easily find, crawl, and index all of the pages you own on a particular topic. They act as a self-promotion tool to show search engines how much you know about a topic, so they are more likely to rank your site as an authority for any related search query.
Your rankability is the main determinant in organic traffic growth because studies show that searchers are on SERPs. But how do you ensure that yours is the result that gets clicked?
Let鈥檚 round this out with the final piece to the organic traffic pyramid: clickability.
While click-through rate (CTR) has everything to do with searcher behavior, there are things you can do to improve your clickability on the SERPs. While meta descriptions and page titles with keywords do impact CTR, we鈥檙e going to focus on the technical elements because that鈥檚 why you鈥檙e here.
Ranking and click-through rate go hand-in-hand because, let鈥檚 be honest, searchers want immediate answers. The more your result stands out on the SERP, the more likely you鈥檒l get the click. Let鈥檚 go over a few ways to improve your clickability.
Structured data employs a specific vocabulary called schema to categorize and label elements on your webpage for search bots. The schema makes it crystal clear what each element is, how it relates to your site, and how to interpret it. Basically, structured data tells bots, 鈥淭his is a video,鈥� 鈥淭his is a product,鈥� or 鈥淭his is a recipe,鈥� leaving no room for interpretation.
To be clear, using structured data is not a 鈥渃lickability factor鈥� (if there even is such a thing), but it does help organize your content in a way that makes it easy for search bots to understand, index, and potentially rank your pages.
SERP features, otherwise known as rich results, are a double-edged sword. If you win them and get the click-through, you鈥檙e golden. If not, your organic results are pushed down the page beneath sponsored ads, text answer boxes, video carousels, and the like.
Rich results are those elements that don鈥檛 follow the page title, URL, meta description format of other search results. For example, the image below shows two SERP features 鈥� a video carousel and 鈥淧eople Also Ask鈥� box 鈥� above the first organic result.
While you can still get clicks from appearing in the top organic results, your chances are greatly improved with rich results.
How do you increase your chances of earning rich results? Write useful content and use structured data. The easier it is for search bots to understand the elements of your site, the better your chances of getting a rich result.
Structured data is useful for getting these () from your site to the top of the SERPs, thereby, increasing the probability of a click-through:
One unicorn SERP feature that has nothing to do with schema markup is Featured Snippets, those boxes above the search results that provide concise answers to search queries.
Featured Snippets are intended to get searchers the answers to their queries as quickly as possible. , providing the best answer to the searcher鈥檚 query is the only way to win a snippet. However, 探花精选鈥檚 research revealed a few additional ways to optimize your content for featured snippets.
is a relatively new algorithmic listing of content by category specifically for mobile users. It鈥檚 no secret that Google has been doubling down on the mobile experience; with over 50% of searches coming from mobile, it鈥檚 no surprise either. The tool allows users to build a library of content by selecting categories of interest (think: gardening, music, or politics).
At 探花精选, we believe topic clustering can increase the likelihood of Google Discover inclusion and are actively monitoring our Google Discover traffic in Google Search Console to determine the validity of that hypothesis. We recommend that you also invest some time in researching this new feature. The payoff is a highly engaged user base that has basically hand-selected the content you鈥檝e worked hard to create.
Technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO work together to unlock the door to organic traffic. While on-page and off-page techniques are often the first to be deployed, technical SEO plays a critical role in getting your site to the top of the search results and your content in front of your ideal audience. Use these technical tactics to round out your SEO strategy and watch the results unfold.