Generally, although you may have the best site with the best content, if your technical SEO is messed up, then you’re not going to rank. At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render and index the pages on your website. Back then, it was perfectly normal to buy some backlinks as part of your SEO strategy. Nowadays, not so much.
But, that’s just scratching the surface. Even if Google DOES index all of your site’s content, that doesn’t mean your job is done. That’s because, for your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO, your site’s pages need to be secure, mobile-optimized, free of duplicate content, fast-loading, among other thousand things. See! There’s just so much that goes into SEO.
Be that as it may, it’s not true to say that your technical SEO has to be perfect to rank. It doesn’t! But, the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better chance you have to rank. And, that’s where SEO audit comes in handy.
Related Topic: WordPress SEO | A Full Guideline On How To Do It Right
Technically, there are many mediums to learn SEO from like books, videos, guides, ebooks, blog articles. But, as the rule of thumb, you’ll never truly learn something without applying it. It doesn’t matter how many books about “driving a car” you have read, without driving one you won’t be a good driver. The same idea applies to technical SEO as well.
Personally, the most important advice I give to people starting out in any SEO journey is to have their own project. Start a blog, a little web-shop, a wiki — anything! Apply what you learn to it and draw your conclusions. You’ll also need to develop an understanding of how long certain options might take to implement and how to measure their success.
One of the best ways to do this is by creating an on-page SEO checklist, working your way through it, and then analyzing how it improves your site. Thus, the first big mistake you can make is to think you can learn technical SEO within a short time. When you learn technical SEO, remember to rely only on hard data and experiments.
Understanding The Key SEO Types
Usually, bias and the inability to change your mind based on evidence are two of the biggest mistakes SEOs can make. Not continuing to learn is a safe way to get left behind in any digital marketing discipline. Knowing better than what the data suggests is another sure shot at failing.
In general, we all know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a fundamental part of having an online presence and ensuring online success. Thus, understanding how SEO works is important to growing your website. And also, for making sure you appear at the top of search results.
Related Topic: What Are SEO-friendly URLs? How To Structure Them
A successful Technical SEO strategy includes many components, which we’ll explore in-depth in this article. In addition, we’ll also discuss SEO best practices, the importance of SEO, the different types of SEO, etc. But first, let’s consider the key types of SEO that you should know as an SEO below.
Well, in that case, there are five key different types of SEO that are all very important in terms of any site audit. So, you should have a good grasp of each type in order to fully optimize them.
The Key SEO Types Are:—
- On-Page SEO
- Off-Page SEO
- Local SEO
- International SEO
- Technical SEO
With that in mind, as you’ll learn in elaborate details from our guided weblogs, you’ll notice that there’s more to each of them. Above all, some of them if not all should be incorporated into a successful SEO strategy. Pretty much all these key SEO tactics can be categorized into their buckets as follows:
On-Page SEO
In terms of On-Page SEO, it covers the tactics that you use on your site that help search engines to better understand and rank your content. From creating great content on your site, optimizing title tags, meta tags, and H tags to internal linking, image optimization, and more — these all fall under on-page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
As for Off-Page SEO, it includes those tactics that relate to activities carried out away from your own website. Link building is often considered to be the main off-page tactic, but this also includes tactics such as content marketing, social media, appearing on podcasts, landing reviews, building local citations, and more.
Local SEO
Generally, Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a website in order to increase traffic, leads, and brand awareness from local searches. Common tasks associated with local SEO include finding local keywords, optimizing a business’s Google My Business profile, and building “NAP” citations.
International SEO
By the same token, International SEO refers to optimizing your search presence for people who are in different countries or speak different languages. Whereby, a successful International SEO uses elements such as geo-targeting, Hreflang tags, and other localization signals. More so, in order to target web content on basis of users from around the world.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Some of the key important elements of Technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Basically, this covers those things that directly impact the indexing and crawling of your site by search engines. Some argue that this falls under on-page SEO. However, it is also widely considered a discipline in its own right: site speed optimization, structured data, canonicalization, hreflang, and much more.
