Why Is Technical SEO Important for Your Digital Strategy?

Technical SEO is an often-overlooked digital marketing endeavor, skipped in favor of the more traditional approaches such as keyword research and content optimization. It’s a crucial aspect of any digital strategy as it’s a well-known fact that Google ranks websites that adhere to technical SEO best practices more favorably.

When technical SEO is applied, website visitors are met with positive customer experiences like improved page load speed times, the absence of intrusive ads, proper redirects, and not landing on broken links. These are just a few of the issues technical SEO addresses, along with myriad others.

Technical SEO extends beyond the basics, diving into more nuanced approaches to SEO such as performing website audits, monitoring for Core Web Vitals, and implementing structured markup. Some of these practices are beyond the scope of traditional SEO work requiring developers and web designers to accomplish.

This article will explore technical SEO on a deeper level, ensuring that you walk away with a comprehensive understanding of how it works, its massive impact, and strategies you can implement to ensure your website provides the best user experience possible.

Whether you are just starting your technical SEO journey or you’re a seasoned SEO looking to explore new strategies, this article can enhance your understanding of more advanced SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings and align more closely with Google’s technical preferences.

UNmiss offers numerous free tools to enhance and master your technical SEO including a website audit tool, broken links finder, and Robots.txt Generator.

Technical SEO 101

When many think of SEO, they typically consider the on-page SEO elements such as content, titles, links, and more. SEO, however, is a much more in-depth effort that goes further than just what you see on a website. It also requires behind-the-scenes work such as creating a site map and optimizing your website for mobile friendliness.

Technical SEO is a multi-faceted effort that ensures all the technical aspects of your website are performing optimally to provide an excellent experience for users from the moment they find your business in the search results to after they click through to potentially purchase your product or service.

A study conducted by Ahrefs found that 80.4% of sites have missing alt attributes and 88% have HTTP to HTTPS redirect issues.

Source: Ahrefs Site Audit Study

These issues may seem minor, but they have detrimental effects on your website’s visibility and ability to drive qualified search traffic. Additionally, search engines are on the lookout for technical-related issues on your website and when they find them, they no longer prioritize your website in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

A few areas of technical SEO include the following.

Mobile-friendliness

As of June 2024, the global mobile market share is higher than desktop at 60.61% vs. 37.23% respectively. With more people on their mobile devices than ever before, it has become integral to have a website that performs well on mobile devices.

It’s imperative that you consistently monitor your mobile website for issues and errors to ensure visitors receive a consistent and positive experience with your business irrespective of the device they use.

Site Speed

Visitors expect your website to be fast and responsive. Websites that take too long to load will cause visitors to bounce and Google to rank your website poorly as page load speed is a critical Core Web Vitals factor.

Slow page speeds also lead to poor user experience which can cause frustration and dissatisfaction with your business. As customer expectations continue to rise, it’s important to optimize your performance anywhere you can to remain their top choice.

Linking

Links hold the power to shape a negative customer experience. Consider a visitor reading your article and eager to navigate to a link you provided only to find that page no longer exists. The likelihood of the visitor going back to the previous page and continuing to engage with your website is low.

They’ll likely move on and over to another competing page that provides a better user experience.

There are myriad reasons why your links may be hurting your technical SEO such as:

• Broken Links: Linking to web pages that no longer exist or don’t have proper redirects in place. These types of links may exist on your website, or they may also be broken on a third-party website.
• Improper Redirects: A website’s navigation structure may change, or a web page may need a URL slug for a number of different reasons. If you don’t properly redirect your outdated link to link to the new page, you risk a broken link and visitors landing on a 404 error page instead.

Structured Data

Implementing structured data is an excellent way to give Google more context about your web pages. It can also help highlight key information you want to point out to search crawlers.

Structured data can also help improve your chances of achieving a Featured Snippet in the SERPs. A study of 2 million featured snippets websites found that 70.3% of Featured Snippets appear in the top 3 positions in Google’s search results.

Knowing that Featured Snippets tend to have high visibility in the SERPs, it’s important to take the steps towards potentially achieving a coveted Featured Snippet.

Crawling

It’s helpful to direct crawlers to the pages you want to have crawled on your website. For example, you may have a staging site where you test new features prior to making them live. You wouldn’t want your staging site to be indexed or crawled by search engines which is why it’s crucial to have the right code in place to guide crawlers more effectively.

Technical SEO also helps you eliminate other types of crawl errors such as Robots.txt and 404 errors.

HTTPS

Google continues to prioritize and emphasize websites providing a safe browsing experience. Secure websites (those using HTTPS) show Google that you care about your website visitors, and, in turn, Google ranks those websites higher in the SERPs.

Websites that use HTTPS promote safe and trustworthy browsing which can promote your business as a credible resource to turn to.

