Why Is Technical SEO Important? 5 Reasons You Need To Care.

So, you know by now that SEO gets eyeballs on your website. And that once SEO has done its magic and delivered you a whole load of lovely visitors, you can use your wit and wile to turn them into leads and nurture them into raving fans and loyal customers.

But I’m not here to talk about converting traffic into clients today. I want to go back and make sure you know how to get those visitors to your website in the first place. And to do that, we’re going to have to take a look at Technical SEO.

No, don’t run away. 

Technical SEO is really important. In fact, it’s probably the most critical element of SEO, as if you don’t have your technical SEO working properly; you’re not going to get your business crawled or indexed, which means you’re not going to get discovered. 

Basically, without technical SEO, you’re not going to have a business that makes many sales.

Interested now?

Good.

Let me show you why you need to pay attention to Technical SEO and how you can get started getting yours sorted.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a set of practices that focus on improving the technical aspects of a website to enhance its ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs). 

Technical SEO involves optimising website speed, mobile responsiveness, website architecture, site security, and structured data. 

Stay with me! This is really important. 

Let’s go through each of those, and I’ll explain what it means and how you check your technical SEO to see if yours is working.

It Improves Website Speed and User Experience

A lot of technical SEO is about optimising your website’s speed.  Website speed has a huge impact on user experience, and Google wants to give people visiting websites they’ve sent them to a good user experience.

So, Google will reward you with better rankings if your website is fast.

Also, the faster your website loads, the more likely users are to stay on your website and read or watch your content, which, again, is something Google loves.

And, of course, you’re making humans happier too.

If your website is slow to load, you’ll end up getting increased bounce rates and lower user engagement, which can negatively impact your website's ranking on SERPs. 

Which is not what you want.

You can improve your website’s speed and, in turn, your rankings by looking into things like caching, compression, and minification can enhance your website's speed.

Head over to Google's free website speed tester to find out how your website’s speed stack up.

It Increases Website Visibility on Search Engines

This is probably the most important reason you need to care about technical SEO.

Technical SEO helps search engines to crawl and index your website more quickly and easily.

Site architecture, how your pages are structured from a navigational perspective, and all the links between them are key to good technical SEO.

If you’ve got your site architecture set out well; a nice shallow site structure so people (and the bots) don’t have to dig for the information they need and links that make it easy and intuitive to move around it’s going to make the Googlebot’s life so much easier when it comes to crawling your site.

If your site is easy to crawl, the right information will be taken back to Google HQ, where it will be indexed better, which in turn makes it more likely your website will be served up in the SERPs.

A poor crawl = limited or inaccurate indexing = crappy rankings = invisibility!

It Enhances Mobile Responsiveness

Back in 2016, Google issued the edict that all sites must be optimised for use on mobile phones and told us they’d crawl and index our mobile version first, with the desktop versions being secondary.

(Did you even know you had two different versions of your website? More on that another day!)

So came into being mobile-first indexing which prioritises the mobile version of your website when indexing and ranking search results. If you don’t have a mobile version of your website, Google will still crawl your site, but you might not rank as well as you would if you had a mobile version.

So, the long and short of it is, technical SEO helps you optimise your website for use on mobiles.

You can see if your website is mobile-friendly by taking Google’s free mobile friendliness test!

It Boosts Your Website’s Security

In this day and age, where we share our most private details, especially bank and card details, over the internet, website security is critical.

A big part of Technical SEO involves making sure your website is secure and that it’s got HTTPS encryption and all the right security certificates in place.

If you’ve got a secure website, people and search engines are much more likely to trust you, and you’ll get much better engagement and, in turn, rankings.

There are loads of free tools you can use to check to see if your site is secure, but click here to use the one I use with my clients.

It Helps Implement Structured Data

What?

Look structured data is just a bit of code that tells search engines what the content on your website is all about. 

It helps Google understand what you’re talking about.

And you know that if Google understands what your website is about, you’re more likely to get indexed more accurately, which means you’ll rank better.

And if you rank better, you’ll get more eyeballs on your business, and you know what more eyeballs mean…yes, if you can convert them…more clients.

So back to structured data.

Technical SEO involves adding structured data to your website so you show up in things like the rich snippets section of the SERPS and by showing up in the ratings sections and reviews and events.

Structured data can also help with your click-through rate, which gives you better user engagement and higher search engine rankings.

We’re not going to go into how to add structured data markup to your website today. 

Yes, you have dodged a bullet!

But here’s a great article from Google if you’re interested in finding out more about getting structured data working for you.

So, Do you See Now Why Technical SEO Is Important?

Yes, Technical SEO, as horrendous as it may sound, is an essential part of getting people to find your website. 

It’s possibly one of, if not the most important element of SEO as, if you don’t have your technical SEO sorted, your website won’t get crawled or indexed, and all the work you do to optimise your pages and your blogs won’t really matter as you’ll struggle to get Google to index them in the first place.

Go and check your Technical SEO using the tools I’ve shared with you and if you need any help, drop me a comment or get in touch by email.