8 Technical SEO Tasks That Are Critical To Organic Success

According to a Backlinko analysis, the top Google result receives about 32% of clicks on the web. Only those websites that are fast, contain engaging content, and outperform all other SEO expectations have a chance to appear higher on search results pages and receive the greatest amount of clicks. When it comes to ranking on search engines, several factors are taken into consideration. However, SEO is one of the most crucial factors that must be considered for improved ranking.

When discussing SEO, we refer to all facets, from technical SEO to simple content creation. An effective SEO strategy means your website contains all the high-volume and relevant keywords and offers a compelling website experience.

However, in this blog, we’ll talk about SEO’s technical side and the technical tasks essential for higher rankings.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of increasing your website’s online ranking by making it faster, understandable, and easy to crawl. Technical SEO acts as an essential pillar in your SEO marketing strategy. It comes under on-page SEO which includes optimization of your website for better search engine rankings.

Search engines have specific algorithms to rank a website. And faster loading websites are always the top priority. Another thing to consider is accurate, accessible, and user-friendly content. 

What is included in technical SEO?

Some of the major elements included in technical SEO are:

• Indexing
• Crawling
• Rendering
• Website architecture

What is the importance of technical SEO?

According to a statistics by Hubspot, 73.1% of web designers have claimed that a non-responsive design is the first reason for maximum visitors to abandon a website. Creation of a fast-loading, highly responsive and compelling website comes under technical SEO. 

Even with the most compelling and thoughtful content, you can find trouble to convert maximum visitors if its technical layout is improper. Technical SEO is crucial to create a website that every search engine finds easier to browse and index. Search engines like Google ranks prefer to present the best results in front of its users. That is why it uses various factors to rank any website on their search results page. Those factors include fast page loading speed, compelling user experience and many more. It is highly recommended to formulate and perform strategic technical SEO tasks in order to encourage search engines for crawling your website. 

Let us now learn about some major SEO task checklists that are required for the creation of a successful website that works appropriately with search engine algorithms. 

What are some major technical SEO tasks?

In one of Hubspot’s reports, it was stated that 42% of people tend to leave a website due to poor functionality. So make sure to use these tasks for avoiding mistakes that cost you a lot. 

Here we go,

Optimize Your Website Structure

A good website structure is extremely crucial for a better user experience. A clear and easy to use website is the preference of every customer nowadays. If you are looking for a revenue generating asset, avoid using complex layouts that confuses them. Not just that, it enables search engines to crawl your website more efficiently. 

Every search engine doesn’t take long hours to crawl any website. So if your structure is difficult to crawl, Google won’t be able to index it properly. Hence, your website won’t show on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Even your website’s URL structure needs to be optimized in a way that search engines find it easy to direct users toward your website. We will discuss it in a little more detail in our next point. 

URL Structure

URL structure offers all the major information about your web page to search engines as well as to searchers. URL generally begins with HTTPS. The letter ‘S’ represents an SSL certificate i.e. the security portal used by websites to keep their webpage content safe. 

URL structure looks something like this:

In this you can see the URL for the Hubspot website is written as, ‘https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics/.’ This is the manner in which URL appears for most of the websites. 

In order to check the technical SEO issues, you can make use of the Site Audit tool for the best results. 

Mobile-Friendly

According to stats by Statitsa, approximately half of website traffic is generated from mobile accounts worldwide. It was reported that in the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices gathered about 54.4% of website traffic globally. So you see how important it is to have a website that works perfectly on mobile devices. Even Google has made it clear that mobile responsiveness is a key factor in its ranking algorithm. So make sure that your website is fully responsive and displays the best format on devices like mobile phones, tablets and desktops. 

Fast Loading Website

A study by marketing dive found that 53% of mobile users leave websites that take longer than three seconds to load. Nowadays people switch to another website in seconds if the first one doesn’t load faster. So, if you don’t desire to miss out on plenty of website traffic, make sure it takes no time to load. Even Google prefers websites that load faster. Slow web pages offer optimal user experience that’s why Google avoids ranking such websites on top. 

There are no simple metrics to measure the speed of your website. You must calculate the time your website takes and steps it goes through while loading. There are several steps involved in the loading process of a website. 

• The physical hardware needs an internet connection. 
• Your device requests a page from your server in this case, then the server processes to return a response. You can measure your server performance using tools like DataDog and NewRelic. These tools help you to monitor and analyze the inner behavior of your website. 
• In the Browser stage, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML tags affect the loading process of all the images and the display. 

Easily Crawlable

Search engines use bots to crawl your website. They follow links while searching your website content. They will comprehend what the most crucial content on your website is thanks to a strong internal linking structure. There are certain ways to guide your guide bots as per your convenience. You can direct them in the direction you want them to go using the following ways:

• Robots.txt  file

It is a powerful tool to offer directions to bots as per your choices. There are certain technical issues that can prevent bots from crawling your website. There are times when you block your website’s JS and CSS files in the Robots.txt file. These files are crucial to show search engines that your website works appropriately.  

• Meta robots tag

Robots meta tags are used to instruct search engines to crawl any specific page but not to show it on the search results. If you want to forbid search engines to follow any link on the page, then you can do so using these tags. 

Avoid Dead Links

Slow websites can infuriate a user but other things that can force them to leave your website are broken or dead links. One of the reports by Ahrefs stated that around 66.5% of links have been lost in the past 9 years. So always make sure that the links that you use are available for your visitors. 

When a person clicks on a link and is directed to an error page, they will quickly become upset and quit your website. Websites are always in progressing mode, which makes it difficult to figure out a dead link sometimes. There are certain tools that you can use to retrieve a dead link.

Some of them are mentioned below:

• Bing Webmaster tools
• Google Search Console
• Yandex Webmaster 

Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content often leads to confusion especially for search engines. In one of the research, it is estimated that 29% of the content on the web is duplicate content. Search engines have a tendency to rank pages lower in search results when they discover the same content on many pages. Different URLs leading to the same result may not bother users, but it is undoubtedly a problem for search engines.

Some of the amazing tools that are used to check duplicate content are mentioned below:

• Copyscape
• Plagspotter
• Duplichecker
• Siteliner
• Smallseotools

Contains XML sitemap

An XML file serves as a roadmap for search engines who are trying to understand your website. XML helps them to identify what each web page serves while crawling. An XML sitemap contains the following details about each page:

• When was the last modification made?
• How frequently is the website being updated?
• What thing is on their priority list?

You can use a sitemap generator to create an XML file for your website. 

Final Thoughts

Technical SEO is a little complicated but is one of the most essential aspects to rank your website on search engines like Google. It sure requires dedicated research and lots of effort. The above mentioned SEO tasks are well-researched steps to increase your website performance in real time. 

Incorporate the above technical SEO tasks in your marketing strategy and outrank your competitors!