Need fresh ideas to take your UX and SEO performance to the next level?
Did you know that most of the UX and SEO problems occur due to the same repetitive website operation errors? And that they can be mitigated or avoided altogether if only one knows where and what to look for.
The clue to solving these issues lies in the technical SEO. It holds all the answers and levers to boosting UX and search engine performance.
Need proof? Let’s walk through the essentials you can’t afford to miss.
What is Technical SEO
Technical search engine optimisation deals with your website’s infrastructure. If done systematically, it represents a continuous process of identifying and fixing infrastructure errors.
The goal of tech SEO is to improve website performance, particularly its crawlability, rendering pages, and indexing. This is the science behind how tech SEO impacts user experience and ranking.
Since we are looking under the hood now, a few extra details won’t hurt, as technical SEO encompasses many more areas, such as:
- Website speed;
- Mobile responsiveness;
- Structured data;
- Secure connections (HTTPS);
- Canonical tags;
- URL structure.
These are some of the most common SEO areas to address. For thorough website analysis, a professional SEO audit report will bring additional aspects to light, which can further improve your user experience and rankings. As SEO pros like to say, there are no perfectly healthy websites – only those not audited enough.
Identifying Slow Page Load Times
Let’s explore how to catch and fix SEO issues, particularly one of the most common ones — slow-loading pages.
We live in a time when an average attention span is only 3 seconds. Moreover, users are so spoiled with fast Internet connections, powerful PCs, smart devices and applications, and so on that they won’t tolerate your website page opening for longer than a blink of an eye.
Slow page load times are the primary source of high bounce rates, low engagement, and conversion. This is where tech SEO comes to the rescue, as it has a direct connection to page loading times.
To understand if your website has slow page speed issues, start with the basic performance measuring tools. For example, Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, and WebPageTest will allow you to catch most technical SEO issues.
This is what you should be looking for with these tools:
- Large, unoptimised image files;
- Lack of browser caching;
- Render-blocking JavaScript or CSS;
- Too many HTTP requests;
- Excess of third-party scripts.
These are the bottlenecks that directly affect the speed of your website page loading. Get rid of them or mitigate their impact, and your UX and search ranking will improve.
How to Find and Fix Crawl Errors
Search engines, unlike humans, are restless in how they scan your web pages. This is called crawling, as the analogy often used to describe this process is imagining a bunch of bots (or bugs) deployed by search engines like Google to understand and index a website.
However, these bots occasionally hit barriers, also known as crawl errors. Finding and fixing them on your website is the key to improving UX and search ranking.
Tools like Google Search Console or Screaming Frog SEO Spider are meant to find crawl errors before search engines’ bots do that. You install and run them, looking to catch the following types of errors:
- 404 Not Found;
- Server errors (5xx);
- Blocked by robots.txt (an important file that sets the rules for crawling);
- Redirect chains/loops;
- URL parameter issues.
To prevent crawl errors, keep a keen eye on the health of your URL structure. This means updating internal links that lead to broken pages and ensuring you use absolute URLs (with the full path) as opposed to relative ones (good only for internal usage but practically unusable for search engines’ crawlers).
Also, deploy canonical tags to maintain clean indexing of your pages and avoid duplicate content penalties.
The Effect of Broken Links on SEO and User Trust
The most evident effect of broken links can be seen in user trust and engagement.
Picture this – you read an article, and it really captures your interest. You want to know more by clicking on an embedded link, but it doesn’t work! Naturally, you abandon the source article in frustration, looking for other, more reliable sources of additional information.
Search engines rate websites with broken links poorly because humans programmed them to rank high only for pages with perfectly functional links. This has a direct negative impact on SEO, dragging down such key metrics as:
- Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR);
- Search ranking;
- Crawlability and indexation;
- Average session duration;
- Click-through rate (CTR).
Broken links happen, but a well-balanced link structure that includes regional SEO posts can boost the resilience of your link-building profile. The best SEO practice is to maintain a diversity of link sources, including local, regional, and international links, as well as directories, news portals, authoritative forums and review sites, and industry-specific blogs.
The Key Takeaways
A website’s infrastructure is the root cause of most website performance issues, whereas technical SEO is the tool that helps us identify and fix those errors. Tech SEO encompasses such fundamental areas as:
- Website Crawling and Indexing;
- Site Speed and Performance;
- Mobile Optimisation;
- Internal & External Linking and Site Architecture.
By understanding the basics of how SEO works on these ground levels and using relevant tools, you can find the most technical SEO errors and inefficiencies that hinder your website’s performance in search results.
In the long run, this will have a direct positive impact on user experience and loyalty, leading to stronger customer relationships and higher revenues for your business (or higher conversions if you’re in a not-for-profit type of activity).
