TECHNICAL SEO
Give Google a deeper understanding of your website for better performance.
Websites that have a strong technical SEO foundation will always perform better in search results. A strong technical SEO foundation with give Google a deeper understanding of your website and its intentions.
A well-optimised website will leverage technical SEO to increase its:
- Traffic
- Visitors
- Goal Completions
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO looks at a site from the search engine’s point of view. The goal is to make your site as friendly to Google as possible. If you think of link building and content marketing as solutions that can be scaled up, then technical SEO (and on-page SEO) is like building a strong base.
How can Technical SEO help you dominate your niche?
Sites that tell Google more about what they are about do better in search results. If you don’t send Google a site that is technically sound, it would be like giving your English-speaking professor a 10,000-word dissertation written in Spanish. Even if the content is good, it is useless if the examiner can’t read it.
Building a solid foundation.
If a house is built well, it will probably last longer. The same is true for your website and how it works.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO looks at a site from the viewpoint of the search engine with the end goal of making your site as Google-friendly as possible. If you think of link building and content marketing as scale-up solutions, then think of technical SEO (and on-page SEO) as laying a solid foundation.
How can Technical SEO helo you dominate your niche?
Sites that give Google a deeper understanding perform better in search results. Failing to submit a technically sound site to Google could be likened to submitting a 10,000-word dissertation to your English-speaking lecture written in Spanish. It might be good content, but if the examiner can’t read it, then it is useless.
Building a solid foundation.
The better a house is built, the longer it's likely to survive. The same goes for your website and it's technical foundations.
Our Technical SEO Process
The part of SEO that is most in black and white is technical SEO. We examine a number of variables. The below-described process was revised on March 27, 2019, although the variables we consider are always changing. Since we take everything into consideration, our method is not sequential.
Encryption
Google knows that encryption is a security measure. If your website is not encrypted, Google may rank it lower. Google does this because it wants to send its users to sites that are safe. Encryption is important for any website, but from a non-SEO point of view, it is a must when dealing with customer information. To avoid problems with mixed content, we make sure your website uses HTTPS and serves all content (scripts and images) from an encrypted domain.
Mobile Friendlieness
Since 2018, Google and other search engines have become more and more focused on user experience. Since most searches are now done on mobile devices, having a website that works well on those devices is often a deciding factor in how well it ranks. Our mobile friendliness test looks at the size of the text, the width of the content in relation to the size of the screen, and how close clickable elements are to each other. Google looks at all three of these tests when deciding how mobile-friendly a website is.
Duplicate Pages
Contrary to what most people think, there is no direct penalty for duplicate content. Page cannibalization, on the other hand, can make it harder for your content to rank well if you have too many duplicate pages. If Google indexes and shows the wrong page, it can be bad. Also, having duplicate pages may mean that your link profile for a group of keywords is spread out over several pages, which makes it harder for the content to rank well in a competitive way. When dealing with duplicate content, the correct canonical tags should be used.
Sitemaps
If you have a well-built website with internal links that work and good navigation, you might get away without having a sitemap. But a sitemap is easy to set up and makes sure that Google and other search engines can find an index of your content. This is because sitemaps tell Google everything there is to know about your website and make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your site.
Robots.Txt
With a robots.txt file, you can block Google from accessing certain parts of your website. But recently, Google said that the no-index directive should be used instead of the robots.txt file to keep a website from being indexed by Google. Keeping this in mind, it is important to make sure that nothing is blocked in the robots.txt file, since blocking even admin folders can stop Google from showing your website in its entirety.
Structured Data
Through structured data, you can tell Google what your website is about. This can lead to featured snippets or extra extensions in organic search results. Some of the ways we use structured data are FAQs, reviews, and local business schema. This helps Google understand your site better and give your page a higher relevance score. A higher CTR is also linked to extensions like reviews.
Status Codes
Status codes control if a page can be retrieved from the server. A 200 status code means that Google and other search engines can get a page from a server. Status codes that start with a 3 are moved, those that start with a 4 can't be found, and those that start with a 5 are blocked by the server. You want all of your pages to send back a status code of 200 so that Google can find them. Pages that have a 301 code, which means they have moved permanently, will also be crawled, but the new page will be shown. Pages with the status code 401 (not found) should be fixed or redirected, and problems with the server that cause 5xx status codes should be fixed. We also pay close attention to 302 (temporarily redirected) codes because they can keep link juice on the old page, which could mean that organic traffic to the new page goes down.
