Technical SEO Services Australia

What are Technical SEO Services?

Technical SEO services are those aimed towards optimising the internal elements and backend aspects of a site to increase its search rankings. The goal of technical SEO services is to make web pages understandable and crawlable for search engines.

Technical SEO forms a part of on-page SEO that usually involves activities like submitting sitemaps to Google, creating SEO-friendly site structures, improving website speed, and finding error issues in the websites.

Technical SEO Services Best Practices

1. Check Indexing

Crawling and Indexing are the basics of technical SEO services. Every other SEO practice is fruitless if your pages aren’t even indexed by Google. You can check if you’ve indexed the page by using a site: operator or the overall indexation status. You can also check the status of your XML Sitemap Submissions in the Google Search Console.

If your pages aren’t getting indexed, it can be because Google isn’t able to crawl them or because it thinks your pages are irrelevant. Another major reason it can’t crawl is that you may have been slapped with a Google Penalty. Once you identify the reason, you can take steps to address the issues and facilitate Google to index your pages.

2. Use HTTPS

Google has emphasised the importance of security in its recent upgrades. To ensure your sensitive information like passwords and credit cards is protected, load your pages over HTTPS instead of HTTP. The former is a secure version of HTTP. HTTPS protects the communication between your browser and server from being hacked and tampered with by attackers. It provides authentication and confidentiality to most websites today. To check if your website is loaded by HTTPS, a website will show a ‘lock’ icon in the address bar.

3. Page Speed Optimisation

As we discussed before, page speed is an important factor when it comes to technical SEO. A slow-loaded page can increase the bounce rate and take a toll on your conversion rate. To avoid loading issues, it is advisable for brands to:

Reduce Web Page Size: Sure, compressing images and videos can work a great deal in improving your page speed. But they won’t alone make any difference, especially if your web page size is enormous. If page speed is your priority, you have to make a conscious decision to have minimum elements that facilitate faster loading.

Compress Media Files: Most of the loading issues arises because of the big media files. Compress them with image optimisation tools that will reduce the file size so that they take little time to load.

Use Content Distribution Network: CDN facilitates faster loading of pages regardless of how far the user is geographically from your server. CDN contents the visitors to the nearest server so there’s less distance for the files to travel.

4. Ensure Your Page is Mobile-Friendly

A true SEO specialist knows the importance of a mobile-optimised site. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it indexes mobile versions of webpages separately. However, it’s not always that easy to keep the mobile-optimised issues at bay. There might be issues that arise specifically because your site isn’t mobile-friendly.

You want to ensure that your website is compatible with mobile devices and the way to do that is to head over to the ‘Mobile Usability’ report in Google Search Console.  It will show you all the issues that you need to fix to build your page mobile-friendly.

5. Reclaim Lost Links

You spend so much time in building a strong linking profile for your website. But when websites change their URLs over the years, the old URLs that have links from high authority sites often get lost. One of the best technical SEO practices is to redirect those links to the current pages. This can considerably improve your link-building practices.

You can find the lost linking opportunities using SEO tools like Ahref’s Site Explorer. You can check the Best by Links report and filter links by “404 not found”. By redirecting the links to the current version, you’ll find plenty of new link-building opportunities and reclaim the lost value of the old links.

6. Practice Internal Linking

Speaking of link-building practices, internal link-building is too big of a strategy to ignore for technical SEO. Internal links are those that you add from one page to another on your site itself. It helps Google to add context to your pages and helps it rank them better. You can find internal linking opportunities using site audit tools. These tools identify the keywords that you’re already ranking for and suggest contextual internal link opportunities for your site.

While placing internal links, you need to ensure link placement is at the top of your page so that it helps with your bounce rate. At the same time, don’t use the anchor text for different pages as that can get confusing for Google. Read about the internal linking dos and don’ts before placing links on your website. Or you can simply hire an SEO agency that understands the internal linking protocols. Most SEO agencies offer technical SEO services for internal linking where they can identify linking opportunities for you, use keyword-rich anchor text, and help you add links to important pages.

7. Fix Broken Pages

A 404 error is always an unpleasant user experience. And if those pages have different types of backlinks, they all point to dead resources. This is why it’s critical to check for broken links on your site and fix them if you find any. On WordPress, you can fix broken links using the broken link checker plugin. It automates the checking process and scans your site for broken links every 72 hours. If it finds any, you’ll receive notifications via email so that you can take actions to fix them.

There are two primary actionable steps you can take to fix broken links. Firstly, you can reinstate the pages that were accidentally deleted or you can redirect your error pages with backlinks to other relevant pages. Once those links are fixed, you can update internal links that point to the newly deleted pages.

8. Use Hreflang for Multiple Languages

Sites that have a global audience usually opt for having websites in multiple languages. If you’re one of them, ensure that your site uses hreflang tags.

What are they?

Hreflang is an HTML feature that is used for specifying a webpage’s language and geographical targeting. It is how Google displays the language and geographic-specific versions of your pages to the visitors. You can implement this tag by adding hreflang tags in the <head> section of all versions of the page.

9. Regular SEO Audits

SEO audit is an ongoing activity. You need to run regular technical SEO audits if you want to consistently rank higher on search engine result pages. Running regular site audits gives you several action items to improve your SEO and lets you control issues before they escalate and harm your overall search rankings. There are several SEO tools available to run an SEO audit like Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.

There are a lot of things that go into running a complete SEO audit. To ensure you’re doing it right and consistently, it is advisable to hire an SEO agency that can perform these technical SEO services for you. They would know which are the best SEO practices according to your industry, and goals, how often your site needs SEO audits, and what new keywords you can bank according to the latest trends.