What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the optimization of the website speed, page experience, and managing search engine crawl budgets and crawl paths. It covers the ranking factors that are separate from keywords, which is what on-page optimization and off-page optimization (often referred to as backlink building) are responsible for.
Google has made it clear in their webmaster guidelines that they take a mobile-first approach to crawling and ranking websites. This means that if your website is not optimized for mobile usage, it could impact your rankings.
Another important factor is site speed. Google offers the Page Speed Insights tool to test your website loading speed – the faster your website loads the better the experience for users.
A technical SEO analyst would work with the development team or the team that owns the website to improve metrics such as:
- Time to First Byte (how quickly the website responds)
- First Contentful Paint (how quickly the page loads to a useable state),
- Cumulative Layout Shift (how much elements such as buttons shift around as other elements are loaded in sequential order)
- Ensuring that the robots.txt file is set up correctly
- Removing 301 redirect chains
- Compressing images
- Deferring Javascript and CSS files as much as possible.
Most items in technical SEO are focused on the user experience. There is anecdotal evidence that says they play a role in helping your website rank better but John Mueller from Google says that site speed and SSL certificates are not ranking signals.
Leave a Reply