4 Essential Technical SEO Tips You Can’t Afford To Ignore
Implementing technical SEO tactics can help you rise up the Google ranking ladder, surpassing your competitors. This is great, because you’ll see a boost in traffic and profits as a result. This makes technical SEO something your simply can’t afford to ignore.
Search engine optimization is certainly nothing new. However, it is always changing, depending on how Google feels that particular month or year, and what new algorithm they have up their sleeve.
For instance, Google recently implemented its Mobile-First Index in full, making it absolutely essential for site owners and businesses to think mobile user experience. According to Google Webmasters, “Having mobile-friendly content is still helpful for those looking at ways to perform better in mobile search results.”
But with a little know-how, you can easily stay up-to-date with the latest ranking trends. Here are the top 4 technical SEO tips you can begin employing today.
1. Reduce Site Load Time
The amount of time your website takes to load is a huge ranking factor, especially for mobile searches. “Although speed has been used in ranking for some time, that signal was focused on desktop searches,” Google explained. “Today we’re announcing that starting in July 2018, page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches.”
In fact, if your site doesn’t load in three seconds or less, you may need to make some adjustments to your website using technical SEO. One way to check site load time is to use speed test platforms, like Google PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom, or better yet, both.
Once you have a good idea of just how fast your website load time is, or isn’t, follow the suggestions each page speed tool gives to speed up your site. For instance, compressing images, embedding videos from YouTube, and minimizing CSS files.
2. Make Mobile Optimization A Priority
As mentioned earlier, mobile friendly websites are important for success. Is your website mobile-friendly? To find out use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to get valuable insight into your site’s mobile-readiness.
3. Boost User Time On Site
Time on site is an important factor when it comes to outranking your competitors to grow profits. Time on site is the total amount of time a user spends navigating your website, as well as time spent per page.
This essentially tells Google that users find your content engaging enough to stick around. The longer your time on site analytic is, the more Google will find your page valuable to fulfill searcher intent down the road.
If your time on page is more than three minutes, you may find your site moving up in search engine rankings. This can have a powerful impact on your bottom line, making time on site a must-do when it comes to technical SEO.
4. Reduce Bounce Rate
Time on site directly impacts your bounce rate, which is another very important technical SEO factor regarding ranking. What is bounce rate? It is essentially a percentage of page visits. This is a ranking signal, since it indicates if users are engaging with your website content.
Speed and other factors play into your site’s bounce rate. “The biggest issue with having a slow website is that your users will often lose patience and leave,” DreamHost noted. “This negatively affects your ‘bounce rate’, which reflects the number of visitors who click away after only seeing one page.”
To see ranking benefits, you want to reduce your bounce rate percentage to the lowest number possible. The average bounce rate across common industries is between 30 percent and 55 percent. If you have a new website or online business, expect a bounce rate of around 60 percent to 65 percent until you grow.
Less than 30 percent bounce rate and you are doing very well, positioned in the top tier of websites. This can give you a nice boost in ranking.
If you need to make a few tweaks to your site to get that bounce rate down, you can optimize pages with very high percentages, use deep linking tactics, and also utilize visual content to increase user engagement.
In Conclusion . . .
Technical SEO is an essential aspect of ensuring your website is performing at optimal levels while providing a quality user experience. These assurances will have a direct impact on your ranking and profits, since users will find your site above the competition on Google SERPs.
First, take a good look at the above 4 technical SEO tips, and then build an optimization strategy to employ said tips. You very well could see ranking results in a matter of weeks.