Technical SEO is a term or keyword thrown about by the SEO and wider marketing community; but what is technical SEO at its core and who is the technical SEO discussion relevant to? 

I see technical SEO all of the technical things about a website that can be optimised in the pursuit of bettering user experience and in the pursuit of ranking for keywords that have been researched and used on a website. 

And because of the nature of the internet, it is relevant to all websites - although, some parts are more relevant to some than others. 

Let’s get into it and see how it unfolds. 

Why technical SEO is important

If you want to know why technical SEO is important then see technical SEO as made of two main goals; not to ruin all of the SEO work done so far across other areas and to then build upon the other good work that has been done in other areas. 

By ‘not to ruin’ we mean addressing things that can either ruin a user’s browsing experience - such as a webpage taking a whole minute to load - or stop search engines from indexing your content - such as exceeding your crawl budget by having far too many pages set to index on eCommerce website. Years of blog post writing and link building efforts could go to waste if your audience doesn’t have the patience to wait the 60 seconds that it may take your webpage to load for example or if Google decides to stop indexing your new product pages entirely. 

On the other hand, if we’ve got the basics of user experience down and we’ve started being able to index pages consistently; there is then the option to strive further for better search rankings appearance across current keywords through the use data markup. The other option is to take what we’ve done in this current market and target a market further afield - this means either a new location or a new language or both - and the path to other search engine markets is rooted in technical SEO efforts. 

What does technical SEO include

Ok, so it sounds kind of interesting but what does technical SEO include and how can it be simplified?

There is a way that we understand technical SEO and I believe it can be defined as the subject of making technical efforts in pursuit of:

(1) Having a well functioning websites for your audience to peruse both on desktop and mobile devices that gives a kind, visibly safe and smooth user experience

(2) Having a website and uploaded content that fits well within Google’s crawl budget assigned to your website so that new content can continue to be uploaded and indexed 

(3) Being eligible for rich results as seen as featured snippets in search results

(4) Striving to target other audiences of different locations and languages 

Typically the efforts fall within one of the following categories; website architecture, indexing, website core vitals, security, data highlighting and finally location and language optimisation.

What can a technical SEO analyst do for me?

A technical SEO analyst can usually be worth engaging with, at least for the short term, for all businesses who are targeting markets on search engines. 

Typically however, it is the websites with larger websites - usually with search filters on such as eCommerce sites, who could be set to benefit most from hiring a technical SEO analyst. 

When you get into the region of having thousands upon thousands of webpages and into the territory of having an extensive set of sitemaps it could be time to think about bringing someone in - either an agency on retainer or inhouse staff. 

What use is a website technical audit tool for a small business?

As with most things, the first step is usually an audit to know the state of affairs right now. 

If you want to monitor the overall performance of your site so that you can make your site user friendly or pursue better positions on your search engine rankings a website technical audit tool will help with this.  

One benefit of using a tool is having the ability to analyse an entire domain in a few minutes and have tasks outputted in an organised and prioritised format.

One issue that we have found with some audit tools however is that the priority of tasks may not be done in accordance with how much they will move the SERP rankings meter.