Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimizations that make a website search engine friendly.
It involves ensuring that the website’s technical aspects are sound, so search engines can easily understand, crawl, and index, understand its content.
By optimizing your website technically, you can improve your online visibility and attract more organic traffic.
This blog will walk you through the importance of technical SEO for website performance and highlight how hiring SEO services can help you maintain a strong online presence.
Let’s begin!
Benefits of Technical SEO for Small Businesses
Technical SEO plays an essential role in the success of small businesses online. Beyond just improving search engine rankings, it offers a range of advantages that can significantly affect visibility, user experience, and traffic.
1. Improved Search Engine Rankings
Technical SEO involves optimizing various backend elements of your website, such as site speed, mobile-friendliness, and structured data markup.
When these elements are optimized, search engines can crawl, interpret, and index your site more effectively.
As a result, your website becomes likelier to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords.
2. Increased Organic Traffic
Higher rankings due to effective technical SEO practices translate directly into increased organic traffic. Organic traffic refers to visitors who find your website through unpaid search results.
By ensuring your site is technically sound and follows best practices recommended by search engines, you attract more qualified traffic interested in your products or services.
3. Enhanced User Experience
Technical SEO isn’t just about search engines; it’s also about improving the overall user experience (UX).
A well-optimized website loads faster, has intuitive navigation, and is responsive across all devices. This seamless user experience encourages visitors to explore your site further, consume your content, and ultimately convert into customers or leads.
4. Competitive Edge in Local Search
For small businesses targeting local markets, technical SEO is indispensable.
Website optimization for local SEO involves strategies like creating a Google My Business profile, which ensures consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) information across directories, and optimizing for local keywords.
Statistical reports show that 64% of online consumers use Google My Business posts to search local businesses and 94% of the total calls made to these businesses come from GMB listings.
This optimization helps your business appear in local search results when potential customers are looking for products or services in their area, giving you a competitive edge over businesses that neglect local SEO.
How Technical SEO Can Boost Online Visibility for Small Businesses
The digital world has become quite competitive and colossal with over 2 billion websites currently online.
This is why small businesses often face the challenge of standing out among larger, more established competitors.
One of the most effective ways to level the playing field is through Technical SEO.
This powerful strategy focuses on optimizing the behind-the-scenes elements of your website, ensuring that it not only meets search engine requirements but also provides an exceptional user experience.
Here’s how Technical SEO can significantly enhance your online visibility:
1. Crawling and Indexing: Ensuring Your Content Gets Discovered
Think of search engines as vast libraries and your website as a book that needs to be cataloged.
Search engines use crawlers (bots) to scour the internet, discovering and indexing new content. However, if your website isn’t optimized, crawlers might miss important pages or fail to index your content altogether.
By improving elements like your site’s XML sitemap, robots.txt file, and internal linking structure, you can ensure that these crawlers efficiently navigate and index your site.
2. Site Speed: Keeping Users Engaged and Search Engines Happy
If your website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to click away, leading to higher bounce rates and lower conversion rates.
But it’s not just users who care about speed—search engines do too.
Google announced in 2018 that both desktop and mobile site load times will be factors in the page’s rankings.
A faster website not only improves the user experience but also signals to search engines that your site is well-maintained and user-friendly.
3. Mobile-Friendliness: Reaching Your Audience on Every Device
Did you know that more than 70% of online traffic is from mobile devices?
A report by WARC also shows that the mobile marketing market is expected to reach 25.5 billion USD in 2025 , up from 10.5 billion USD in 2019, with 72% of people predicted to use only mobile devices for internet access.
So, having a mobile-friendly website is no longer an option—it’s paramount.
Search engines prioritize mobile-optimized websites in their rankings, especially since Google switched to “mobile-first indexing”, meaning it now predominantly considers your content on mobile devices for indexing and ranking.
By implementing a responsive design, optimizing for touchscreens, and ensuring fast mobile loading times, you make sure that your website is accessible and functional on all devices.
4. Structured Data: Enhancing Search Engine Understanding
Structured data, often referred to as schema markup, is like giving search engines a cheat sheet to understand your website’s content.
By adding structured data to your site, you help search engines interpret your content more accurately, which can result in rich snippets—those eye-catching bits of information like star ratings, prices, or event dates that appear directly in the SERPs.
For small businesses, rich snippets can be a game-changer, making your listing stand out from competitors and attracting more clicks.
5. Security: Building Trust with Users and Search Engines
Online security is a major concern for both users and search engines.
Websites that are secure, typically indicated by HTTPS rather than HTTP, are favored in search rankings. This is because HTTPS protects users’ data, providing a safer browsing experience.
For small businesses, ensuring your site is secure with an SSL certificate not only improves your SEO but also builds trust with your audience, encouraging them to engage with your content and services.
6. Eliminating Duplicate Content: Avoiding Penalties and Confusion
A Raven Tools study reveals that around 29% of web pages contain duplicated content.
Duplicate content can confuse search engines and dilute the visibility of your original pages.
Google specifically says that duplicate content won’t get your website in trouble unless it’s used to deceive search engines. Google is good at selecting the best version of duplicate content to display in search results, so you don’t have to worry too much about it.
However, if search engines find multiple pages with similar content, they may struggle to determine which version to rank, potentially leading to lower rankings for all versions.
By conducting regular audits and using canonical tags, you can signal to search engines which content is the primary source, helping to consolidate your rankings and improve your visibility.
Boosting Online Visibility: A Small Business Superpower
For small businesses, technical SEO isn’t just a set of best practices—it’s a powerful tool that can help you compete with larger players in your industry.
By optimizing your website’s technical elements, you improve the chances of being discovered, keep users engaged, and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.
So, gear up your website with technical SEO and watch your small business rise above the competition!
Technical SEO Checklist
If you want to improve your website’s technical SEO, here is a checklist of things you can do:
Website structure optimization:Ensure that your website is easy to navigate and well-structured. Use clear headings and subheadings, and create a sitemap so that search engines can easily understand your website’s content.
Improve your website’s loading speed: Use a content delivery network (CDN) to improve your website’s loading speed. Minify and combine your CSS and JavaScript files, and optimize your images.
Make your website mobile-friendly: Design your website to be responsive, so that it looks good on all devices.
Submit your website to search engines: Once you have optimized your website technically, submit it to search engines so that they can index your content.
All in all, technical SEO is an important aspect of online marketing.
By optimizing your website technically, you can enhance your SERP rankings, increase organic traffic, and provide a better user experience. If you want to improve your website’s performance, be sure to invest in technical SEO and hire professional SEO services.
At Search Berg, we offer a wide range of comprehensive search engine optimization services and SEO solutions for small businesses.
Let our knowledgeable team help your small business reach new heights with tailored search engine optimization services. Hire our SEO services today for audience-centric optimized content.