Technical SEO is the process of analyzing and improving the technical performance of your website (How well it works). How a website functions can can impact search ranking and user experience. If pages load too slowly or the site contains broken links, ranking can take a hit and users might navigate somewhere else. It’s important to make sure your website is optimized and at peak performance to rank and get conversions.
Examples of Common Technical SEO Problems
Some examples of technical SEO problems that can be encountered on a website include:
- Slow Page Load Speeds
- No SSL (http prefix instead of https) or Insecure Page Content
- No XML Sitemaps
- Missing or Incorrect robots.txt File
- Meta Data Problems
- Duplicate Content
- Broken Links
- Poor Use of Structured Data
- Missing Alt Tags
- Poor URL Structure
What Causes These Problems?
Slow Page Load Speeds – This can be caused by oversized media files, slow hosting servers, poor or non-existent cache policies, inadequate bandwidth, redirects, too many outside files loading in the head section of the code and code errors.
No SSL – The site owner either hasn’t installed an SSL certificate or the certificate they have is installed incorrectly. Many web browsers will show a big somewhat threatening site insecure notice when a visitor arrives on a site with no SSL certificate or an expired SSL certificate which can result in them immediately leaving for a competitor site.
No XML sitemaps – The site owner either hasn’t set up any XML sitemaps or they’re set up incorrectly. XML sitemaps provide an easy path for search engine robots to follow when they crawl a website.
Missing or Incorrect robots.txt File – The site owner either hasn’t created one or has it set up incorrectly. A robots.txt file provides instructions to robots.
Meta Data Problems – The site owner either hasn’t added meta data or added it incorrectly. Examples of this problem would include improper use of the NOINDEX tag or tags that can be useful for SEO containing no data. Improper use of the NOINDEX tag is one of the biggest problems and it can prevent a search engine from indexing a page or allow it to index a page that shouldn’t be indexed.
Duplicate Content – This usually happens by accident, especially on sites where multiple people edit content. If the exact same thing appears more than once, your site ranking can take a hit.
Broken Links – These are links that used to go somewhere but no longer work, usually because an internal page was relocated or removed, a URL (or slug) was changed, or an outside site moved or removed a page being linked to.
Poor Use of Structured Data – It’s been my experience that structured data is not used at all more often than it is used incorrectly. Structured data provides additional information about a web page a search engine can use to determine how to best show page data on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If you don’t know what structured data is you can learn more at Schema.org.
Missing Alt Tags – Images should almost always contain Alt tags. These are usually missing or poorly written because site owners don’t understand their value for SEO. Alt tags provide additional information about the contents of an image to search engine crawlers that they can use to determine how to correctly index the image.
Poor URL Structure – Websites built on platforms or with Content Management Systems (CMS) are where this problem is commonly found. Instead of a clean URL that clearly displays a page title, you see a bunch of symbols and/or numbers at the end. A good URL would be something like tombroadwater.com/about where a poor URL would be something like tombroadwater.com/?post12234.
How Do I Find and Fix Technical SEO Problems?
There are a lot of useful tools that can be used to uncover technical SEO problems.
Manual Checks – This is exactly what it sounds like, navigating around the website manually checking for problems.
Google Search Console – A suite of tools for measuring site traffic, performance and finding technical SEO problems.
Google Pagespeed Insights – A tool for determining page load speed and finding ways to speed up it up.
Google Structured Data Testing Tool (Schema) – This will show you how your Schema data appears and whether it is valid.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider – Screaming Frog is a full-scale SEO site audit tool. It can be used to find all kinds of SEO problems ranging from bad links to poor Meta data and everything in-between. It’s great for websites of all sizes and I use it all the time.
Ahrefs Site Audit Tool – Cloud-based tools for analyzing your site and finding technical SEO issues.
SEMrush – A suite of SEO and digital marketing analysis and planning tools that include a technical SEO audit tool and a tool for tracking SERP positions.
DeepCrawl – An enterprise-level technical SEO tool. Great for finding broken links, testing XML sitemaps, page speed analysis, content quality analysis and optimizing site structure for search engine crawlers. I like this one for very large websites.
Those are the tools that I have experience using. There are many other excellent technical SEO tools available.
Is Technical SEO Necessary?
Absolutely! If your website has performance problems it will negatively affect search ranking and, worst of all, user experience. If a customer logs on to your site to buy a product and gets a 404 Page Not Found error or the page takes too long to load they will go spend their money with your competitors.
At the very least, your site needs to perform better than your competitors. Don’t ignore Technical SEO.