Technically, when starting to learn SEO, we start with keyword research, right? Whilst, trying to understand user intent, screen the existing content, and… do a technical SEO audit. The latter has become a stable part of every SEO strategy with dozens of tools able to help you.
Technical SEO Topics Include:
- Crawling, Rendering, and Indexation
- Mobile, SSL, and Structured Data
- Status Codes, Migrations, and Page Speed
- Content Optimization, Site Structure, etc.
As you can see, this is quite a lot to digest, isn’t it? When I first learned SEO, Google was much simpler. If you enter Search Engine Optimization nowadays, you surely feel overwhelmed. That’s why this article is for you:— to help you navigate the deep sea that is technical SEO. Eventually, there has always been a certain degree of technicality in SEO.
However, in the last 5–7 years technical SEO became its own discipline. And, that’s next to content (marketing) and Link Building. Learning anything always takes the same ingredients: mindset, knowledge, application. Too many people focus on the knowledge part, and that is why they fail, get overwhelmed, or feel like they are spinning their wheels.
What Are The Benefits Of Technical SEO?
Technically, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is how websites can increase the quality and quantity of their website traffic from search engines. This happens mainly by increasing the website’s ranking in search engines like Google or Bing. When you optimize your website for search engines, you aim to get a higher search engine ranking.
More so, in order to generate more organic traffic to your website. In the age of digital marketing, SEO is fundamental to online success. The majority of online users do not scroll past the first page of search engine results when looking something up online. That is why having your website appear higher on result pages is important.
If your site does not appear on the first page of results, it probably won’t be seen or found by many people. The better the ranking, the higher your website will appear and the more traffic you will generate. With a smart SEO strategy, your business or brand will enjoy increased visibility, which is the first step to driving traffic and converting sales.
Search engines look at some main factors when ranking a website, such as the quality and authority of a website. It is important that your website builds on these factors as an important step in search engine optimization.
Quality Content
One of the best ways to boost your website’s SEO ranking is by creating high-quality content that is original, informative, and accurate. Search engines look for sites that provide unique and shareable content. Creating content not only improves your searchability, but it’s also an efficient way of building out your website. When you provide relevant content, that also shows that you are a credible source and it helps increase your authority too.
High Authority
Search engines want to promote websites that are credible and trustworthy. Your website can gain authority when more people visit it. High traffic and engagement result in a higher ranking for your website. When other websites link to your website, that also builds your authority, which is why link building is an important strategy. Additionally, the better you optimize SEO for your website, the more you can gain authority over your competitors and their website.
How To Improve Website Technical SEO Organically
In reality, the rise of Technical SEO is a result of three trends. Firstly, there’s the ongoing war of Google against backlink spam and “overly active” link building. Secondly, there’s the rapid progression of Google’s algorithm in terms of web query results.
And then, thirdly, there’s the sophistication of websites. Additionally, the Penguin Algorithm and sudden spike in manual link penalties pushed SEOs to look for other levers to grow organic traffic. Besides content and content marketing, technical SEO turned out to be much more potent than assumed pre-penguin.
Google’s algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking factors to deliver web pages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).
Learn More: Google Algorithm Updates: Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird
For beginner webmasters, the Penguin penalty largely focuses on identifying poor-quality websites based on backlinks. Google’s algorithm works on the assumption that quality sites link to other quality sites while poor sites do otherwise.
As of today, they’ve quite advanced a lot leading up to Penguin, as you can tell from the progression of its updates in detail. Forthwith, Technical SEO covers the crawl, index, etc. And then, it also renders a portion of the “crawl, index, rank” model. At a high level, you’ll need to learn how to answer a few questions first so that you can get quite acquainted with them.
Consider the following:
- First, can search engine bots crawl/find your page? This includes topics such as status codes, sitemaps, information architecture, robots.txt, facets, etc.
- Secondly, can search engine bots index your page? Including the likes of meta robots?
