Even if you tick off of the boxes on your on-page SEO checklist, there are still a few other barriers you may need to knock down to get the rankings you want. Let’s dive in.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO, like the name implies, focuses on your website’s technical aspects and how they may hinder or help your rankings. While there are a ton of factors that come into play, here are the top ten that you should look at when auditing your site’s technical SEO.
- Speed – How quickly does the site load? Check both desktop and mobile speeds. It matters because people won’t stick around to wait for your site to load – they’ll simply go elsewhere.
- Crawlability – A crawler is one of three parts of a search engine. Crawlability is basically how easy it is for a crawler to roam around your website to find new or revised versions of it. There are ways to block crawlers, which impacts the site’s crawlability.
- Broken links – Links that don’t work not only bum humans out, they bum search engines out, too. Make sure all links on your site function correctly – and fix them if they don’t!
- Duplicate content – Defined as sections of copy or content that are the same (or nearly the same), duplicate content is something to avoid.
- Security status – Adding an SSL certificate to your site, whether you have a checkout or login page or not, is good for your SEO. It also builds trust.
- Mobile-friendliness – Not only are an increasing percentage of people accessing the internet on their smartphones, but search engines place more weight on mobile-friendly designs.
- Structured data – Making sure you have code in a specific format, called Schema, allows search engines to read the codes more clearly and use it to show search results in a more user-friendly way.
- XML sitemap – Adding an XML sitemap makes it easier for search engines to find your site’s pages.
- Multilingual optimization – Is your business in multiple locations with multiple languages? If so, optimizing your site in those languages is good for both SEO and your users.
- Metadata optimization – Every site has metadata, and it can be optimized using keywords to ensure it appears on relevant searches.
Off-page SEO linking
It may surprise you that what is happening on your website isn’t the only essential criteria used to impact ranking. In fact, what is going on outside your website is just as important.
Off-page SEO focuses on the variables taking place outside of your website that impact your ranking status. Essentially, you want to build up an excellent reputation for your site so that Google knows you are credible. While you can’t pick up the phone and call Google to make your case, you do have several tools available to you.
When people love you, they talk. And when they don’t? They talk even louder, both online and off. Reviews and recommendations speak loudly to Google, and, over time, an abundance of great reviews will tip the scales in your favor. Think of these as a digital megaphone. It’s important to focus on improving the product or service you’re offering because happy customers are your greatest asset to rank high authentically.
Links to your site are secret weapons that Google heavily relies on to determine a site’s trustworthiness. When businesses or other influential sites link back to your website, this is a digital thumbs up to Google that your site can be visited and shopped on with confidence. Over time, the more links your site has pointing back to it, the more popular you become. Just like with reviews, the opposite is also true; poor experiences speak loudly. If low-quality links point back to you, you will damage your reputation and possibly get penalized.
Get help ranking your website
If you’re considering attempting SEO on your own, hats off to you. There are a wide range of SEO services and offerings out on the market, but it’s important to remember that SEO is a saturated market and you get what you pay for. Be wary of SEO “experts” that promise quick fixes or overpromise results. It’s a good idea to interview several agencies and ask for case studies to confirm that they deliver what they say they will.
We would love the opportunity to earn your trust. Get a free SEO audit of your website today.