SEO is a changing process that remains a pillar of a successful digital strategy through algorithmic evolutions. It’s estimated that half of the online traffic comes from organic search. But in this competitive world, SEO requires certain skills to be ahead of the game. That is where Technical SEO comes in. Technical SEO is the process of fixing on-site issues and optimizing your website for crawling. A technical SEO practicioner combines marketing and development skills.
In this article, we will demonstrate how to choose the right Technical SEO agency and make your websites visible with search engines and increase your conversion rates.
What Technical SEO is and what the most common issues are
Technical SEO takes care of handling on-site issues and using optimization techniques for search crawlers. It encompasses almost anything on a website apart from the content itself and UX-related SEO tasks. It is an intersection of web development and marketing. A technical SEO practitioner is mid-way between a web developer and a marketer.
A technical SEO practitioner will come across many technical issues during the website’s lifetime. The problems below are the top 5 most common issues:
| Issue | Severity | Description |
| Site not indexing in search | High | The site may not be crawled if there are technical issues. |
| Google Search Console crawl errors | Low-High | These include site and URL errors. |
| Server errors causing crawling issues for Googlebot | High | Caused by the server responding too long and timing out before being able to crawl. |
| Robots.txt | Med-High | Googlebot cannot retrieve your robots file. This will prevent new and changed pages to be crawled. |
| Crawl efficiency problems | Med-High | Caused by 404 Not found errors, 301 excessive redirects and spider traps. |
Characteristics That Make a Great Technical SEO Company
So, what does it take for an agency to incorporate technical SEO Strategies? You need to find an agent that can develop and implement a technical SEO plan suited for your company. Such agencies usually work with a team of experts and contain 4 characteristics that make it a great technical SEO company.
Here are the 4 characteristics a technical SEO agency must have:
Experience with large websites
Smaller websites do not experience a lot of technical SEO issues and most of the time are easy to fix. In fact, for most cases, the usual problems include checking the robots file, ensuring the site is on a good platform and upgrading to a better web domain hosting service. In truth, small sites find it hard to rank high due to not having enough content and authority.
On the other hand, larger sites have a completely different story. A site can have millions of URLs and this means that there will tend to be a huge number of issues cropping up. For instance, there may be many junk URLs that should never have been indexed or serious canonical errors that produce duplication issues. Moreover, large websites tend to be multi-lingual, and problems may arise even further.
With sites like these, you must make sure that you are dealing with a trusted SEO agency that has worked on larger sites. Otherwise, you end up in a scenario where they will not have enough experience to handle your issues on demand.
A deeper study of your website’s SEO potentials
Ideally, you do not want the SEO agency to only solve your on-site issues. Rather than just fix your issues, it is essential to keep monitoring and analyzing different techniques that can be applied to improve your ranking and performance.
You need a plan to grow your SEO traffic on a long-term basis. It is not enough to just make quick fixes. There are always possibilities to grow even further. Having an SEO agency to help keep your site growing yearly is what you need to see a real impact.
An agency with deep SEO expertise will help you create better content, deal with technical SEO and promote your business.
Ability to showcase findings
Try to look for technical SEO agencies that showcase their findings from experiments. It takes commitment and time to develop, plan and implement technical SEO strategies. If you manage to find agencies that publish their results, this will give you a good idea of their amount of dedication to helping you promote your business.
Have years of SEO Experience
Technical SEO can shift dramatically. With Google constantly releasing new features, removing others, and switching its priorities, is a variable scene. That is why it is very important to have a technical SEO that does not only consider the rules of today. Ideally, you want an agency that can estimate what will happen in months and years to come.
By having an SEO agency that has a lot of experience, they will more likely be able to spot the patterns. This will avoid getting into scenarios of restructuring the site and having to change it completely due to Google’s changing ranking algorithms.
Asking for technical SEO help before things escalate to critical levels
Sometimes technical SEO is overlooked when things escalate to critical levels. This is a shame since technical SEO is the backbone of long-term successful SEO strategies. To understand better why technical SEO is needed, I will give you couple of scenarios of SEO issues:
Traffic falls after publishing new content
So, you published and promoted your content and Google rewards you by ranking you higher for some keywords. Your site starts to increase and you see things are doing well. So you reason, why not write more content then? But for some reason, your rankings drop.
This might sound strange, but this process happens quite often. Bloated sites with duplicate content make it tough for Google to comprehend which pages of yours to rank. When Google is unsure of which to rank, it ends up ranking nothing.
Therefore, duplicate content on your blog, along with numerous similar pages that were created automatically will lead to a drop in rankings. You will also see an issue if you tell Google to index internal URLs.
If you notice this scenario, it is best to seek the expertise of an SEO technical agency.
A sudden traffic drop
It is bound to happen. Your blog can see a dramatic drop overnight due to technical issues. This will cause your monthly traffic to drop by hundreds if not thousands of visitors. It’s important in alarming times like this to have an SEO agency team fix the issue rapidly.
The issue may be simple like fixing a bad robots.txt file, or severe that require further digging. When this scenario happens, you cannot afford to lose time in figuring out what to do.
Technical SEO Services for your website
If you are still unsure if you need a technical SEO agency, here are some examples of services technical SEO provide:
Technical SEO Audit
A thorough SEO technical audit is done to identify and mitigate any website technical SEO issues. The audit checks vital checkpoints such as mobile performance, internal link structure, page speed, indexation, site errors and more. It also uses analytical results to develop short-term and long-term strategies to improve visitor’s experience on your website and boost Google rankings.
Speed Optimization
Speed can affect your ranking and customer’s online experience. Technical SEO agencies work to improve speed performance. Some skills include enabling file compression to reduce the size of HTML, JavaScript and CSS files. They also optimize your code, reduce redirects, make use of browser caching, use content distribution networks, and reduce response times.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the catalyst to your digital marketing strategy. They can help you gain insights into popular industry trends and consumer habits. They also assure you use relevant keyword usage throughout your website. Technical SEO agencies will perform keyword rankings and optimize your pages based on your niche.
Penalty Recovery
Google penalties can be the result of algorithm changes. To help you recover from a penalty, SEO experts make use of Google Search Console to check which penalty you fell victim to and which parts of your website are affected. They will also assess your backlink mechanisms and resolve differences between original web pages and the actual content crawled by Google. They also check that your redirections are being handled correctly.
Competitor Analysis
Gain insight on what your competitor’s optimization tactics are and tackle your conversion possibilities. Technical SEO agencies will evaluate your keyword performance, rankings, online presence, and authority. By evaluating, SEO agencies can determine the best strategies that can place you at an advantage for your selected niche.
Image optimization
Large images can decrease your site performance and increase your bounce rates. Technical SEO agencies will help you choose the best format for your images and optimize all your alt attributes. Moreover, they will reduce the file size for images and make use of image sitemaps and utilize image optimization techniques.
Structured Data Markup
To be able to make your website crawled easier and displayed with markup, technical SEO practitioners make use of schema markup. They perform highlighting of page elements, assign data tags, create HTML and add schema markup to each page. The schema markup will be tested by Google’s structured Data Testing tool.
Website Migration
This process is a tough and long one. Technical SEO practitioners develop a migration plan that avoids losing valuable traffic. They will map all changed URLs and update all internal links. Moreover, they will eliminate any duplicate content and manage any 404 errored pages.
Conclusion
If you want to see long-term results for your website and quickly fix on-site issues, you need to make use of a Technical SEO agency. If you are interested in learning more about technical SEO, get in touch with us and book a free consultation.
