No business ever makes money by going unnoticed, unless you’re a spy or a private detective but even then you’ll have to interact with people who want to use your services.
The first big step for a new business is coming up with a new way to attract customers. It has to be unique, catchy, and easy to remember. In this day and age, you’re going to want to do the same with your website domain. From that point on, you’ll be trying to get the word out about your business.
When it comes to marketing, there are plenty of traditional ways to go like signage, advertisements, print, and more. With more and more business taking place online, there are also new and upcoming marketing techniques like social media advertising, video marketing, partnering with influencers, and more.
One of the most powerful ways to boost your visibility without breaking the bank is to gain consumers’ attention via organic methods. One of those ways is by boosting your SEO.
SEO is a tricky animal that can appear simple at times, but can be difficult to grasp at others. There are plenty of ways to boost a website’s SEO through the steps listed above, but today we’re going to be focusing on technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Before we jump into the how, let’s understand the what. Technical SEO is what it sounds like, that it’s more the technical, IT side of SEO instead of any content you might be producing.
It covers crawling, site speed, mobile use, image optimization, and more. Another way to think of technical SEO is all of the background work going on during a play while the actors are the content.
Now, let’s dive into the tips!
The Fast and the Furious
Ever been trying to go to a website and it doesn’t load quickly, or at all? After awhile, you’ll probably just throw in the towel and move on. It’s a surefire way to lose traffic and consumers. Not only that, but you’ll get hit with a penalty from Google.
Some ways you can speed up your website are:
- Optimizing images
- Enable browser caching
- Using a CDN (content delivery network)
Making sure your images are JPG and compressed means they’ll take less time to load. Stay away from using super high-res images, especially on your front pages.
Browsing caching lets you store, temporarily, data on someone’s computer so it will load faster the following times they visit.
CDNs use proxy servers able to distribute content quickly to users, and are particularly useful for media and ecommerce websites.
Make it Mobile
In 2018, 63% of website traffic came from either mobile phones or tablets. Google has taken note of this too, as not having a mobile-friendly website will get you a penalty on search rankings.
One of the easiest ways to check this is by looking at Google’s Mobile-Friendly test.
It’s a simple process that every website should do.
Audit Your Website Weekly
Audit may seem like a scary word, but this audit is for the health and benefit of your website. Auditing your website will help you find any technical errors that could be causing slow performance or other issues and will give recommendations on how to fix them.
One great tool is SEMrush, which offers a free 14 day trial for new users and allows you to see any issues that have arisen.
Get Rid of Broken Links
Everyone has that one family member who just doesn’t want to throw anything away. They keep everything, from old photos to newspaper clippings to figurines. Even if you try and help them clean up, your efforts are usually rebuffed. Walking through their house becomes more of a maze. Think about them when going through your website.
If you have any 404 errors on your website, you should get rid of them immediately. Not only are they poor for user experience but also means Google will have difficulty crawling it. Remove those links and update your sitemap.
While going through 404 pages, this can also be a great time to look for link reclamation opportunities or ideas to create new content for your site or to contribute to other sites as a guest post. Stellar SEO cited in a recent post that 72% percent of people surveyed said that backlinks are important when you’re looking to rank. This stat echoes many other tests as well that have continually proven the value of link building.
Seeing Double
One of the best ways to confuse Google, which isn’t a good thing, is to have pages with duplicate or near-duplicate content. Google will struggle in deciding which page to rank first or worse, not rank either page.
Try editing by editing content or removing a duplicate page altogether. SEMrush will help you find these pages through its site audit tool as well.
Install an SSL Certificate
SSL is a security measure for your website, designed to provide communications security over a network. It ensures that the data passed between the web server and browsers remain private.
Not only is having an SSL important for your website, but Google also uses SSL as a way of ranking websites. Sites without an SSL will be ranked lower while those with an SSL will show up higher.
Use Your Images
As stated above, you want to make sure you’re using compressed and optimized images to help loading time. You can also use your images to improve your SEO.
While Google can’t “see” what images are, it can use the image’s file name and any other data to find out what’s in the image. If you’ve ever gotten on Instagram or Google image search with a slow connection, you might have seen words pop up in place of the photo, like “children, tree, outside, nature, green”.
The best idea is to keep the description short and sweet, focusing on the keywords you think will bring traffic to your website. Consider these bonus points to up your search ranking.
Optimize Your XML Sitemap
Google uses sitemaps to look for and index the pages on your website. Google has a free tool for making a sitemap, called Google XML sitemaps plugin. After creating the sitemap, you can use Google Search Console to see how well it’s optimized.
It will help you manage various URLS, prioritize high-quality pages, and make it easier for Google to crawl and index your content.
