Technical SEO

Some people call it technical SEO. We call it SEO.

Attention to detail can have some pretty awesome consequences in the world of search engine marketing. It’s where many small interconnected pieces have to add up to get results. Making assumptions about how SEO fits into your company’s digital architecture may turn into a mistake that you will regret later.

You can put aside assumptions and build your company’s SEO strategy on a solid technical foundation. Take comfort that some of us take seriously getting details of SEO right on your website. We live and breathe SEO.

What do We Mean by Technical SEO?

In the ideal scenario, the SEO professional starts laying the technical foundation with the stakeholders when the website is just a twinkle in the founders’ eyes. Afterwards he needs to periodically analyze, investigate, and uncover the aspects that are important to its organic search performance and recommend solutions that move you forward. Technical SEO includes site code, architecture, usability, server, network and even aspects of external sites that may be affecting you.

Do You Really Need Technical SEO?

No one is exempt from doing technical SEO. We’ve seen both small sites running WordPress and large corporate ecommerce sites take serious hits because no one looked under the hood. An old saying applies quite well to technical SEO:

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”

The dangers of a little SEO knowledge are things like:

  • penalties
  • revenue loss
  • missed opportunities
  • damage to brand reputation

Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller at Google emphasizes the importance of the technical foundation and points out that:

“the big aspect that a lot of people skip is just the technical foundation. And that’s something that plays a really big role with a lot of websites. So, having a website that’s accessible by Googlebot, where the content can be crawled, where the links can be followed, that doesn’t end up in a big mess of URLs in the end. These are things that are kind of a technical foundation that you need. And that’s something that’s definitely not going to go away.”

What Are Some Examples of Technical SEO?

There are many ways to break a website. We see new ones with almost every new client we help. Here are a few big revenue-killing examples of where SEO can go wrong.

  • Failing to do redirects correctly
  • Canonical URL problems
  • Indexing issues
  • Duplicate content hidden on sister sites
  • Bad code
  • DNS issues
  • Errors in pages or sitemaps
  • UX problems
  • Backlink profile issues

How does Technical SEO Help You?

Doing technical SEO is not a preset checklist that we run against your company’s website. We try not to give clients a canned set of best practices to improve SEO beforehand. Part of SEO consulting is learning what you need to advance. Only after understanding your unique situation do we feel comfortable making recommendations. With almost every new client, we discover something new that we’ve never seen before.

Who are Some Good Candidates for Technical SEO Consulting?

  • Companies who have an SEO team but want technical or strategic consultation to minimize risk and move the needle on performance.
  • Web designers, developers, marketers and agencies who want to offer SEO services to clients.
  • The underdogs, Davids and tortoises of the business world.

Source: John Mueller Quote from SEO 101 Podcast, March 25, 2015 episode