Technical SEO

A Guide to Technical SEO Services

Learn about GR Digital Marketing’s Technical SEO Services in this Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Why Technical SEO?

If you own a business, you’ve probably heard the term “SEO.” If you have a website or your business is online in any way, you’ve definitely heard it. “SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” “Technical SEO” refers to the multitude of highly specialized techniques one uses to adjust, modify, and improve a website to ensure internet search engines can crawl, index, understand, and rank the website’s content. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain terms like “crawling,” “indexing,” and “ranking” in the following sections).

GR Digital Marketing offers a comprehensive suite of online marketing services. In fact, when it comes to your business and the internet, there’s nothing we don’t do. We view all online marketing and advertising services equally, as they all have their place. That said, our SEO services were among the founding service packages we created when GR Digital Marketing was getting its start. To this day, it’s one of our core offerings.

Read on for more information on what technical SEO is and how to leverage it for online success. And if you’d like to talk SEO with us, click here to connect.

Starting with the Basics: Organizing Your Website

Our parents told us when we were kids to clean our rooms, and it wasn’t until we got a little older that we understood why. Finding something in a messy room is next to impossible, and the same applies to a messy or poorly organized website.

Search engines today are so advanced that they read, navigate, observe, scroll, and interpret website information much in the same way that humans do. With that in mind, a messy, poorly organized website is just as likely to frustrate search engines like Google as it is to frustrate a human user.

What You Can Do: Is your website structure clear, logical, and well laid out? Organize your website pages to make them appear more authoritative and user-friendly. Make sure the important pages stand out and are the easiest ones to find and engage with. Structure pages in a hierarchical way (e.g., Home > Sections > Sub-pages) so it’s intuitive and so that humans and search engines can quickly and effortlessly find the information they need on your website. Just as human users will blow off a website if it’s confusing or disorganized, search engines won’t give a website a high ranking if it’s confusing or messy.

What GR Digital Marketing Does: While frameworks and foundational principles exist, no two websites are the same, and every website deserves a custom approach when laying it out, deciding what to prioritize, and carefully crafting the user experience. Hence, website visitors arrive at the content they are looking for and “convert” from users to paying customers.

Business owners can make modifications to their websites to make them easier to navigate. The GR Digital Marketing difference is that our technical experts will strategically arrange and organize the website to maximize user conversions (conversions are what happen when a website user decides to interact with the website further by filling out a contact form, calling the business, or making a purchase from the site).

Improve Navigation by Linking Pages to Each Other

Everyone loves a good shortcut that enables them to do something more efficiently, and in the technical SEO world, “linking” is that shortcut. In layperson’s terms, linking simply means using a clickable link button as a way to show users they can navigate from one page to another simply by clicking on a bit of highlighted text or a designated button.

Humans AND search engines use links when interacting with a website. In fact, Google’s “crawlers” (automated programs that metaphorically “crawl” over website pages and study their contents) learn much about a site when there are links present, and little when there are few or no links.

What You Can Do: Link between your pages to establish relationships and guide crawlers. Internal links help users find relevant content and help Google discover pages beyond your homepage.

Avoid “orphan” pages, or pages that have no links being directed to them and that don’t have any links directing users from that page to other pages.

What GR Digital Marketing Does: Any linking is better than no linking, but as SEO is highly technical, the more specialized and specific you get with linking, the better results you will enjoy both in terms of the user’s experience and the Google ranking position of your site.

GR Digital Marketing’s SEO experts treat each client’s website as a separate entity and craft a customized linking strategy for that site. There is such a thing as too many and too few links, and which links send users to what pages make a difference. Our specialists build on the Three Clicks or Fewer rule, which holds that it should never take a user more than three clicks to reach any key page on your website.

Improve User Experience by Enhancing Website Performance

The internet is one big competition for attention, and with that being the virtual landscape your website competes in, you want a website that performs as well as possible. Like training a racehorse for the Kentucky Derby, improving a website to maximize performance comes down to analyzing the most intricate and nuanced technical details of the site and then optimizing their output and efficiency.

What You Can Do: Pages that load quickly keep visitors engaged, while slow pages drive visitors away (which can send negative signals to Google and other search engines). In fact, a slow-loading website often leads to higher bounce rates (people leaving immediately), which indicates a poor user experience that search engines are less likely to reward with top rankings. Thankfully, there are some tasks the layperson can perform to improve website speed and performance. Google has introduced a helpful tool called Core Web Vitals that anyone can use to analyze their website’s loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. The tool helps optimize these performance metrics.

What GR Digital Marketing Does: Improving a website’s performance is where an SEO technician really shines. Without getting too much into the technical jargon, SEO specialists at GR Digital Marketing secure top ranking with search engines by compressing website images, “minifying” code (HTML/CSS/JS), using browser caching, and reducing redirect chains, to name a few.

GR Digital Marketing also optimizes content load speeds using tools and measurement programs such as Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and PageSpeed Insights. Every step, every decision, every measurement, and every metric is performed and analyzed to improve every conceivable aspect and facet of a website, meeting the requirements that search engines (and humans) have for websites.

Make Your Site Appealing to All Users by Optimizing for Mobile Devices

Did you know that roughly half of all web browsing worldwide is now done on mobile devices? That may come as a shock to adults who remember a time when desktop computers had internet access but cell phones didn’t even exist yet, but it’s true. Internet surfers are just as likely to scroll search engine results and website pages on their mobile phones or tablets as a laptop or desktop computer.

