When most potential clients come to us, we hear the same thing over and over. “My current SEO provider started off strong and over time our rankings dropped and they couldn’t tell us why.” Most SEO companies know that all 3 aspects of SEO are important. The problem that arises is they don’t carefully monitor and practice all three. It is no different when talking about technical SEO. If I told you that by fixing some of the easiest parts of tech SEO your rankings could be boosted right away, what would you say? I will be going over the “low hanging fruit” when it comes to technical SEO.
Site Speed Matters
If you find yourself searching for the best practices when it comes to technical SEO, this is not the first time you’ve heard about site speed. Google has made it abundantly clear that site speed is a ranking factor in the algorithm. If your site speed leaves a little to be desired then there are some ways you can improve. Check your site speed here.
- Hosting – Who is hosting your website? Not all hosting is created equal. Chances are if you got the cheapest hosting out there, your site speed could suffer.
- Image size – Decreasing the size of your images can help your page load speed.
- Website platform – There is a reason why we always suggest building websites in WordPress.
Is Your Site Being Indexed?
One of the easiest ways to boost your rankings is to make sure all of your pages are being indexed. If you don’t use one of the website crawlers out there then you are missing a major opportunity to check in on your website’s health. Here is a list of the industry’s best crawlers. One quick way to check right now if your site’s pages are being indexed by Google is to type in, “site: your website’s URL” into your address bar.
Was it what you expected to see? Did the number of pages look correct and were the pages you saw in the results what you wanted to see?
Broken Backlinks
Have you recently migrated your site to another platform or done a complete rebuild? Chances are if you tried to do this by yourself without an SEO professional you could have lost some of your links. Once you have identified which of your pages have dead backlinks, set up a 301 redirect to the proper page. You don’t have control over other websites linking wrong, but you can redirect that traffic to the proper page.
Secure Sites
Maybe when you were in the market for hosting, a security certificate was offered. Unless you already knew that having a secure site was important, you probably disregarded the offer. If you don’t know if your site is secure or not, just go to your website and click on your URL in the taskbar. Does it say Http or Https? If your site is not secure, almost all hosting providers offer a security certificate. Back in 2015, Google stated that a security certificate could serve as a tiebreaker between websites.
Unless your SEO provider reports out to you on the monitoring and fixing your technical SEO issues, they probably aren’t. You can either find an SEO provider that does monitor and fix the issues or use the above practices.
