What does “technical SEO” mean?

Introduction

Okay, so you may have paid an SEO agency for an seo report, or perhaps you’ve just asked a friend to give you a few pointers on how your companies website can be improved.

And they have comeback and said your website needs to improve its technical seo, now this has got you scratching your head, as what does this even mean?

Well you’ve come to the right place, as we have asked some of our seo consultants what they believe are some of the most important things that a business should consider when looking to improve their technical seo.

So here’s what we believe are some of the most important areas a business should consider

Can the website be crawled and indexed by Googlebot?

This is a really important consideration, and its important because if Google or another search engine cannot crawl and index the information on your company’s website, well, it doesn’t have much of a hope of showing up in Google.

That’s to say your company website may look brilliant, it may well convey exactly what your business has to offer, yet if it can’t be crawled and indexed, well all that seo work will quite simply be a wasted effort.

So, what should you do? Well, we would recommend checking the really simple stuff like the “no-index” tab isn’t left on, failing that, we would highly recommend you speak to a respected white hat seo agency for help.

Reduce the number of 404-page errors

This point needs to be answered with two things in mind, number one is you should talk to your seo company whether or not it’s a good idea to delete any pages on your website.

All too often a businesses website design agency and the seo agency will work totally separate from each other. And, this can sometimes cause problems.

As sometimes the businessowner will state that they have new products or services that they wish to add to the website, so then the website designer may state we can delete the old pages, and design new ones.

However this is where the seo agency may later step-in and say wait a minute, if you do that you will lose all the seo value that this page has accumulated. That’s because the page in question may have loads of good quality backlinks, which will be useless if that page is deleted and a new page is created with a different website address.

So first things first, talk to your seo agency first if any pages on your businesses website are to be deleted.

Second thing is if your website does have 404 errors, well these need to be fixed, talk to your seo company on how this issue is best rectified as one thing is for sure, that is 404 pages often cause a website to have a higher bounce rate.

Schema

Our digital marketing agency specialises in organic and local seo, and this means often we need to use a businesses NAP details in order to improve that businesses seo.

So we can use Schema to mark-up the businesses NAP details, this way Googlebot will know that this is the businesses name, address and phone number.

Talk to your online marketing agency for advice on how to add Schema to your companies website.

Duplicated content

This is a really important point to make, that is your website shouldn’t have duplicated content, so this means that you shouldn’t copy text from your own website onto another page on the website, and you shouldn’t copy text from another website and paste it on your own.

In a nutshell if your business has duplicated content, well this could mean that your business incurs a penalty.

Incurring a penalty, such as a Google Panda penalty could mean that your businesses rankings drop or your business could be removed altogether from Google.

So, make sure your business doesn’t have any duplicated content.

Thin content

So many websites do not meet their SEO goals simply because the whole website may well have pages that are deemed as being “content thin”.

So for example, let’s say you run a construction business, and you build mostly extensions on peoples homes, loft conversions and you also build complete houses.

Now you may have adding a number of blog posts to your website, and been building good quality backlinks, plus you think that your businesses technical seo is really good, so now your wondering why your business isn’t on the first page of Google.

Well, it might be because the main pages on your website, the ones that describe what services your business offers are deemed “content thin”, so for example on the loft conversion page you may have written:

“We build loft conversions, we build loft conversions in large homes and also smaller homes”.

And you may believe that this is enough, well its most probably not, and that’s because your competitors may have the following on their loft conversion page:

·        A detailed description of the type of loft conversions that the business can build

·        A detailed description of why you should choose that business

·        Recommendations from customers

·        A YouTube video embedded into the page, which shows the company owner explaining why you should choose that business

·        Internal links to other pages on that website which explains more about the businesses loft conversions

As you can see the second business has implemented better seo, and is therefore likely to rank higher.

Can we help your business with its seo?