What You Can Do: A website’s mobile usability is no longer optional. Google analyzes a website’s compatibility for mobile use and considers that compatibility when determining the website’s search result ranking. In fact, Google now uses mobile-first indexing (meaning Google predominantly uses your site’s mobile version for indexing and ranking). The first thing a business owner should do is pull out their cell phone and visit their business’s website on it. Is the text easy to read without zooming? Can the full page be viewed without swiping left or right? By providing mobile users with the same quality experience as desktop users, you not only satisfy visitors but also meet Google’s mobile-friendly criteria.

What GR Digital Marketing Does: Our SEO experts are trained in implementing responsive web design tools so that a client’s website layout and content automatically adapt to different screen sizes. Our SEO specialists are also trained to implement responsive images, eliminate mobile-specific errors, and ensure important content is not hidden on mobile devices. The result? Our clients experience improved mobile usability, better user engagement on phones and tablets, and no search ranking penalties for a poor mobile experience, all of which improve our clients’ rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Help Search Engines Find Your Website with Crawlability & Indexing

You can find your website and its pages because you know where to look, but can other people? The tally changes daily, but there are currently about 50 billion website pages on the internet that have been indexed by search engines, which means they have been recognized and cataloged by search engines like Google.

But what if your website and its pages haven’t been indexed by Google yet?

Indexing is the process by which a search engine uses its crawler programs to analyze website pages and add them to a virtual catalog. If this happens to your website and its pages, those pages and the entire website will not appear in Google search results. That’s why indexing and a website’s “crawlability” are so important.

What You Can Do: “Crawlability” refers to the ability of search engine bots (like Googlebot) to discover your pages by following links or sitemaps. At the same time, “indexability” means once found, a page can be stored in the search engine’s index and shown in results.

Most web hosting and website building programs and software offer tools you can use to determine whether or not Google is crawling and indexing your website pages, including troubleshooting techniques for when those essential tasks are not occurring.

What GR Digital Marketing Does: Again, without getting too much into the weeds of technical jargon and confusing language, SEO specialists are trained in key practices, including managing a website’s XML sitemap, robots.txt, and redirect links. In a nutshell, an SEO specialist fixes errors that could impede crawlers.

To briefly cover the above terms, an XML sitemap is basically a list of a website’s important pages that the website owner wants crawled. Keeping this list up to date and fixing any errors on it is an SEO specialist’s first task when troubleshooting a website indexing issue. Robots.txt is used to guide search engine bots on which parts of a site to crawl and which to exclude. SEO specialists must be highly trained in this because, because if misconfigured, a robots.txt can accidentally block important content. That is why the task is best left to a professional who can also fix broken links, remove duplicate links, improve redirect links, and otherwise scrub the site of anything that would slow, impede, or stop the indexing process.

Highlight Important Aspects of Each Page with Structured, Searchable Data

Remember the messy room analogy? That applies to what the user sees when they interact with a website, as well as to how Google’s software and web crawlers interact with a website’s backend data. Messy coding, poorly structured data, and disorganized content blocks all slow down, and in some cases halt, the ranking process.

What You Can Do: Make search engines’ jobs easier for them by adding “structured data,” i.e., a way to provide extra information to search engines about the content on your pages. In essence, structured data acts as a specific “hint” to Google about what your page is about. For example, it could be data that tells Google a given page is a recipe (with fields for ingredients, cooking time, etc.) or a product (with price, availability, reviews, and so on).

What GR Digital Marketing Does: The sky is the limit when it comes to improving a website with structured data, but it must be done well to deliver the right results. In simple terms, structured data is a way to provide extra information to search engines about the content on a website page by adding a special markup (code) in a standard format Google can understand (such as the Schema.org vocabulary).

GR Digital Marketing’s SEO team adds structured data to every website we work on, which manifests differently for each website. Common features of structured darts include things like stars in reviews, FAQ drop-downs, event details, images in snippets, etc. The goal is to provide highly concise, highly specific, yet supremely valuable and authentic data that Google can use as a rich summary of the webpage, so Google can spend less time understanding it and cataloguing it accurately.

In Conclusion? Get Free Information & Access Our Technical SEO Knowledge Today!

Still with us? Ok good. As a final word of advice, remember that performance and user experience are closely linked. Google’s algorithm takes user experience into account, so optimizing technical factors like website load speed pays off.

As Google frequently reminds its users, improving site speed isn’t just about ranking; it’s also about what happens after users click through to your site (if your site is faster and more usable, users are more likely to stay and convert).

In summary, Google and other search engines measure and quantify how users are interacting with your site, so you have all the incentives in the world to give users the best experience on your site as possible.

Investing in performance optimization is a win-win for both SEO and user satisfaction. If two websites have equally relevant content and one website has been better optimized for fast and efficient loading and usability, the better-optimized site will almost always rank higher, so investing in this side of technical SEO is well worth the payoff.

We hope the information on this page helps you take the first steps in optimizing your website’s technical SEO. If you’d like to talk to us about what GR Digital Marketing can do for your business, brand, advertising, and website SEO, we’re one call away. Contact us today to learn more.