How to do this Growth Hack and what can it do for you?
Technical SEO is one of the most fundamental aspects in the field of search engine optimization (SEO).
- Growth Hack Type : High volume depending on traffic
- Expected results : Reduction in the bounce rate of your website, in the user experience and directly or indirectly in your SEO
Why use this Growth Hack?
If you write quality content but your site has unresolved technical SEO issues, you will have a hard time ranking it among the top search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Technical SEO takes time and patience, but it is vital to sacrifice some time to optimize the technical aspect of your site if you hope to succeed in your web project.
To help you understand your first problems, test your site for free using the SEO software SE Ranking below:
How do you do this Growth Hack?
Here are 10 steps to carry out this Growth Hack that we will see in more detail:
- Optimize your website for mobile devices
- Create and optimize your XML sitemap
- 3 Increase the loading speed of your website
- Fix your site errors and warnings with weekly site audits
- Optimize internal links and try to get natural external links
- Include your main keywords in the image's alt text
- Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues
- Install an SSL certificate (HTTPS)
- Check and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console
- Find and fix broken links on your site
Now let's see in a few simple steps how to carry out an initial SEO audit of your website.
READ MORE: The 23 best SEO software for your website
1. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Google announced 2 years ago that theindexing of sites will be mobile-based first (mobile-first indexing).
So, today, having a mobile-friendly website is more important than ever. It's really the basis for technical referencing.
Several free tools are available on the web to check the mobile-friendliness of your website, for example:
The test Mobile Friendly (mobile-friendly) from Google will determine if your website meets Google's criteria for a mobile-optimized website.
It is very easy to use. You only have to insert the url of your site or the page of your choice.
Google (and the majority of the other tools) gives you the test result and some tips for correcting the problem with your site if necessary.
2. Create and optimize your XML sitemap
Les Sitemaps are needed by Google to find and index your web pages.
Although your site can be indexed by Google without sending a sitemap, it helps to speed up the indexing frequency of your website and at the same time it shows search engines the entire structure and URLs of your site.
If you are a WordPress user, you can generate it using free WordPress plugins such as Yoast or Google XML Sitemaps Generator. Otherwise, there are several online websites that allow you to generate your sitemap for free.
Once you've created the sitemap file, submit it to Google via the Google Search Console.
To do so, log into your Google Search Console account and go to Sitemaps -> Add a new sitemap, then press “Submit.”
Once your sitemap is successfully submitted, follow these best practices:
- Ensure that your pages are not blocked by the robots.txt file (this has nothing to do with your XML Sitemap)
- Prioritize high-quality pages in your site map
- If you have a large site with more than 50,000 URLs, use dynamic XML sitemaps.
For example, you can send your site's RSS feed as a sitemap.
3. Accelerate the loading speed of your website
Site speed is very important for search engines. Don't make the mistake. If your site is slow and takes up a lot
In time to respond, Google will apply a small penalty to your website. It is an evaluation criterion among the most important Google ranking factors.
This means that even if your content is great, your website will rank lower in the SERPs unlike if your website had a faster load time.
This is a technical SEO aspect that you simply cannot ignore.
You can use any of the following free tools to test the speed of your site:
If your site takes time to load, it can have a serious impact on the user experience. Follow these steps to speed up your website:
Optimize the images on your site
Use a compressed image format like PNG, JPG, or WEBP in the majority of your publications.
Use a tool like TinyPNG or iLoveIMG to further compress image files.
Enable browser caching
This allows you to temporarily store certain data on a visitor's computer, so they don't have to wait for it to load every time they visit your site.
Enable GZIP compression
According to Yahoo, enabling compression on your website can reduce HTML and CSS files by 50 to 70% and significantly increase site speed.
Reduce server response time
Google recommends keeping the server response time under 200ms.
This is why choosing a quality web host is very important for technical SEO:
.avif)
Use a content delivery system (CDN) like Cloudflare to increase the speed of your site.
4. Correct your site's mistakes by conducting technical SEO audits
You need to solve your on-page SEO problems by running a technical SEO audit regularly if you want to rank your site higher in the SERPs and keep the position.
