Technical SEO Services: [The Ultimate Guide]

January 27, 2019
Pearl Lemon Team
Business, Local SEO, Local SEO London, SEO

A site that easily allows search engines to:

Crawl? Render? Index? Rank

Is ideal.

Once you’ve achieved this, your site’s ability to rank highly in the search engine results pages (SERPs) increases.

This will boost the amount of organic traffic you receive.

Many sites have technical bugs hindering their organic search performance.

Hiring a technical SEO Expert, or an SEO agency that will implement their Technical SEO Services is a viable solution.

This guide outlines everything you need to know about technical SEO services.

Why Should You Invest In Technical SEO Services?

When last did you test your website to ensure that it is search engine friendly?

Unfortunately, most sites have never been tested by the developers that created them.

When it comes to Technical SEO, it’s often the case that small mistakes grow into larger problems over time, preventing a site’s ability to be ranked in search engines.

‘A stitch in time saves nine’.

This is certainly the case when it comes to investing in technical search engine optimisation.

List of common technical SEO issues:

As an SEO agency, we offer a wide variety of technical SEO services depending on the needs of your site.

Here are some of the most common technical SEO errors. Check to see if your site has any of the following issues – if it does, don’t worry, we’re here to help – check out our Technical SEO Services.

1: Crawl Errors

Crawl errors can prevent your webpages from showing up in search engine results.

Put simply if you have crawl errors, your site won’t rank.

Identify Crawl errors: check to see if you have any crawl errors in Google Search Console.

Once you’ve logged in, click on “Coverage on the left-hand” side:

Google search console will highlight:

Errors – these are pages that can’t be indexed, and as a result, won’t show up in Google results resulting in a loss of traffic.

Valid with warnings – These are pages that have been indexed; however, there are some issues with. It might be the case that the page is showing up in Google, but perhaps you don’t want them to.

Valid – these are the number of pages that have been successfully indexed.

Excluded – These are the pages that were intentionally excluded and therefore, will not appear in Google search results.

Take action: If you notice that Google can’t access a page on your site, it’s important that you get it fixed as soon as possible – or call us, we’ll take care of it for you!

2: Google not being able to access your pages:

The Fetch as Google tool allows you to test how Google crawls or renders URLs on your site.

The tool enables you to:

see if Googlebot can access a page on your site
how it renders
identify if any of the resources on your site such as images are blocked to Googlebot

Assess how Google sees your site: To do this, use the search and render tool in Google search console and ‘fetch as Google’.

Take action: if Google is unable to access your site properly, your site won’t rank. It is vital that you resolve this issue – if you need help with Technical SEO, let’s chat!

3: Sites that aren’t mobile-friendly:

Mobile SEO is vital.

If your website isn’t optimised for mobile devices, it will have a negative impact on your rankings.

You can easily check if your site is mobile friendly.

Check your site speed: Google’s mobile-friendly test.

As a result of mobile-first indexing, Google will predominantly use the mobile version of your content for indexing and ranking.

Take action: If you do not get this result, and your site isn’t mobile-friendly – fix this ASAP!

4: Sites that aren’t secure

Google takes security very seriously.

They invest a lot into ensuring that search, Gmail, and google drive users have a secure connection to Google.

This involves using strong HTTPS encryption by default.

HTTPS is a confirmed ranking factor.

If you haven’t already, migrate your site to HTTPS.

Take action: Contact us – we’ll help you to migrate your site over to HTTPS without negatively affecting your SEO.

5: Broken links:

Broken links are very damaging to SEO.

They are links that don’t work.

This might be due to the fact a page has been removed or moved without a redirect being set up.

Clicking on a broken link will result in a 404 error message being shown.

It is vital that you remove or update broken links as they signal a low-quality site to search engines.

Identify if your site has any broken links: Head over to Dr Link Check and enter your URL.

Take action: If you have any broken links, it is best practice to update or remove them as soon as possible.

6: Duplicate Meta tags

Each URL should have a unique meta tag.

Use Google Search Console to identify duplicate meta tags: in Search Console go to ‘HTML Improvements’.

Take action: If you have duplicate meta descriptions, title tags, or meta descriptions that are too short, get them fixed to prevent this issue from negatively affecting your SEO.