Manager, Demand Generation

Associate Director, SEO

Associate Content Marketing Manager

Technical SEO Guide: 3 Steps to Sustainable Improvements

When it comes to providing a great website experience for users, leveraging a well-executed content strategy is a big part of the equation. Yet, while content is a great way to establish your brand’s voice, users might never find and experience your content if your site can’t be accurately read by search engines. Knowing how to properly manage your technical SEO approach is key to making sure that your content is standing out on search engines, and effectively drawing eyes to your website. 

Let’s quickly debrief what technical SEO involves, first. This form of SEO focuses on optimizing your website so that search engines, like Google, are able to digest the information available on each page of your site, and index it away to show a user at a later date. Crawlers (or spiders, as they’re sometimes called) are bots that travel around your site from link to link and report the data they find back to the search engine’s servers, where it’s stored in hopes that someone will search for something your website details. 

When that pivotal search occurs, your information will be served up to the user on the search engine result page, with its position on the page, or rank, being determined by how well you’ve optimized all aspects of your website and user experience:  

  • Crawlability. Can the website be easily read by the crawler? For example, a crawler can easily read HTML, but will have difficulty understanding the content of images and videos.. 

  • Indexability. How easily can the pages be saved in a search engines’ library of pages to show users later on?

PSA: Both crawling and indexing are necessary prerequisites for solidifying (and boosting!) your ranking on a search engine results page (SERP). The higher the rank, the more people are likely to see your website and consequently, the more traffic you’ll get!


Since technical SEO has multiple moving parts that are intertwined with one another from both a content management and website perspective, you’ll need to leverage the proper technical SEO approach in order to foster valuable organic traffic growth while providing meaningful content for your visitors. We’re here to break down how to create a technical SEO strategy that properly optimizes your website — and drives the traffic your brand needs to flourish.


Your Three Step Guide to Seeing Technical SEO Improvements 

1. Audit your website for technical optimization opportunities. In order to build the right technical SEO strategy for your website, you’ll first need to audit what you already have to get an accurate picture of the places where improvements are necessary. When you run the proper caliber of audit on your website, you can: 

  • Identify if duplicate or similar content exists, and could be causing confusion within the search engines. This includes identifying duplicate metadata, redundant header tags (think H1, H2, and so forth), and repeating keywords. 
  • Pinpoint opportunities to restructure your website in a way that intuitively showcases both existing and net-new content like blogs, case studies, and service line pages. 
  • Get an accurate pulse of your page load speed, and whether it’s helping users to efficiently and smoothly navigate through your website.

While your audit will reveal where you can improve your technical SEO tactics, it will also naturally overlap with your content strategy. As you strategize and write new content like blogs, white papers, and case studies, you’ll want to keep technical SEO best practices top-of-mind. 

PRO-TIP: Once you’re done with your audit, we recommend making a road map of your priorities! This will act as your anchor throughout the process, and will properly integrate all the different parts of your strategy in a way that’s smooth and efficient. Remember, deploying an effective technical SEO approach is a marathon, and not a sprint!


2. Prioritize the technical optimization of your written and visual content first. Whether it’s evergreen or net new content, leveraging technical SEO best practices will allow crawlers to not only properly index new content, but breathe life into your existing content, as well! That’s why we recommend focusing on optimizing all page elements including videos and images. Making sure that every crawler touchpoint in your content is accounted for is key to growing your presence on search and driving greater traffic. 

3. Redesign your website with technical SEO in mind. Relying solely on a multimedia-heavy experience for your website might be aesthetically pleasing, but it won’t help crawlers inventory your content— in fact, it could keep searchers from ever finding it. But by either working with your company's web development team, or by partnering with a qualified web development company, you can redesign your website in a way that provides visitors with the valuable information they seek, and performs amazingly on the open web. 


Impactful, Real-World Results of Technical SEO

At Rise, we’ve directly seen how the right approach to technical SEO benefits our clients’ website traffic and search presence: 

Paired with a stellar content strategy, our technical SEO approaches drove… 

  • 88% YoY increase in YTD total website traffic for a leading children’s hospital. 

  • 174% YoY increase in top 10 ranking keywords for a national clothing retailer. 

  • 107% increase in traffic to optimized categories for a regional banking service.


Becoming a Technical SEO Tactician 

Knowing how to leverage technical SEO in content creation and website management is key to paving a clear way for users to organically reach your website. By using the tips we’ve outlined here, you can build a strategy that will drive greater traffic, boost your KPIs, and acquaint users with your brand. Both your website and organic search visibility will be all the stronger for it.

If you’re ready to begin your journey to an exceptionally-optimized website, contact our SEO experts today!

02/08/2023 at 02:00