What is Technical SEO?
There’s SEO and then there’s technical SEO. Technical SEO is everything that a typical SEO strategy miss - it’s the backlog of optimization errors, website issues, and site speed problems that are generally looked over when you pay the bare minimum for SEO services. The ultimate goal of it is to find and improve your rankings on search engines like Google. So, how does it do that? Well, technical SEO is easier to think of when you picture your website as a house. It has a beautiful interior and exterior and is ready to sell. That is, until Technical SEO, who plays the role of a home inspector, comes in. Technical SEO finds all of the “bad wiring” in your home, points out plumbing issues, siding issues, and is what ultimately makes your home/website marketable. In layman’s terms: technical SEO finds all of the programming errors that stops your website from performing at its best. Most technical SEOs go over the same metrics in some capacity, though they may be called different things. This is what Helix House’s Technical SEO audit will include:
- Initial/Final Crawl
- URL structure
- Site Structure
- Backlink profile
- SEO
- Site Speed
- Site Metrics
Initial/Final Crawl
The Initial Site Crawl creates a 30,000-foot overview of all of the errors, warnings, and problems with the client’s website on both desktop and mobile. It gives an insight into how the website is performing in four crucial categories: Page Speed, SEO, Internal Link Structure, and Site Structure.
Internal Link/URL Structure
Helix House’s internal link structure audit gives insight to internal errors, such as broken links, orphan pages, redirects, and more. Some common errors include:
- Orphan page
- Page has no internal or outgoing links
- Pages has no outgoing links
- Redirects
- HTTPS page has internal links to HTTP
Site Structure
This gives an insight to any errors in the sitemap. This allows us to recommend and implement design changes for the website’s main navigation and webpages. Some common errors include:
- 3XX, 4XX, and 5XX errors in sitemap
- Noindex page (review and fix if needed)
- Nofollow page (review and fix if needed)
- Noindex follow page (review and fix if needed)
- Noindex and nofollow page (review and fix if needed)
Backlink Profile
This audit looks for opportunities in the client’s link building efforts. It pulls numbers and competitors data to show them how link building will benefit them immediately. Backlinks account for 15% of your Google Ranking. The more backlinks you have the higher you will rank on Google.
SEO
The SEO Audit gives us an insight to how well the client’s internal SEO is structured. It allows us to check for missing or incorrectly formatted metadata, such as H1s, titles, meta descriptions, and more.Some common errors include:
- Missing metadata (H1 titles, descriptions)
- Too long & too short metadata (H1 titles, descriptions)
- Titles and SERP don’t match
- Multiple H1 tags
Site Speed
The Helix House site speed audit portion of their technical SEO process provides an overview of problems that are slowing down both the mobile and desktop version of the website. Some common errors:
- Compress CSS
- Remove resources that block rendering
- Minify JavaScript or CSS
- Efficiently encode images
- Enable text compression
- Serve images in next-gen formats
- Reduce initial server response time
- Avoid an Excessive DOM size
Site Metrics
The Site Metric Audit allows Helix House to identify any performance problems on the client’s top three essential pages, including their homepage. Helix House then creates a strategy to fix these issues, such as how to improve their bounce rate or increase traffic.
How a Technical SEO Audit Works
The main component of the audit is Google’s ability to crawl and index your website. Every time Google runs into an error while crawling or indexing your site, it affects how much Google trusts your website. The less trust it has in your site, the less chance your SEO efforts will work.
What is Crawling?
Google doesn’t get on all fours and crawl like a baby does. Crawling, in this sense, is Google analyzing your website and following breadcrumbs (like Hansel and Gretel) to learn what your site is all about.
What is Indexing?
Indexing is like Google’s filing cabinet. Once Google crawls a public site, it stores that content, and (when it’s finished indexing) that page will appear in the relevant search engine results that best match a searcher’s query. Want to see how your website is doing or do you want to rank higher organically by just making your website function better? Give us a call at Helix House! We’ll be happy to create a custom SEO strategy for you and take a look at your website’s internal performance. Reach out today!