- Thirdly, can search engine bots render your page? Such as JavaScript, the DOM, page speed, etc.
- Again, can bots understand the content on your page? Like the structured data (Schema.org, HTML), accessibility, etc.
- Likewise, are you sending search engines the proper signals for dealing with ranking content? For example, canonical tags, dealing with pagination, etc.
- Lastly, is this page worthy for search engines ranking? Including content relevance, authority, HTTP, UX, mobile-friendly, site latency, etc.”
Like I said, “Technical SEO” isn’t just crawling and indexing. Technical SEO doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s important to be aware of the bigger picture (“For example — Failing to balance recommendations with client needs and capabilities”) and the relationships with UX and dev teams.
If you’re not bringing in donuts for your UX and dev teams, today’s the day! In all seriousness though, technical SEO, UX, and development work are all deeply intertwined, so play nice. To improve your site’s technical optimization, you need to take into account a few things. So, that you can have a clear path to start and then progress with the result findings.
Consider the following:
- Javascript
- XML sitemaps
- Site architecture
- URL structure
- Structured data
- Thin content
- Duplicate content
- Hreflang tags
- Canonical tags
- 404 pages
- 301 redirects
That’s not all! I’m probably forgetting a few 🙂. In general, learning technical SEO takes time, patience, continuous learning, and application. The best way to start is to gain knowledge in a broad sense and then go deeper into topics that are important at the moment and interest you. You can learn it completely for free, just from material on the internet.
But, the best teachers are people who know their craft. It is good to have a methodical approach to learning new topics because they will keep coming up in technical SEO. The process for Learning SEO Issues includes quite a lot. But, there are a few things you’ll need to look out for at first.
Consider the following:
- Start with Google SERPs
- Consult Google documentation
- Read every article/piece of content on page one and page two
- Make note of questions that arise during the initial exploration
- Copy/paste highlights into a document
- Organize information in a slide deck
- Process information and try to visualize
- Consider how various data and trends connect
- Get answers to the recorded question
- Try to find answers through research (minimal half-hour)
Some common places to ask for help and advice include:
- Quora – a very great web tool to ask and get some answers
- Reddit (e.g.,
- Twitter (e.g., Google Webmasters, John Mueller, Gary Illyes, etc.)
In addition to the above mentions, Google Webmaster Hangouts is also a very great avenue. Hangouts generally cover anything related to publishing content online and making it findable in web-search. They cover topics like crawling, indexing, sitemaps, Search Console, duplicate content, multi-lingual/multi-regional sites, and more.
Try to speak on the topic (talking through usually helps pinpoint gaps in understanding). Then, rinse and repeat until the learning plateau is hit. Likewise, you have to look at a highly dynamic topic, such as technical SEO, also in terms of where it is going. Otherwise, what you are learning right now might be outdated by the time you have really understood it.
The strong advances in AI and especially machine learning might make you think that at some point Google can perfectly understand websites. That is only partially true. Only because something is understood, doesn’t mean it can’t be optimized. It would be foolish to assume that technical SEO isn’t necessary anymore at some point.
Make Use Of Technical SEO Marketing Software
In order to smoothly advance, it’s good that you build your authority in search with SEO Marketing Software and tools that will help you in the long run. For instance, plan your SEO strategy, optimize your content, and measure real return on investment. In the end, you’ll quickly rise to the top of Search Results and even easily outrank your main competitors too.
But, you’ll need to start building authority for the topics that matter. You’ll also need technical SEO software to understand how to optimize your content for search in one convenient location. Bearing in mind, SEO is mysterious and ever-changing. It can be difficult to understand which keywords to prioritize to drive traffic and conversions.
For this reason, that’s where the likes of HubSpot SEO Tools come in. You’ll get actionable recommendations on how to optimize your site for SEO, ranked in priority order to show which optimizations will have the most impact on your performance in search. See exactly which pages need to be updated, and what actions should be taken to improve them.
Related Tool: BuiltWith | Find Out What Websites Are Built With For Free!
