Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
One of the biggest wins in SEO to boost performance is making sure your site is optimised from a technical SEO perspective. This is essential for improving the user experience, fixing broken links, improving site speed and optimising titles, making your website easier to navigate and improving its value to search engines. However, when running a technical SEO audit, especially for the first time, there can be an overwhelming amount of tasks, making it hard to know where to start.
You may also find that many issues that appear on a technical SEO audit are often developer-led tasks that an SEO may struggle to fix on their own. This can lead to incomplete technical performance optimisation or many developers being tasked with focusing their efforts on fixing issues of little importance or relevance to real-time performance. Bruce Clay speaks about this in his latest article for SearchEngineLand,
“One of the biggest hurdles for in-house SEO programs is the lack of resources to implement changes to the website.
- Up to 67% of respondents cite non-SEO dev tasks as the biggest reason technical SEO changes can’t be made, according to Aira’s State of Technical SEO Report.”
Page Speed and User Experience
One of the first places to focus when improving technical performance is page speed. Website conversion rate and bounce rate improve dramatically when page speed increases; this is a strong signal for Google to rank your content higher. Google has a free tool, Page Speed Insights, that will let you run a URL and check the page speed, where it will feed back key metrics and insights on how to improve performance.
Running a speed optimisation plugin on your site, such as WPRocket, will allow you to address page speed issues, including; delaying JavaScript execution, reducing unused JavaScript and CSS, adding Lazyload to images and videos and more. Installing one of these plugins is a quick win to improve page speed, but make sure you are aware that these plugins can often conflict with other plugins or cause issues if certain settings are turned on. Make sure to consult your web developer, and if any issues arise, you may have to look into different plugins or code-based fixes to improve page speed and user experience.
Crawling and Indexing
Crawling and indexing are the main ways your site gains traffic. Without being indexed in search engines such as Google, it becomes incredibly difficult for users to reach your site. Google uses website crawlers to crawl over the pages on your site, understand your content and index it appropriately.
When looking at prioritising technical tasks, making sure your main pages are indexed appropriately is one of the most important factors. You can use an SEO technical audit tool on platforms such as SERanking or SEMRush to see if anything is blocking your pages from being indexed. However, it is important to check Google search console, because even though there may be nothing blocking your page from indexation, it still does not appear in search engines if Google considers it thin or duplicate content. Google Search Console allows you to see which of your pages are being indexed by Google and the reason if they are not appearing. If any important pages on your site are being blocked from Google search, you need to address this.
Keeping on top of both your site speed performance, as well as any crawling and indexing issues, will allow you to maintain solid rankings while creating new and engaging high-quality content, which will produce improved rankings over time.