URL Paths
A web page's URL structure is made up of URL paths. We look at these to make sure they make sense, but changing them and re-directing the page may have more negative effects than staying on a path that is already there. We also watch out for any URL structures that change over time. Google can read dynamic URLs, but they can lead to a lower SERP CTR, URL changes that lead to 404 errors, less likely keyword relevancy in URLs, and other problems. Then, we asked, "Will changing dynamic URLs to static URLs have any other bad effects?" and "Can we lessen any bad effects?" If you need to rewrite your URLs, Google traffic might drop at first while your new URLs are crawled and indexed again. This kind of redirection can drop a page's rank by about 15%, which is something we take into account.
International SEO
A terrific approach for rapidly scaling a website, which finally leads to an increase in revenue, is to make use of international search engine optimization (SEO). Having said that, this may be a hard procedure, and any mistakes that are made can cause search engines to become bewildered and misinterpret the material. Nevertheless, it is important to avoid making these kinds of errors. We search for issues that may arise with language compatibility, such as hreflang links that are either missing or broken, as well as hreflang conflicts that may exist inside the page source.
WWW Resolve
For example, if you click on https://a1seo.co, it will take you to https://www.a1seo.com. Most websites include a redirect that takes users from their non-www version to their www version or vice versa. If this redirect is not used, link juice may be distributed between www and non-www versions. There is occasionally a chance of cannibalism as well. We make sure that this redirect is active.
Broken CSS & Scripts
Broken scripts and CSS can result in users not viewing your website as it should, which will have a negative impact on their user experience. This could provide Google bad user signals, which would ultimately lead to worse ranks. Additionally, Google cannot render your website properly if scripts and CSS files are corrupt, which could hurt rankings.
Crawlability
A page must first be accessible in order to rank on Google and other search engines. The no-index directive is the proper method for delisting a page from Google. To make sure that particular pages aren't unintentionally banned from crawling, we examine whether pages are set to no-index and determine whether these are appropriate or not.
On-Page Optimisation.
It can still be technical.
Broken links, internal linking, and broken images are a few examples of on-page SEO problems that can also be classified as technical SEO. A detailed explanation of our procedure can be found here: On-Page SEO services.
Speed Optimisation.
The need for speed 🚀
Google rates your website based in part on its speed. There is compelling evidence that Google determines page performance and rankings using time till first byte (how long it takes your server to react).
Without getting too technical, a slow website wastes crawl budget, which is the amount of resources Google uses to analyse your website, which means that less of your potentially valuable content is noticed by Google and displayed to Google users.
At A1 SEO Glasgow, we evaluate the speed of your page, carry out speed updates using our internal resources, or collaborate with your development team to put solutions into place.
Things we look at:
Render blocking resources | Server response times | CSS optimisation | File compression | CSS minification | JS minification | Image optimisations (size and next-generation formats) | Redirect chains
Render Blocking Resources
Render blocking resources are files that have to load at the same time as the rest of the page. Therefore the page cannot fully load until all of these files have loaded. The solutions for this is to load these scripts after the main content of the website is loaded. This lets a website completely load in the eyes of the users with the scripts being loaded whilst the users browses your web page.
Core Web Vitals
Google has benchmarks for page speed than follow guidelines called Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift and First Input Delay are all Core Web Vital factors. Core Web Vitals are a page experience signal. If a page has a poor page experience, the page will likely have poor user experience. Poor user experiance signals can result in lower rankings.
CSS Optimisation
As with render blocking resources, CSS files are loaded in line with the rest of the page. Any unessential CSS can be delayed to load once the website is fully visible to the user. In 9/10 cases the above fixes are enough to bring a website above competition. However, for some more competitive niches, more complex, bespoke solutions are required.
File Compression
File compression is a bit complicated to explain. Essentially we can work with your server to zip an unzip files to improve web speed. Pingdom, a thought leader in speed optimisation, has wrote THIS GUIDE TO GZIP AND FILE COMPRESSION which we would advise anyone really interested in to read.