HTTPS Google Search Console Report

The Role of Technical SEO in Digital Strategy

Technical SEO serves as the foundation of your digital strategy. Without a firm foundation, your on-page, user experience, and digital marketing efforts will crumble.

When technical SEO is prioritized, websites are better poised for growth and improved search engine performance. Higher search rankings lead to more eyes on your website and better chances of convincing visitors to take action.

Consider your content strategy. If you’re spending ample time and resources creating high-quality content, you want it to be seen to achieve your return on investment. Technical SEO ensures your content can be found by searchers looking for your solution and is easy to read.

The same can be said for your on-page SEO such as keyword research, linking strategy, and meta tag optimization. Technical SEO can identify issues with your on-page SEO such as toxic backlinks, missing meta descriptions, missing alt tags, and more factors that may be negatively affecting your website’s search performance.

Leveraging Google Search Console for Technical SEO

Google Search Console (GSC) provides a wealth of invaluable information related to your website performance including any issues that may be hindering your SEO growth. This free and powerful tool gives website managers, SEOs, and developers critical insights into its Core Web Vitals, page indexing, mobile performance, and more.

By regularly checking your GSC and enabling notifications whenever new website issues arise, businesses can formulate a roadmap towards improved search performance, ensuring the website is healthy and user-friendly.

There are several different areas of GSC worthy of highlighting which include indexing, experience, enhancements, security and manual actions, and legacy tools and reports. We’ll explore each in greater depth.

Indexing

The indexing section of GSC provides a comprehensive overview of pages that have been indexed by Google and therefore have an opportunity to appear in the search results.

There may be some instances where you don’t want pages to be indexed such as pages living in a staging environment or hiding unfinished pages, however, it’s important to ensure that Google has indexed pages you do want to have appear in Google Search results.

Using UNmiss’s Robots.txt Generator tool, you can seamlessly create and upload Robot.txt files to your website in seconds.

Check your Page indexing report frequently in GSC to ensure that your pages are properly indexed. Indexed pages will appear in green in the report, as seen in the image below.

Experience

The Page Experience report section of GSC provides valuable information regarding the user experience of visitors to your site and any challenges they may be facing when viewing your site on desktop or mobile devices.

Page Experience is measured using Core Web Vitals, a test Google uses to check the speed, responsiveness, and stability of the page loading experience. Pages are rated as either Good, Needs Improvement, or Poor.

In an ideal world, every page would rank in the “Good” category on both desktop and mobile.

The Page Experience report also has a section for HTTPS usage, indicating that your site is providing a safe browsing experience for its users.

Enhancements

As mentioned above, structured data is a powerful tool to incorporate into your technical SEO strategy. However, it’s important to measure the impact it has on your website which can be found in the Enhancements section within GSC.

The Enhancements section tells you how many pages on your website have structured data and the types of structured data that exist on your website. It can also tell you how many times your website has appeared in a rich result such as a carousel, image, or other search results that aren’t traditional blue links.

This section will also show errors and warnings related to your structured data, giving you the opportunity to improve your structured data for better chances of achieving a rich result.

Security and Manual Actions

If your website has a manual action issued against it, “some or all of that site may not be shown in Google search results” according to Google. That’s where the Manual Actions report comes into play. Located in GSC, this report tells you if your website has issues and in which section of your website.

By regularly checking your Manual Actions report, you can quickly identify any issues that require action and remedy the issue quickly.

Manual actions occur when a human reviewer at Google deems your page violates Google’s spam policies. You may not even be aware that a page has a manual action against it without reviewing this report in GSC, which makes it imperative that you consistently review your Security and Manual Actions report.

The Security Issues section of this report is equally important as it identifies if your site has been hacked or if other security-related issues like phishing or malware have occurred. If your website doesn’t have any security issues, you’ll see a green circle with a white checkmark in that section along with the text “No issues detected” beside it.

Legacy Tools and Reports

Legacy Tools and reports are simply older tools and reports that don’t have a new replacement for them in the new Search Console dashboard but are still available to use.

For example, the Data Highlighter tool is a tool that can be found under this section and allows Google to extract template pages on your site such as event schedules or public transportation routes.

Technical SEO is a pertinent part of overall digital marketing strategy. Without it, pages risk being omitted entirely from the search results and larger security issues can come into play. As with any SEO strategy, technical SEO is an ongoing process that must be consistently addressed to ensure optimal user experiences.

Google Search Console is an essential and free tool to leverage, however, UNmiss also offers many free technical SEO tools as well that complement and integrate with GSC.

Additionally, UNmiss offers other types of SEO tools that don’t require technical knowledge such as a Keyword Generator, UTM Tags Generator, and Article Rewriter, as well as many more.

Be sure to take advantage of these tools today to maximize your content marketing, SEO, and digital marketing efforts!