When building or updating your small or medium business’s website, you shouldn’t focus solely on its contents and aesthetics. You should also pay attention to technical aspects like your website’s page speed and performance. These aspects are crucial because they influence user experience and your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
Technical SEO and why it matters
SEO focuses on enhancing your website’s ranking and visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), making your target audience more likely to see and click on it. Many SEO efforts rely on optimizing your website’s pages and content with the right keywords. However, this is just one approach to boosting search rankings.
Technical SEO specializes in fixing the backend aspect of your site, such as its code and structure. It has two critical goals. The first is ensuring your website is properly crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines. Technical issues can cause your website to rank lower, and others may even result in it not being ranked at all, making it invisible to potential customers.nk.
The second is identifying and addressing user experience issues, including the website’s page speed and performance. Loading speed is a significant concern because it is one of the key factors search engines use when ranking websites.
Technical SEO works hand in hand with other types of search optimization approaches, such as local SEO and enterprise SEO, to ensure your website effectively generates awareness, leads, and conversions for your business.
How to improve page speed and performance
When it comes to improving your website’s page speed and performance, here are some technical SEO tips to get you started:
Optimize images on your web pages
Images make your website appealing and engaging, but they can also slow it down when not appropriately optimized. To speed up your site, compress images to reduce their size without compromising quality. You should consider alternative formats like WebP instead of more conventional ones like JPEG or PNG.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
Loading web page elements like images and CSS files requires requests to your server. The more elements on your page, the more requests are needed and the slower your site becomes. You can decrease the requests required to load web pages by removing unnecessary plugins and merging elements where possible.
Take advantage of browser caching
Browser caching stores some of your website’s elements on the user’s device. The next time that same user visits your website, the stored elements can be used instead of being retrieved from the server, resulting in faster loading times.
Implement lazy loading on your site
Lazy loading is an approach wherein that loads only the necessary web page elements, such as images, forms, and animations. For example, if a visitor lands on a page containing multiple images, the browser only loads those in the user’s view. The graphics at the bottom of the page will only be loaded if the visitor scrolls down.
Leverage a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN is composed of multiple servers located around the world. You can distribute your website’s assets across these servers. This tactic ensures that wherever the user may be on the planet, they can get content from the server nearest to them, improving page loading speed.
Fix broken links and redirects
Broken links and redirects are incredibly disruptive to users and search engines, so your technical SEO strategy should include steps to address them. Tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs can make finding them easier. To fix them, you can either redirect them to a functional page or remove them altogether.
Optimize your site for mobile
More and more people are using their tablets and smartphones to go online, so your website must be optimized for mobile use. This means using a responsive design, simplifying navigation, and ensuring important elements like contact forms are easily accessible.
The role of professional technical SEO services
While you may have a basic understanding of SEO, executing, maintaining, and updating your strategy on your own can be challenging, especially alongside running your business. This is why small and business owners use professional technical SEO services.
Experienced SEO specialists have the knowledge and expertise to identify and fix technical issues that could negatively impact your website’s page speed and performance. They also stay updated with the latest best practices, algorithms, and tools to improve your site’s search ranking continuously.
Moreover, they can conduct comprehensive audits of your website to pinpoint specific areas for improvement and implement strategies tailored to your business needs. By partnering with a professional technical SEO service provider, you can ensure your website is optimized for user experience and search engine rankings.
Don’t let technical issues hold back your website and business. Partner with a reputable technical SEO agency today!