Technical SEO Services

Basics of Technical SEO

Technical search engine optimization refers to the practice of optimizing a website’s architecture in order to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It involves a wide range of activities and practices that are designed to improve the crawlability, indexability, and overall user experience of a website.

Technical SEO is an important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) because it helps search engines understand the content and structure of a website, which in turn helps them deliver relevant and accurate search results.

There are many different factors that can impact the technical SEO of a website including:

• Crawlability: This refers to the ability of search engines to access, crawl, and index the pages on a website. If search engines cannot crawl a website, it will not be able to index its web pages and they will not appear in search results. Common reasons for issues with crawlability include robots.txt issues, meta tag mistakes, and hosting issues.
• Indexability: This refers to the ability of search engines to understand and interpret the content on a website. If a website’s pages are not properly indexed, they may not rank as highly in search results or may not appear at all. Common reasons for issues with indexability include language issues, broken assets, Javascript rendering issues, etc.
• Page speed: The speed at which a website loads is an important factor in the user experience and can also impact its ranking in search results. Common issues for site speed are hosting performance, lack of page caching, oversized images, and poorly constructed web templates.
• Mobile-friendliness: With the increasing use of mobile devices to access the internet, it is important for websites to be optimized for mobile. This includes having a responsive design and fast loading times on mobile devices. Common technical SEO issues for mobile-friendliness include the lack of a responsive theme, broken responsive templating, and missing content.
• URL structure: The way in which a website’s URLs are structured can impact its crawlability and indexability. It is important to use clear, descriptive, and consistent URLs. Common issues for URL structures include the lack of SEO-friendly URLs, canonical URLs, or physical content silos.
• XML sitemaps: An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of the URLs on a website and provides additional information about each URL, such as when it was last updated. XML sitemaps can help search engines discover and crawl new and updated pages on a website, especially deeply nested web pages. Common issues within XML files are the lack of a sitemap file, or a file that doesn’t include all website pages.

There are other technical SEO factors that can impact the visibility and ranking of a website in search results. It is important for website owners and technical SEO professionals to stay up-to-date on the latest best practices and changes in the industry.

By fixing technical website issues, it is possible to improve its visibility and ranking in search results, resulting in more organic traffic and potentially more business for the website owner. While it may not be as glamorous as on-page content improvements or backlink building, technical SEO is essential for ensuring search engines can easily crawl and index your website.

Best of all, most technical SEO issues are one-time fixes, unlike on-page and off-page SEO, which are both continuous.

A Few of Our Technical SEO Experts

Our Technical SEO Services

We take a multi-faceted approach to technical SEO services, which addresses various aspects of a website’s infrastructure. Here are a few key areas we focus on after performing a technical SEO audit of your website:

1.) Review website architecture

We review the site structure and page organization of your website to ensure it is easy for both users and search engines to navigate. This includes having a clear hierarchy of information (content silos), a logical and easy-to-use navigation menu, and clear headings and subheadings to divide the content.

2.) Optimize website performance

We analyze the page speed and uptime of your website, and take steps to improve it. This can be done through various methods such as cleaning up your website template, removing unnecessary apps / plugins, minifying JS or CSS files, optimizing images, setting up a CDN, switching hosting services, implementing caching systems, among other tactics.

It should be understood that not every change that is possible within an open-source platform like WordPress will be available in a SaaS application like Shopify.

3.) Improve website crawlability

We make it easy for search engine crawlers to access and index your website’s content by creating a valid XML sitemap, checking the robots.txt file, and ensuring that all pages are accessible to crawlers.

Our technical SEO specialists often find improper usage of meta tags, such as web pages that have been set to noindex or nofollow, which will impact how search engines can crawl your website to discover new content.

4.) Optimize mobile optimization

We make sure that your website is designed to work well on mobile devices, primarily through the use of a responsive design.

Although most websites these days are developed in a responsive design, you’d be amazed how many pages within responsive websites aren’t actually mobile-friendly. If you notice horizontal scrolling, cut off videos, missing content, or unclickable buttons in your page content you’ve likely got some responsive web design issues going on that need to be fixed.