CSS Minification
CSS files control the design of your website, however they can have hundreds, thousands and sometimes even tens of thousands of lines of unnecessary code. This unnecessary code creates unnecessary strain on page load time. A1 SEO Glasgow can optimise CSS files to ensure that they contain no unnecessary lines of code.
Image Optimisations
Chances are image sizes are slowing your site down. Images are important for design and branding, however, files can be too large. Next-generation image formats like WebP can decrease file size drastically whilst retaining quality. This is something that can be rolled out with relative ease depending on server setup.
Redirect Chains
Sometimes when restructuring your website you will move pages around and send old pages to new ones via redirect. This is good practice for retaining SEO value obtained from link building. However, you should update your internal links to their proper version. Failing to do so creates redirect chains. With redirect chains, web users have to load each page before the next can be loaded. These pages may have no information on them but web user’s browsers still have to communicate with your website’s server for each web page in the chain. Optimising these chains reduces page speed for users navigating through your website.
Site Migrations
Keeping it all together.
Migrations are often turbulent times for a site’s visibility in Google. During migrations parts of your website can move, change or completely disappear.
Some of this is necessary due to redundant content and/or logical restructuring. Some of this is not necessary and can come from a lack of understanding of how search engines view web pages.
Google sees URLs as physical locations on the web. The term URL literally stands for Uniform Resource Locator. You build rankings to individual pages. When those pages disappear or are not in their usual address Google drops them and shows the next best page.
A1 SEO Glasgow specialise in salvaging site migrations gone bad, and consulting in how to avoid disaster when looking at restricting your website.
We can look at recreating the previous structure or redirecting the old pages to the new.
Search Engine Tools
Some on the on-page SEO factors we look at are sometimes also classed as technical SEO, for example, broken links, internal linking and broken images. View our On-Page SEO services here for a full break down of our process.
Google Search Console allows you to submit a sitemap directly to Google. Naturally Google will find your sitemap and start to pick up pages but pointing them in the right direction speeds up this process.
Bing Webmaster Tools is more or less a carbon copy of Google Search Console but for Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
How long before you can see results?
It depends - but it can be almost immediate.
Technical SEO results are tangible. For technical SEO it really depends on how quickly A1 SEO Glasgow can get started on your website.
With Technical SEO we are in control of everything. You don’t have to wait a few months to see the results of a link building campaign roll in, results are almost immediate. Granted it does take some time for Google to reassess the quality of your site but you should see an increase in rankings after work is completed.
Our Other SEO Services
Outreach & Linkbuilding
Local SEO focuses on targeting customers within your service area through location-based search and Google Maps. Our team have the experience to get your business dominating your search area.
Local SEO
Local SEO focuses on targeting customers within your service area through location-based search and Google Maps. Our team have the experience to get your business dominating your search area.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO are elements you have direct control over. Meta tags, heading tags, speed, image optimisation, your address, schema, and internal linking are all highly relevant to the health and success of your site.
SEO Audit
An SEO strategy starts with a detailed analysis of a site's current technical, on-page and off-page elements. Audits are the building blocks for all SEO campaigns and allow us to make actionable, data-based plans.
SEO Consulting & Training
Our SEO experts are equipped to give your marketing team professional guidance. From highlighting complex SEO challenges to devising full-scale search strategies. A1 SEO's team also offer on-site consultations.
Get in touch.
Why choose us?
You're in good hands.
Hi, I’m Graham Grieve, the lead SEO consultant here at A1 SEO. We are a highly efficient team of 15 search engine optimisation specialists. We only offer SEO as a service. This means that, unlike most generic digital marketing agencies, 100% of your budget spent with A1 SEO goes directly towards ranking your site higher in Google. We have over 8 years of experience ranking websites in some of the world’s most competitive niches and know exactly what works. Our campaigns are fully transparent, meaning you are able to see exactly what work has been carried out on your website at any point. We also go to great lengths to educate our clients about SEO in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. It’s usually me on the other end of the phone so if you have any questions, please give me a call and together, we can start ranking your website higher in search engines.