What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the part of the search engine optimisation process where a website’s backend and technical elements are optimised to help search engines to crawl, index, and rank web pages better.
What’s the Difference Between On-Page SEO and Technical SEO?
On-page SEO and technical SEO are different yet complementary.
On-Page SEO focuses on the visual aspects of webpages. These are usually the content, the meta data (titles and meta descriptions) with the headings and page/article structure. Optimising the user experience (UX) is also an important part of on-page SEO.
Technical SEO involves work in a website’s “backend” so this usually covers server and page speed, code changes, and all the aspects that help to improve crawlability, indexability, and ranking.
A fully experienced SEO expert should be able to conduct all SEO tasks, but there does appear to be a bit of a watershed in the industry where you have the writers on the front-end and more developer oriented experts working backend.
The best SEO experts are able to manage all forms of SEO to provide a complete and more successful package. Indeed, SEO consultants with a foot in both camps, plus any other areas of digital such as website design and development have a distinct advantage in this area.
So What Does a Technical SEO Do?
Every technical SEO expert is different and will have followed a different path to where they are today. Personally, these are the basics that I expect from a technical SEO practitioner:
- Crawlability and Indexation:
Ensuring search engines can efficiently crawl and index the site by managing things such as XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and resolving crawl errors like 404s or redirect issues. - Website Performance:
Optimising page speed, reducing code bloat, and improving server response times to improve the user experience and align with any search engine ranking factors. - Mobile Optimisation:
Make websites mobile-friendly through responsive design or Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), ensuring proper rendering across devices. - Structured Data Implementation:
Using schema mark-up to help search engines understand the content better, increasing the chances of appearing in rich snippets or knowledge panels. - Security Enhancements:
Implementing HTTPS/SSL protocols to protect user data and build trust. - Technical Audits:
Conduct comprehensive technical audits to identify and fix issues related to site architecture, duplicate content, internal linking, or even JavaScript rendering. - Information Architecture:
Advise on the structure of a website in terms of sections, hierarchy, URLs, etc.
Each of these areas involves a lot of further in-depth expertise. I’d also add that a good technical SEO specialist is cross-functional, being able to conduct the on-page SEO as well.
Additionally, your SEO expert should be able to work across and with other disciplines in digital, assisting with the design, build, maintenance and even the copy creation. A good technical SEO should be involved very early in web design projects to ensure that websites are built correctly in the first place.
What Tools Do Technical SEO Specialists Use?
There are no hard-and-fast sets of tools that technical SEOs must use, but here’s a list of what they can use if it suits their workflow.
Google Search Console
Formerly called Google Webmaster Tools until May 2015, Google Search Console (GSC) is vital to helping website owners identify and monitor crawl errors and indexing issues.
With a performance overview, covering impressions, clicks, CTR, and running, there are tools to inspect indexing, experience, and enhancements.
In GSC you can tell Google which XML sitemaps to crawl, see your internal and external link structure, and see which Core Web Vitals are affecting performance.
Bing Webmaster Tools
This is Microsoft’s Bing search engine equivalent of GSC and you can pull GSC sites into your BWT console. It also has some useful extras.
BWT has its own “site scan” tool to identify technical issues such as broken links, crawl errors and duplicate content. There’s also a “crawl control” feature which helps Bing understand when to crawl and not to crawl your website e.g. during peak traffic times.
Google PageSpeed Insights
This tool is web-based. Just enter your URL and get PageSpeed Insights to analyse individual pages. You will see that it provides both mobile and desktop reports, with the mobile insights being displayed by default (Indexing is mobile-first, so this is vital)
The performance issues that PageSpeed Insights identifies are quite in-depth, so your technical SEO will need to understand and be able to rectify Core Web Vitals and code such as where you have excessive DOM (Documental Object Model, e.g. bloaty themes, too much CSS and overly complex page layouts and structure).
Google Lighthouse
Built into the Chrome web browser, Lighthouse is a console operated through inspecting a webpage using the webdev tools. Again in mobile and desktop mode, Lighthouse provides the same functions as PageSpeed Insights but from a local rather than a remote source.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This tool is like a Swiss Army Knife – At first glance it may look overly technical and almost rudimentary, but when you explore all the functions and features, there’s a wealth of options to provide really in-depth analysis of any website.
Yes, website – unlike PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, which look at a single page, SFSS crawls your complete website providing a detailed analysis that your technical SEO specialist will need to analyse and interpret.
SEMrush
With SEMrush you set up projects to crawl individual websites. These crawls repeat weekly and, if you’ve set up the site audit you’ll get regular updates on issues the the tool may encounter.
Having used SEMrush extensively for a few years, it’s a great tool to have in your toolbox and flags up errors, warnings, and notices – what I call large, medium, and small issues. Your technical SEO can monitor and act upon SEMrush site audit issues on a regular basis.
Other Tools Are Available
There are other great tools out there that are an essential part of your technical SEO toolbox and they have slightly different features from each other. Ahrefs is very similar to SEMrush but the free tier allows you to set up more projects than the basic SEMrush. Majestic SEO is another, which I don’t have so much experience of.
I suggest you experiment and see which tools suit your specific requirements.
Personally, I love GSC and BWT, with Lighthouse. These are sufficient and free. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider adds another level of depth that is useful for really deep-diving into technical SEO aspects. SEMrush is great for managing multiple projects. I last used it with 50 projects to monitor.
So Why Do I Need Technical SEO Again?
Without technical SEO your website may very well not be performing as well as it should do. And quite often website owners don’t realise there are issues. When you run a homepage URL through PageSpeed Insights, and the red flags pop up for excessive DOM or a huge 6MB image for the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) then suddenly there’s a dawning realisation, THAT is why the website was so slow and why you’re not in the top 10 in Google.
The most common and disturbing issue I see with websites these days is that they may have been beautifully designed and they look absolutely awesome, but all the video, images, and complex layouts cause them to perform poorly on mobile and then desktop too.
The mobile version of your website is the most important one, and mobile-first indexing has been a thing for a few years now. For trades, builders, plumbers, mechanics, screeding contractors, etc. users are far more likely to use their mobiles to search. That’s the shift in user behaviour over the past few years.
So if you had a hot design built but you have no website traffic, no rank, and no conversions, then it’s highly likely you have a deeper technical issue and thus you need a technical SEO specialist to audit, analyse, and fix your website.
To secure my technical SEO expertise, call me on 01252 692 765 and let’s discuss your website. You’ll be pleased you’ve chosen the right SEO consultant to help your business, whether it’s in Hampshire, Surrey, or beyond.