In a similar way to Screaming Frog is a tool developed by IIS (the webserver type created by Microsoft). Uniquely, it also crawls a site from your desktop and creates a report on the site. Unlike Screaming Frog the IIS SEO Toolkit provides the user with a breakdown of the site’s potential issues and suggests a remedy for them.
It does take more initial setup than Screaming Frog prior to crawling the site. And, depending on your level of understanding the reporting can be a little overwhelming at times. Especially, when you export everything to a CSV! It’s free so I recommend giving it a go and seeing what you find that you hadn’t already uncovered.
GTmetrix is yet another best SEO software to consider in your technical SEO audit arsenal as site speed really does matter. A faster site means more of a site can be crawled, it keeps users happy and it can help improve rankings. This free online tool checks over a page and suggests areas that can be improved to speed up page load times.
Some may be on-page site speed updates and others may be server-level site speed changes that if implemented can have a real impact on a site. The tool also has a great waterfall visual that helps to show which elements are causing slow load times as well as a chart plotting the history of the site’s speed (if you use it a few times).
Other Useful Tools:
- SE Ranking
- LiteSpeed Cache
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- Remove URLs Tool
- All In One SEO Pack
- SEOPressor Connect
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
- Alexa Rank Math Plugin
- Keyword Density Checker
- Yandex Webmaster Tools
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Squirrly SEO Plugin
- Pingdom DNS Check
- Reverse IP Lookup
If you are a Semrush user, I’m sure you have heard of the SEO site audit tool and how good it can be. If you aren’t a user I honestly recommend you give it a go! It crawls a domain from the web browser and creates an online report to show where there are potential issues and shows them in an easy-to-read format with export options for offline analysis and reporting.
Personally, my favorite feature of the tool is its historical and comparative sections to it. You can then easily see whether changes to the site have had a positive or negative effect on its SEO potential. Perse, you can easily show all the audit reports change. And then, develop a way to resolve it without necessarily undoing the change itself.
So far, in terms of Technical SEO, I find HubSpot as very powerful software to grow your business — no matter the size. Simply, because you can use it to streamline your marketing by bringing your team, tools, and data together in one place. That’s why over 128,000 customers use HubSpot to make Technical SEO easy and their content marketing more human at scale.
Plan Your Content Strategy And Build Your Search Authority
Overall, when it comes to a great Technical SEO Tool, it’s always good to plan your content strategy around topics that will elevate your authority in search engines. As well as get as-you-type optimization advice as you’re creating content, and measure real SEO ROI with integrated analytics. Today, search engines reward websites whose content is organized by topics.
Luckily, HubSpot’s content strategy tool makes it easy to discover and rank for the topics that matter to you and your customers. You’ll get topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity. As well as access to monthly search data for your overall website too. So that, in the end, you can estimate how ranking for specific topics will translate to organic traffic gains.
Then, use HubSpot’s integrated content tools to create clusters of web pages and blog content around each of your core topics. Easily designate canonical URLs to focus your search authority on your most influential pages. As you track all your important topics in one dashboard. And then, watch your traffic increase over time as you build search authority.
Equally important, you’ll get a full report on your performance and rank in search. Thus, you’ll get detailed reports from the HubSpot SEO tools. Ranging from what terms and topics people are searching for, to where your content ranks for any given query. It’s an all-in-one Inbound Marketing Software.
It Helps Your Entire Team In:
- Blogging: Publish relevant, engaging, conversion-optimized content with tools that speed up creation, keep formatting consistent, and make it easy to optimize for search.
- Landing Pages: Launch pages that look perfect across devices, add forms optimized for completion in one click, and automatically change content based on who’s viewing your page.
- Email: Create stunning email templates, automatically personalize subject lines and content for each recipient, and run A/B tests to improve open rates and clickthroughs.
- Marketing Automation: With marketing automation, you can use each lead’s behavior to tailor emails, content, offers, and outreach at scale.
- Lead Management: Access each contact’s information and see every interaction you’ve already had. Use this data to create hyper-targeted campaigns that close more deals.