So how do you carry out a technical SEO audit?
There are several tools on the market that can help you carry out your audit, SEMrush, Moz and Ahrefs are all great tools.
For my part, I use SE Ranking, which has a very interesting quality/price ratio and is very complete.
You can find my detailed review here: SE Ranking detailed review
If you don't have a budget, we recommend the free (limited) version of SEMrush which can already give you a great helping hand.
5. Optimize internal links
An internal link is a hypertext link that points to another page on the same website.
While internal links don't have the same influence on search rankings as external links, they still play a critical role in helping search engines understand your website's information hierarchy and establish a site architecture that's optimized for SEO.
So what is the easiest way to optimize the internal links on your site?
Moz recommends using descriptive keywords in the anchor text that give an idea of what keywords the source page is trying to target.
However, Google algorithms are being made very smart today to understand the content of pages.
6. Include your main keywords in image alternative text (ALT)
Google can't see the content of an image.
Instead, it uses metadata such as the image file name and image alternative text (ALT) to determine the content of an image. Text is used in an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.
.avif)
Generally, the best practice for alternative text is to keep it descriptive by making sufficient use of the main keywords you are targeting.
At the same time, make sure you don't stuff it with keywords to avoid having your site penalized.
Referencing images is not limited to adding alternative text.
The use and optimization of images helps to improve the user experience by offering content that is fluid and easy to read and therefore leads to an improvement in the performance of your site in search engines.
7. Use canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues
- You should always make sure to analyze your website and remove duplicate content on your site.
- You should never intentionally post content that already exists on other sites or on other pages on your site.
- Some CMS like Wordpress and Joomla can cause duplicate pages, especially if a page is accessible via multiple menus.
Several tools can help you detect duplicate content on your site: SE Ranking, SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you analyze and fix issues on your site.
That said, there are cases where duplicate content on your site cannot be avoided. In such cases, use canonical URLs.
Canonical URLs are useful when you replicate a blog post from one website to another. They are particularly useful if you manage an e-commerce site with hundreds of identical pages.
So, in order to avoid duplicate content and a Google penalty, set up a canonical URL using the rel-canonical tag. You can add the rel-canonical tag via the Yoast SEO plugin if you use WordPress or directly in the SEO settings of Webflow.
8. Install an SSL certificate for your website
Google has confirmed since 2014 that SSL certificates (HTTPS) are now a ranking parameter in SERPs.
Today, that is no longer an option.
If your site is not secure (HTTPS), you must get started.
The majority web hosting providers Or of domain names suchlike NameCheap, Contabo or GoDaddy offer the certificate free of charge with your accommodation.
9. Check and fix crawl errors in Google Search Console
Look for crawl errors in Google Search Console regularly and fix them quickly as they are serious technical SEO issues that can hurt your website's performance and hurt your search engine rankings.
Google Search Console offers you a range of features to indicate technical problems related to your site such as:
- non-existing pages (404),
- internal and external links with anchoring,
- pages that are not adapted to mobile phones,
- problems with structured data,
- The loading time of your pages
- and issues related to the user experience in general
10. Find and fix broken links on your site
Broken links are not only bad from a technical SEO perspective, but they can also hurt your site's user experience.
You don't want one of your users to land on a “404 Not Found” page. This just created a bad first impression and the user may never come back to your site again.
That's why you should check for broken links on your site regularly and fix them as they appear.
Tips and bonus resources for technical SEO
Technical SEO is a vast subject that requires constant monitoring and updating.
Here are some additional tactics you can use to optimize your site's technical SEO:
- Use Google AMP - AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. These pages are designed to load very quickly on mobile devices.
- Use Schema.org structured data
- Check and minimize the number of 301 redirects for your site: You can use a tool like SEMrush, SE Ranking or Broken Link Checker (see #10) to check and reduce the number of 301 redirects on your site.
- Always prefer subfolders over subdomains: It's a long ongoing debate, but most SEO experts agree that subfolders rank better on the SERPs than subdomains. Google's webmaster tips have also addressed this over and over again.
READ MORE: Learn how to conduct a thorough technical SEO audit
