Imagine this.
You just spent a good amount of your money to invest in a well designed website for your business to have a strong online presence.
After quite some time, it appears that not a lot of people are visiting your website.
You’re not generating any leads or sales from your website.
You begin to ask yourself, what’s wrong? It’s not how you envisioned this to be.
At this point, the best course of action is to hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Marketing Consultant or Technical SEO Specialist.
Why?
SEO is actually the process of improving or optimizing a website to help it rank in search results whenever people search for specific words or phrases in search engines like Google.
In this day and age, people (including me and you) would normally go to Google whenever we want to find out about something.
Looking for a new restaurant to try?
Where to go for your next vacation?
We would normally reach out for our mobile phone and type a simple phrase in Google’s search bar.
Google then gives us search results.
While that sounds awesome, the sites you see on the first page most likely didn’t get there “just because” they’re popular.
These companies have done extensive research to determine what phrases users like us use to search for specific topics so that they can optimize their pages accordingly.
Similarly, if you want your target audience to find you, you would have to do the same and work with an SEO Marketing Consultant to ensure that you’ll be doing the right thing for your business.
However, SEO will not succeed without a strong backbone.
That’s where Technical SEO comes in – it is the foundation of any SEO strategy.
The goal of Technical SEO is to improve the technical aspects of a website to increase the ranking of its pages in various search engines. These technical factors need to run smoothly to help search engines like Google and Yahoo crawl and index your site.
In order to ensure that your technical SEO strategy is done right, you need to hire technical SEO specialists to minimize technical SEO issues during and after the implementation process of your strategy. It would be best to engage their technical SEO services to ensure that your website is optimized to attract your target market and increase conversions.
Once you nail your technical SEO strategy and your site has very good rankings in search engines, you’ll be able to ramp up your Inbound Marketing. This translates to more qualified leads for your business which can result in more sales! At the same time, it’s very customer centric because you’re able to provide helpful resources to them, which in turn makes it so convenient for them to reach your business especially when they’re ready to make a purchase.
This increases your chances of making a sale through your marketing messages and optimized website.
Since the primary goal of any business is to increase sales to drive revenues day in and day out – how then do you start using technical SEO just by fixing the infrastructure of your website?
Here’s are some points to get the ball rolling:
- Fast Website = Better Rankings
Ensure that your website loads fast. If your website is slow, impatience kicks in and most people would immediately abandon your site thereby increasing your site’s bounce rate. As the bounce rate increases, your chances of getting a sale decreases.
You can improve your website’s loading speed by optimizing your images for the web, using fast hosting, and by compressing some of your content. Once you do these, you can make it easy for users to navigate your site which will naturally help increase your website’s rankings. - Improve “Crawlability” and “Indexation”
Google, Yahoo, and other search engines use bots and spiders to “crawl” or find your website. The key to being “searchable” is to have a clear and simple site architecture so that your site pages get indexed and ranked faster. How do you do this?
Create XML Sitemaps.
XML Sitemaps help search engines like Google understand your website while “crawling” it. These sitemaps tell search engines exactly where each page is and contain important information like its last modification date or how frequently the page is updated. If Google is unable to read a sitemap, it won’t even know your site exists. - Bring dead links back to life!
Clicking on a website URL and landing on a page that doesn’t exist can be annoying. These error pages are not searchable and can therefore affect your rankings and potential sales too.
One way to do this is to ensure that broken links, page not found errors, and missing image alt tags are working so that your content is always fresh and stays relevant. Your search results will be significantly impacted if you have links on your pages to other pages on your website that are not working or do not exist anymore.
Tools like Dr. Link check can help you do a quick check on your website and fix them before these dead pages or links before Google or others. - Categorize content as much as possible
One way in which Google crawls websites is through internal links. Google’s spiders can land on a homepage, navigate to a category, and visit all the recent posts in the specific page.
If your content is neatly tucked under each category, Google will have an easier time “crawling” your pages because it takes no more than 3-4 clicks to access each one of the pages in your website. This way, it’s easier for the search engines to figure out what your site is about because you have the content grouped together. - Ensure that you have no duplicate content
This is an important part of your technical SEO strategy. If similar content appears across multiple sites, Google will not know which URL to show in the search results. Naturally, this will affect your website’s ranking because Google will not know which one to show to someone browsing your website.
To address this, you can either:
• Remove the duplicate content
• Add a canonical URL/link to each version
• Cut down the amount of duplicate content
The canonical URL/link tells search engines the preferred version that readers should go to even if there are similar pages on your site.
To help cut down the duplicate content, you can reduce the number of words you show in your blog and write a custom description for each.
We have just barely scratched the surface with these ideas on how you can start your technical SEO journey.
By now, you must already know the importance of getting technical SEO services in order to improve your marketing strategy.
Fix these things and you can acquire customers without the need to spend on expensive ads. It gives a lot of benefits that no other digital marketing strategy can offer. You may have all the SEO tools at your disposal but if you don’t know how to utilize them, all your efforts will go to waste.
This is the primary reason why technical SEO specialists charge a lot for their technical SEO services. They have to be proficient in all aspects which takes years of experience. With their expertise, they are able to craft SEO strategies that can help grow your business in the long term and will surely help move your business ahead of your competitors.
Never take shortcuts because doing so will have negative effects on your Google rankings.
