Technical SEO is all about the ways to optimize your site technically. It is how website is optimized in order to increase the ranking of its pages in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.

Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their queries. Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on a multitude of factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, among others, structured data does. So, by improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings.

Benefits of Technical SEO

1. It's fast - Nowadays, web pages need to load fast. People are impatient and don’t want to wait for a page to open. Research from 2016 shows that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t open within three seconds. And the trend hasn’t gone away, research from 2022 suggests the same. So if your website is slow, people get frustrated and move on to another website, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

2. It's crawlable for search engine - Search engines use robots to crawl, or spider, your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. A great internal linking structure will make sure that they’ll understand what the most important content on your site is. But there are more ways to guide robots. You can, for instance, block them from crawling certain content if you don’t want them to go there. You can also let them crawl a page, but tell them not to show this page in the search results or not to follow the links on that page.

3. It doesn't have many dead links - What might be even more annoying for visitors than a slow page, is landing on a page that doesn’t exist at all. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. There goes your carefully crafted user experience! What’s more, search engines don’t like to find these error pages either. And, they tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.

4. It's secure - A technically optimized website is a secure website. Making your website safe for users to guarantee their privacy is a basic requirement nowadays. There are many things you can do to make your website secure, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.

HTTPS makes sure that nobody can intercept the data that’s sent over between the browser and the site. So, for instance, if people log in to your site, their credentials are safe. You’ll need something called an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. Google acknowledges the importance of security and therefore made HTTPS a ranking signal through which secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.

5. It has structured data - Structured data helps search engines better understand your website, content, or even your business. With structured data you can tell search engines what kind of product you sell, or which recipes you have on your site. Plus, it will give you the opportunity to provide all kinds of details about those products or recipes.