Technical SEO Basics: What Every Business Needs to Know

In 2024, having a beautifully designed website isn’t enough to get you more customers. To truly succeed online, your site needs to be easy to find and understand for both users and search engines. This is where technical SEO basics come into play.

Technical SEO is the work that makes your website’s backend and architecture easier for search engines to navigate. With the right optimizations, you can make your website rank higher in search results and reach more people who are interested in what you sell.

Why Technical SEO Matters

Imagine your website as a house. It may look stunning on the outside, but that doesn’t mean the foundation is strong. If the ground is sinking, the plumbing is outdated, or the doors are hard to open, people won’t want to live there—or in your case, visit and stay on your site.

Technical SEO is that foundation, ensuring your website is structurally sound so that search engines like Google can easily crawl, index, and rank your content. Without it, all the beautiful content and design in the world won’t help you succeed.

The first step to ranking on Google is to get your site indexed correctly. For that to happen, Googlebot—Google’s crawling bot—needs to be able to easily navigate and understand your site. If your site isn’t optimized for this, it’s like putting up a “Do Not Enter” sign for Google, which means fewer chances of showing up in search results.

6 Ways to Boost Your Technical SEO

1. Optimize for Crawling and Indexing

Google’s crawling process is how it discovers and indexes new pages on the web. To make sure your site gets indexed correctly, you can take the following steps:

• Remove broken (404) links. Broken links lead to dead ends, frustrating users and search engines alike. Regularly check your site for any broken links and fix them promptly.
• Avoid internal redirects and redirect loops. Redirects should be used sparingly and correctly. Too many redirects, especially loops, can confuse Googlebot, leading to poor indexing.

2. Build an SEO-Friendly Sitemap

Your sitemap is like a roadmap for search engines, guiding them to all the important pages on your site. A well-structured sitemap ensures that Googlebot can find and index your key content easily. Make sure your sitemap is up-to-date and submit it to Google Search Console.

3. Improve Your Website Security

Security is a top priority for both users and search engines. One of the ranking factors that Google uses is the protocol your website uses to connect with visitors’ browsers.

In the past, many websites used HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), but this protocol isn’t very secure. As a result, Google prioritizes websites that use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) in its search results. HTTPS encrypts the data that is transmitted between your website and its users, which protects user information and builds trust with Google.

To make your website even more secure, you can use HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security). Implementing HSTS forces browsers to interact with your site over HTTPS, even if a user attempts to access the HTTP version.

4. Address Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content can confuse search engines. Having two or more pages on your site with mostly the same content can lead to lower rankings or even penalties.

To avoid this problem, ensure that each page on your site has unique, valuable content. If you have similar content across different URLs, use canonical tags to signal to Google which version of a page should be indexed.

5. Use Mobile-First Practices

Google now uses mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of your site to rank pages. This makes it crucial to have a mobile-friendly design.

There are two big factors in mobile-friendliness:

• Responsive Design. Your site should adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes.
• Fast Load Times. Mobile users expect sites to load quickly. You can compress images and use caching to improve speed.

6. Utilize Schema Markup

Schema markup, AKA structured data, is a powerful tool that helps search engines understand the context of your website pages. It’s a set of standardized tags you can add to your site’s code to help search engines understand your content.

By adding structured data to your site, you can enhance your search listings with rich snippets, which can increase your visibility and click-through rates. This is my personal favorite SEO tactic to use because I can communicate directly to the algorithms.

How All These Efforts Help Your Business

When your site is optimized for technical SEO, it’s easier for search engines to understand and index your content. This leads to better rankings, which in turn drives more organic traffic to your site. More traffic means more opportunities to engage potential customers and grow your business.

Not convinced technical SEO makes sense for your business? Just ask FullSurge about how Rocketship’s technical SEO and web design work helped them get 62.5% more leads through their website.

Remember, technical SEO is not just about pleasing search engines—it’s about creating a solid foundation for your website that enhances the user experience and drives long-term success.

Get Started With Technical SEO Basics Today

While you can do some of this work on your own if you’re tech-savvy, many businesses find a trustworthy SEO agency to help. Putting in the effort to do technical SEO well can help your business attract many more customers through your website.

If the world of technical SEO feels overwhelming, don’t worry. Rocketship is here to guide you through every step. Our agency’s SEO and marketing services can help you make sure both Google and your ideal customers love your website.

Schedule a consultation with Rocketship to start using technical SEO to grow your business.