Introduction
According to Forbes, organic search contributes 17% to overall website traffic. Essentially, organic search traffic indicates how well your website's content matches what people are searching for.
A well-optimized site can significantly enhance the rate of organic traffic coming to your website and aid in their retention.
Technical SEO is a process that optimizes your website and helps search engine crawlers, often called Spiders, to find, crawl, index, and finally rank your website in the Search Engine Reference page (SERF).
One of the key players behind this optimization is a Technical SEO Specialist. This backend expert not only ensures that your website ranks well on search engines but is also user-friendly and easily navigable for the audience.
In this blog, let's explore in detail the tasks performed by technical SEO specialists and how they enhance the marketing strategy. This blog also delves deep into how technical SEO specialists create the foundation for the entire content and marketing strategy's success.
What is a Technical SEO Specialist?
The Technical SEO Specialist ensures that your content is readable not only by your target audience (humans!) but also by search engines. All that makes your website discoverable and readable for search engine crawlers is the job of a Technical SEO Specialist.
A technical SEO expert's job on the user front is to smoothen the reader's experience on your website to increase organic traffic and minimize bounce rate.
On the backend, a Tech SEO Specialist improves the elements that contribute to the search engine to crawl, index, and rank the content of your website.
What Are the Tasks Performed by a Technical SEO Expert?
SaaS marketing agencies like Infrasity that assist early-stage startups have technical SEO consultants who begin with a thorough audit of technical SEO to ascertain the weak points. On the foundation of an optimized technical SEO rests the entire content and marketing strategy.
A staggering statistic analyzed by CXL concludes that new sites encounter an average bounce rate of 56.52%. That's a lot of people coming to your website but bouncing out. A technical SEO expert performs various tasks to retain the generated organic traffic.
Some of the most critical tasks of a search engine optimization expert are:
Technical SEO Site Audits
Audits provide a bird's-eye view of the health of your website's technical SEO and structure. It allows you to see a host of errors that could hurt your website's performance, such as broken links, duplicated content, missing meta tags, and much more.
The audit is like a report card of your website that tells its strengths and weaknesses. The job of fixing the weak points is of the technical SEO consultant.
Some of the technical SEO tool that can help in site audit are Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush.
Mobile-Friendliness
According to Statista, as of 2024, mobile devices account for a staggering 62.54% of all web traffic worldwide. With such a high volume of users accessing websites on their mobile, optimizing your website to become mobile-friendly is an urgent need.
Check for Duplicated Content
If a search engine crawler finds similar content on several pages of your website, it can confuse them as to which one is original, potentially splitting or lowering overall ranking.
The technical SEO expert tackles duplicate pages in case of content syndication or repetition by adding Canonical tags to the URL of the content to tell Google crawlers which version of content to see as original or by adding 301 redirects to point to the preferred original page.
Optimize Website Loading Speed
According to research, 40% of readers bounce off if the page's loading time exceeds 3 seconds.
To prevent this staggering bounce rate, Tech SEO experts pay keen attention to maintaining a fast loading speed to retain readers.
Google's page speed insights tool helps you to check your website speed; it also marks your website's performance across several metrics like speed index, blocking time, etc., on a scale of 0 to 100. The higher your website scores, the better!
Optimizing the Landing Pages - Reducing Bounce Rate
An informative and relevant landing page can be the difference between a conversion and a bounce-out. This is precisely what the Tech SEO expert does to retain organic traffic.
Suppose you start a great advertising campaign in order to bring in more traffic. The generated organic traffic comes to your website following the advertisement. However, if an informative and accessible landing page does not welcome them, this traffic will not be sustained.
Sitemaps Optimization
A sitemap is a document or file that lists all the pages contained in your website in order to help search engine crawlers discover and index your website in a more efficient manner.
Sitemaps offer a bird's eye view of your website, assisting the crawler in understanding your website's structure better so that it does not miss out on crawling any important page.
The Technical SEO expert ensures the creation of a comprehensive XML sitemap for your site and sees that no unnecessary page is indexed (put no index tags).
Optimize Site Architecture
Site architecture refers to how pages are linked to your website. As previously mentioned, Google crawler moves through links from one page to another. Therefore, effectively linking the pages of your website is necessary to get them crawled and indexed.
An SEO-friendly site architecture creation is the Tech SEO consultant's job, who must ensure that most pages are just 2-3 clicks away from the homepage.
Managing Broken Pages and Links
Broken links (like 404 errors) can frustrate your readers, making them bounce out of your website. A tech SEO expert regularly performs site audits to check if there are any broken links or pages. For instance, see the below audit report on broken links.
How Does a Technical SEO Expert Make Your Website Mobile Friendly?
A technical SEO expert generally uses a combination of components to make websites mobile-friendly. Such as:
1. Compressing Images to Improve Loading Time
Chunky images can make your website slower to load and cause readers to leave your website. The visual assets, therefore, need to be compressed to be handled quickly by mobile devices.
2. Decluttered And Simplistic Web Page
Keep the interface simple and not riddled with too many options. Decluttered space is integral for a smaller screen size.
3. Compatible Fonts And Button Placements
The mobile device screen is much smaller; therefore, maintaining the correct font size is essential to enhance user experience. If the reader has to constantly zoom in to read texts, then the chances of them leaving your website, despite good content, increase. Additionally, the button sizes and placements should also be optimized to be compatible with the screen size of a mobile device. CTAs should be strategically placed to attract attention and get clicks.
4. Minimize Pop-Ups
Too many pop-ups can hamper the user experience and make them bounce out of your website.
Conclusion
A technical SEO specialist is a backend expert responsible for various tasks like improving website speed, ensuring the website's mobile-friendliness, and creating sitemaps and backlinks. They are integral to any business looking to build an online presence.
This blog did a deep dive into the tasks performed by a Technical SEO specialist, ranging from undertaking a comprehensive audit of your website and rectifying any error that could potentially have an adverse effect on user experience or make it inefficient for the search engine crawler to discover and index your website.
Book a demo with Infrasity for a technical SEO expert to take care of your website and complete technical SEO optimization.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What Does a Technical SEO Specialist Do?
A technical SEO specialist is essentially a backend expert who optimizes your website to make it discoverable and navigable for Google Spider bots.
The job also entails fixing technical SEO issues and conducting extensive SEO analysis to rectify any loose ends like broken links, incomplete or missing meta tags, duplicate content, etc.
Some commonly used technical SEO tools are:
- Semrush (keyword research)
- Screaming Frog (for SEO audits)
- Google Page Insights (for page speed and website performance score)
2. Does Your Startup Need a Technical SEO Consultant?
To answer whether your startup needs dedicated personnel to handle technical SEO, you first need to assess your goals and priorities. A technical SEO expert’s job encompasses all the behind-the-scenes actions that make your content accessible to both the search engine crawlers as well as the end user.
The Technical SEO consultant works to create a foundation for the content and marketing strategies and becomes essential as your company grows.
3. What Are the Reasons Why SEO Specialists Should Master Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a great tool that gives you a comprehensive view of organic traffic generated with respect to several metrics, such as specific periods and audience search patterns. This insight is invaluable for a technical SEO specialist who does regular audits to monitor the organic traffic coming to the website.