“Content” has become the new buzz word for building brand awareness, boosting online sales and inducing people to return to your site.
Yet even great content will fail to attract more people to your website if your technical SEO fails Google’s standards.
Allocating time to technical SEO will ensure that your website performs well. The pay back is that a high-ranking site attracts “free” traffic without you having to spend hard-earned revenue on advertising.
Responsiveness: Mobile & Cross-Device Compatible Website
The biggest flaw we continue to see is websites trying to dump their entire desktop view into a mobile view by simply rearranging the components into a vertical order. This results in a terrible experience. You should be pushing key information to the top of the screen, leaving out “hero” images etc.
Site Speed Highly Affects Engagement & Rankings
The average attention span of web consumers these days is a mere five seconds. So, what happens when your takes 10 or 20 seconds to load? The answer is that three things take place:
- Google’s algorithms log your poor speed and push you further down the search results.
- Your online visitors are impatient, so they don’t wait – they move to the next website that’s faster than yours.
- Those that do wait have experienced a poor first impression.
Our team has created a list of the eight key actions you should take to boost your speed. Read here.
Make Your Website Understood By Google
Google needs to understand what your website is about before it can index and rank your pages. That’s where technical SEO comes in.
If Google’s automated system can slip quickly through your website, gathering all of the key data it needs within its allocated “crawl budget”, you improve the odds that you will rank higher than your competitors. (A “crawl budget” is the amount of time that the Google “spider” is given to work through your site before it times out.)
We believe there are 11 actions you need to take, or use as a checklist to help brief your SEO provider. We’ve written about each on-page optimisation in detail here but the headings below provide you with a quick overview:
1. Conduct Proper Keyword Research
Avoid choosing your keywords based on what people in your organisation “think”. The correct (and easy) path is to look at the hard data provided by the search engines.
2. Use Meta Tags
Optimise title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags to improve click-through rates (CTR) and help search engines understand your content.
3. Add Structured Data for a Richer Search Listing
Implement structured data (Schema Markup) to help Google display rich snippets like ratings, FAQs, and business details in search results.
4. Create an XML Sitemap
A properly formatted XML sitemap ensures search engines crawl and index all the important pages on your website.
5. Create a Robots.txt File
A robots.txt file guides search engine bots on which pages to crawl and which ones to ignore, helping with indexation control.
6. Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Set up Google Analytics to track traffic and user behavior, and use Google Search Console to monitor indexing and keyword performance.
7. Implement Internal Linking
Linking pages within your website improves navigation, distributes authority, and helps search engines understand content hierarchy.
8. Follow URL Structure Best Practices
URLs should be concise, keyword-rich, and readable. Use hyphens instead of underscores and avoid special characters or long strings.
9. Set Up Google Business
For local SEO, setting up and optimising Google My Business (GMB) ensures your business appears in local search results and Google Maps.
10. Use an SEO Tracking Tool
Track your website’s SEO performance using tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz to measure rankings and organic traffic.
11. Use an SEO-Friendly Content Management System (CMS)
A well-structured Content Management System (CMS) allows easy SEO implementation, including meta tags, structured data, and fast page speeds.
Final Thoughts
Develop a plan to systematically work through the recommendations in this blog and the associated links.
These on-page and technical optimisations – combined with quality content – will lead to strong rankings in search results. It’s one of the best and most cost-efficient business investment you can make in this increasingly digital world.
If you don’t have the resources, expertise or simply don’t have time, the team at Boylen can help. Contact us here to learn more.