5.) Review code optimization

We make sure the code of your website is running properly. This typically involves the installation of platform or extension updates, and checking for core file changes. This is something we can only handle within WordPress and other open-source applications.

6.) Review website security

We check for and implement security measures such as moving your website to the HTTPS protocol. There are other types of security improvements that can be made as well, depending on your platform, including preventing click jacking, reducing API privilege’s, and setting up rate limiting on login forms.

7.) Analytics and monitor analytics

We use analytics and monitoring tools to track website traffic, bounce rates and other metrics to help to identify low-performing areas of the website.

For this, we often utilize Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and a few other helpful tools which are mostly all free.

Pricing for Technical SEO Services

For the most part, technical SEO services are often handled as a project instead of a recurring service. After all, once your website’s platform issues have been fixed, you shouldn’t have to worry about problems resurfacing until the next time you change themes, migrate platforms, or change your hosting service.

With that in mind, we have two approaches to technical SEO services. The first approach is to handle the issues within a managed SEO campaign and prioritize the work alongside other on-page and off-page factors. The alternative is to offer a block of time that allows us to provide the technical SEO improvements on an hourly basis.

Listed below are our hourly rates for handling technical SEO services on a project basis. Further below is a calculator for estimating a budget for managed SEO services.

Crawling vs. Indexing

Crawling and indexing are two important concepts in the service of search engine optimization (SEO).

Crawling refers to the process by which search engines discover and access new and updated webpages, while indexingrefers to the process of adding those web pages to the search engine’s database for later retrieval.

Crawling

Crawling is a critical part of the search engine optimization process because it allows search engines to discover new and updated pages on the internet, to later add them to their indexes. Search engines use applications called “bots” or “spiders” to crawl the web. These bots follow links from one page to another and index the content they find along the way.

There are a few different factors that can impact how a search engine crawls and discovers pages. One of the most important factors is the crawl budget of a website. The crawl budget is the number of pages that a search engine will crawl from a website during a given period of time. A website with a large crawl budget will have more of its web pages crawled and indexed by each search engine, which can lead to better visibility and ranking in search engine result pages (SERPs).

There are several ways website owners and SEO professionals can help improve a website’s crawl budget. One way is by submitting an XML sitemap to the search engine, which is a file that lists all of the URLs on a website. This can help search engines discover and crawl new and updated pages on a website more efficiently.

Another way to improve a website’s crawl budget is by using internal linking. This is the practice of linking to other pages on the same website from within the content of a page. This can help search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of a website and can also help improve its crawlability. This is also known as the creation of virtual content silos.

Indexing

Once a search engine has crawled a website, the next step is indexing. This is the process of adding the webpages to the search engine’s database for later retrieval in search results. During the indexing process, the search engine analyzes the content of the pages and adds it to its index based on keywords and other relevant factors.

There are a few different factors that can impact whether or not a page is indexed by a search engine. One of the most important factors is the quality of the content on the webpage. Search engines typically prefer to index high-quality, relevant, and useful content. They are less likely to index low-quality or spammy content.

Another factor that can impact indexing is the presence of technical SEO issues on the website. If a search engine runs into technical issues while crawling a website (such as broken links or 500x server errors), it may decide not to index the website or may only index a few pages.

Overall, crawling and indexing are two essential parts of the search engine process that our technical SEO agency can help with on your website!

Final Thoughts on Technical SEO Services

The technical aspect of SEO is often overlooked, but it is the foundation upon which all other SEO efforts are built and powers the success of a website.

By ensuring a website’s technical optimization, website owners and SEO experts can ensure their website is ready for search engines, which ultimately leads to increased visibility, traffic, and leads.

Hiring us for technical SEO services can help ensure all the necessary technical fixes are done properly, which can greatly improve your website’s ability to rank and bring in organic traffic.

Hear what our customers are saying

Jen Ollanketo

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Kendrick Jacobs

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These guys are always there when you need them! Whether the issue is big or small, there is little they cannot handle. I cannot express enough how greatly we appreciate their continued superior service and willingness to assist whenever we need them. Thanks Dave, Corey and the entire WebCitz team!!