Working with a technical SEO agency

Achieving a high rank for your web pages within search results is one of the top priorities for most modern businesses, so this objective forms the basis of most SEO strategies. However, there is one area of SEO that can be a minefield if you’re not experienced: Technical SEO.

Technical SEO refers to all the “behind the scenes” optimisations that are required to support your existing on page SEO work, and typically covers five areas:

• Crawlability
• Site performance
• Internal linking
• HTTPS
• International SEO

What is crawlability?

Crawlability refers to how easy it is for search engines to access and crawl the pages on your site. If your site has a high number of crawlability issues, web crawlers will not be able to access all of your content easily and your website may lose search rank.

Crawlability factors includes issues such as:

• Temporary and permanent redirects
• Duplicate content issues
• Canonicalisation issues
• Pages being blocked from crawling
• 4XX errors (i.e. 404, 410 etc.)
• Redirect chains and loops
• Missing XML sitemaps

What is site performance?

Site performance refers to issues that cause your website to perform poorly, and therefore result in a poor user experience. These issues are mostly related to how long it takes for a page to load, and have been introduced by search engines such as Google due to site speed being included within their ranking criteria.

Site performance issues include errors such as:

• Slow load speeds
• Uncompressed pages
• Uncompressed JavaScript & CSS file
• Uncached JavaScript & CSS files
• Unminified JavaScript & CSS files

What is internal linking?

To help search engines crawl your site effectively, it should have a simple structure that demonstrates how the pages interlink. Internal linking is a great way of helping visitors find related content, but also has real benefit for helping search engines better understand the structure of your site and index it as efficiently as possible.

Internal linking errors typically include:

• Broken internal links
• Broken external links
• Crawl depth of more than 3 clicks
• Pages with only 1 internal incoming link

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, which is used for encrypting data and therefore protecting user information from interception.

Google has previously confirmed that serving a website using HTTPS is an important ranking factor, which means that websites that haven’t implemented HTTPS properly are likely to be outranked by competitor sites.

Typical HTTPS errors include:

• SSL certificates not present on site
• Security protocols that are not up to date
• Subdomains do not support HSTS
• Pages contain mixed content
• Links on HTTPS pages that lead to an HTTP page

What is international SEO?

International SEO is hugely important if your site includes language variations for other countries, and helps search engines to understand which version of your content should be served up for users in different countries.

Common international SEO errors include:

• Issues with hreflang values
• Hreflang conflicts within page source code
• Issues with incorrect hreflang links
• Hreflang language mismatch issues

Website migrations

As a technical SEO company we frequently help clients with their website migrations. We aim to minimise the technical SEO issues that occur and maximise the SEO value that is passed from the old site to the new site.

Our expert SEO team has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to supporting clients through this often-difficult process.

Would you like to know how we can help improve your technical SEO? Contact us today to speak to a friendly member of our digital marketing team.

Technical SEO FAQs

Why is site speed important?

As mentioned briefly above, site speed can have a huge influence on user experience as well as rank. This is because search engines want their users to be able to access answers to their queries as quickly as possible.

Search engines don’t want slower sites to rank highly if it means that users click through, wait for the site to load and then abandon the site. This would represent a very poor user experience and is why most search engines have added site speed as a ranking factor.

Also, according to Google: “Google will reduce the amount of crawlers that it sends to your site if your server is slower than two seconds”, so a slow site speed can affect how efficiently your site is crawled too.

What is a crawl error?

Crawl errors can be seen when a search engine or spider is crawling a site and runs into a page that returns a 4XX or 5XX status code. These types of status codes indicate that there is a problem with some pages of your site, which suggests poor user experience and may waste crawl budget.

What is crawl budget?

Crawl budget is made up of a number of factors but can be explained simply as “the maximum number of pages that Google crawls on a website”. If search engine spiders or bots end up hitting lots of issues, this uses up crawl budget and may result in new pages taking longer to be discovered.

By optimising your site for technical SEO, you can help to ensure that you maximise the use of your crawl budget.

We know that industry jargon can sometimes be tricky to understand. For the ultimate list of A-Z industry terms, check out our Digital Marketing Glossary.