- Salesforce Integration: Bi-directional sync with Salesforce means a record of every email open, CTA click, and form submission is at your fingertips. Use this data to score leads and create segmented lists.
- Ad Campaigns: Track the ROI of your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google advertising with precision, and stop struggling to justify your paid ad spend.
- Analytics: Gain insight into your entire customer journey to see which marketing assets are working the hardest.
Get all of HubSpot’s software tools on one platform. From marketing hub, sales CRM software, customer service tools, CMS hub, as well as operations software in both free and premium versions. Not to mention, as of today, its App Marketplace alone reaches more than 1K unified apps. All you’ll need to do is explore the most installed apps in the HubSpot Marketplace.
Why HubSpot Is A Great Technical SEO Tool
First of all, you can easily use this tool for all your Social Media patrol needs. Monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations, track engagements automatically and schedule your social posts to be published when the right people will see them. Secondly, when it comes to partitioning, you can separate all your marketing assets by teams so every user has access to the right content.
Next, you’ll need to create a highly engaging Calls-to-Action (CTA) amidst your site content, right? With HubSpot, you are able to design CTAs visitors can’t help but click. Eventually, you’ll also be able to know who clicks which CTAs, and measure performance to optimize clickthrough rates over time. With many other Salesforce Integration Features as well.
Learn More: Common SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Specifically, with HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools, you’ll easily let your leads find their own path to purchase to close more deals. Whilst, for your web analytics, you’ll be able to use multi-touch revenue attribution tools to show how marketing impacts the bottom line. What’s more, their Pricing Plan for both SEOs and marketers is also quite pocket-friendly.
On the other hand, you’ll also get data straight from Google that can be used to inform your SEO strategy when you integrate Google Search Console. Metrics like total impressions, average position, and clickthrough rate will tell you exactly where your content stands in Google’s search results. So that you can lean into what’s working, and take steps to improve what isn’t.
Final Thoughts:
In nutshell, your own brain is the best tool you can use when doing any SEO work, especially technical SEO! The tools above are great at finding details and in doing bulk checks but that shouldn’t be a substitute for doing some thinking for yourself. Furthermore, you’d be surprised at what you can find and fix with a manual review of a site and its structure.
So far, Google seems to double in complexity every year but that only made technical SEO more important. Instead of vanishing, I can see technical SEO splitting up into several disciplines: mobile technical SEO, crawl optimization (crawling, rendering, page speed, log file analysis), and classic technical SEO (status codes, SSL, structured data, site structure, migrations, indexation).
All of these fields are progressing on their own and becoming increasingly complex. One mistake SEOs make is to only consume content around SEO, visit SEO conferences, and dismiss everything else. There is nothing to be learned in doing this after you have reached a certain point. Instead, look at disciplines like conversion optimization, social media/e-mail marketing, paid search, etc.
Related Topics:
- Website Development | 7 Principles Of A User-friendly Site
- Content SEO Audit | How To Improve Your Web Presence
- Tags & Categories | WordPress SEO Master Best Practices
- Blog SEO | How To Increase Website Rank With Categories
- What Is Meta Description? Why It’s Important In Web SEO
- What Is Keyword Density? How To Use The Right Keywords
- Broken Links | What are they & How do they affect SEO?
- Site Ranking Factors | 5 Best Criteria & 10 SEO Practices
By doing all that, it will help you to put SEO into greater context and expand SEO with the creative use of other channels. You don’t have to learn alone, and you can learn from others. There are a lot of smart people who can help as catalysts to your learning. The SEO community is special in that I think there are a lot of people willing to help you.
I’m always learning from other smart minds in the industry, people like Patrick Stox, JR Oakes, Russ Jones, Emily Grossman, Dawn Anderson, Hamlet Batista, Max Prin and so many others who I appreciate, but can’t name due to brevity. I’m thankful to all of them though. But, if you’ll need more advice, you can always Consult Us and let us know how we can sort you out.
