Let’s Think Like a Motorcycle Racer
Let’s think like a motorcycle racer for a moment. You can have thousands of dollars in performance parts and personal riding development, but if the tires are worn, and the engine isn’t tuned, good luck getting to the finish line. You may get there, but the results will certainly stink.
The same can be said of a website. You can have the greatest content in the world written by the most authoritative authors with truly unique perspectives, but if your pages load slowly, or you have multiple broken URLs, or you’re not mobile friendly, good luck getting your reader to the finish line. And those finish lines for web traffic is a conversion that ultimately leads to a sale.
What your website needs is a supercharged foundation, which is only possible through a strong technical platform. Today’s tools can quickly diagnose multiple issues, from duplicate title tags to multiple H1 tags to site speed issues. These errors are unnerving, and cause major roadblocks for those who engineered strategical on-site (all on-page elements such as title tags, keywords, meta-descriptions, etc.) and off-site (inbound links from other hopefully reputable websites) SEO.
Search Engines are the Absolute Boss
Search engine algorithms evolve daily – especially as new technology emerges (think of the rise in voice search and Internet of Things), which forces you to constantly refine your on-page SEO strategies. Yet the core of this dynamic market – technical SEO – remains unfazed, and will need to remain supercharged for all other elements to work.
A bad-performing website is like a motorcycle with bad tires and no engine oil; it may run, but it won’t get you far. Assume, you have got a mobile website but Google is not indexing it due to various technical issues? It’s pointless to even ruminate over how the mobile app looks when it’s crippled technically.
MCR SEO‘s main focus is written content – but we always recommend that new clients undergo a technical SEO audit so we can get the most value out of those content efforts. We won’t get crazy technical, but the following are six basic elements that are absolutely crucial for your website’s performance and should be audited regularly.
The 6 Must-Dos of a Tech Audit
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Sitemap: A sitemap tells search engine bots about the listed webpages and its content, and you need one for top performance. The crawler will follow the sitemap to index the pages you wish to be indexed. Even with the top-notch quality content, your webpage will be non-existent if Google is not crawling.
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Index Status: Search engines like Google are the absolute boss. They have practically got all the authority to flush out web pages that fail to match up to the quality benchmarks or has got some pesky errors. Check the Index Status Report from Google Search Console to know the discrepancy between crawled and indexed pages.
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Mobile-Friendliness: Having a responsive mobile-friendly website is no longer an option. It is needed for your business to stand a good chance to nurture the potential in the online market. Google changed the rules of the game in 2016 with the announcement of mobile-first indexing. The search giant made the intention pretty clear – build a responsive website that automatically adjusts to screen sizes of your desktop, laptop, smartphones, tabs and other devices alike.
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Page Speed: Page load speed has been the most obvious decisive factor for you to visit a website. As per Google data, if a webpage load time touches 10 seconds, the bounce rate throttles to 123 percent. Your site speed is not just instrumental for improving user experience but is also a ranking factor for mobile searchers as per the Google Speed Update in 2018.
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SSL Certificate: There is nothing to argue when it comes to security for Google, and having a secured website by way of SSL certificate is an absolute must today and going forward. A recent ranking factors study conducted by SEMrush says that having an SSL(Secure Sockets Layer for your HTTP, or Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol) certificate is a powerful ranking factor.
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Crawlability: Search engines cannot see what is visible on your site, they need a specific structure to understand what your website is about in order to display it in search engine results. A technical SEO audit diagnoses all of the crawling and indexing errors of your website. The goal is to provide all solutions to the technical issues that are negatively affecting your website’s performance, which translates to poor search engine results page (SERP) rankings.
Conclusion: Staying Ahead of the Curve
The protocols to pursue SEO are changing at an unfathomable speed. Every Google algorithm change triggers additional tweaks you must make to your website to perform optimally in search.
The good news is that base layers of technical SEO – the six elements explained above – has been pretty much the same. The nuts and bolts of your website need regular audit or assessment to keep it fully-functional and user-friendly.
A motorcycle racer can’t win with an engine that lacks oil or worn tires, just as a website can’t perform optimally in search with a technical platform that’s not functioning at full throttle. Create a schedule to run a thorough website audit to evaluate the health of the website – keep that website running strong so your content and brand can truly outperform the competition.