Key Technical SEO Fixes for Better Performance and Rankings

Technical SEO is crucial for improving your website’s performance and rankings. Unlike on-page SEO, which focuses on content, technical SEO ensures that search engines can easily crawl, index, and understand your site. Fixing technical issues helps both users and search engines navigate your site better, enhancing user experience and boosting SEO. In this post, we’ll cover essential technical SEO fixes.

1. Improve Page Speed

Why It Matters:
A slow website can hurt user experience and lower your rankings. The faster your site loads, the higher your chances of ranking well on Google.

How to Improve It:

Compress Images: Large images slow down your site. Use tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to reduce file sizes without losing quality.
Leverage Browser Caching: This saves some website elements in visitors’ browsers, so they don’t need to reload them on every visit.
Minify Files: Reduce the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
Use a CDN: A Content Delivery Network stores your site’s files on multiple servers worldwide, speeding up load times.
Enable GZIP Compression: This compresses your web files, improving load speed.

2. Ensure Mobile Optimization

Why It Matters:
With mobile traffic making up over half of all web traffic, mobile optimization is a must. Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in rankings.

How to Improve It:

Responsive Design: Make sure your site adjusts to different screen sizes.
Touch-Friendly Navigation: Ensure buttons and links are easy to click on mobile.
Avoid Flash: Flash is not supported on many mobile devices and can slow your site.
Test Mobile Usability: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to identify and fix issues.

3. Ensure Crawlability and Indexation

Why It Matters:
Search engines need to crawl and index your website to rank it. If there are issues preventing search engines from accessing your site, they won’t be able to index your pages.

How to Improve It:

Create an XML Sitemap: Submit your sitemap to Google and Bing to help search engines find and index your pages.
Check Your Robots.txt: Make sure you’re not blocking important pages from being crawled.
Fix Broken Links: Use tools like Screaming Frog to identify and fix broken links.
Avoid Duplicate Content: Use canonical tags to signal to search engines which page is the preferred version.

4. Use Schema Markup

Why It Matters:
Schema markup helps search engines understand your content better and can lead to rich snippets in search results, improving visibility.

How to Improve It:

Add Schema to Key Pages: Apply schema markup to your homepage, product pages, and blog posts.
Use JSON-LD Format: Google recommends using JSON-LD for schema markup.
Validate Your Schema: Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure your markup is correct.

5. Install SSL Certificate (HTTPS)

Why It Matters:
Google treats HTTPS as a ranking signal. SSL certificates ensure data is encrypted between your website and users, which builds trust.

How to Improve It:

Install an SSL Certificate: Secure your site by moving from HTTP to HTTPS.
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS: Set up 301 redirects to ensure all traffic uses HTTPS.
Fix Mixed Content Issues: Ensure all elements on your site (images, scripts, etc.) are served over HTTPS.

6. Improve Internal Linking

Why It Matters:
Internal links help search engines understand the structure of your site. A strong internal linking system boosts SEO and makes navigation easier for users.

How to Improve It:

Link Important Pages: Ensure key pages, like services or product pages, are linked from the homepage and other main pages.
Use Descriptive Anchor Text: The text for internal links should clearly describe the linked page’s content.
Fix Orphan Pages: Pages with no internal links are called orphan pages. Make sure every page on your site is linked from at least one other page.

7. Fix Redirects and Errors

Why It Matters:
Broken links and excessive redirects can harm your SEO and user experience. Redirect chains, for example, can slow down your site and waste crawl budget.

How to Improve It:

Fix 404 Errors: Use tools like Google Search Console to find and fix broken links or redirect them to relevant pages.
Limit Redirect Chains: Redirect chains (e.g., URL A → URL B → URL C) should be avoided. Ensure redirects go directly to the final destination.

8. Optimize Core Web Vitals

Why It Matters:
Core Web Vitals are metrics Google uses to measure user experience. They include loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability—all of which affect your ranking.

How to Improve It:

Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Speed up your page loading times by optimizing images and reducing JavaScript execution.
Minimize First Input Delay (FID): Improve interactivity by optimizing JavaScript.
Fix Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Ensure your page elements stay in place by setting size attributes for images and ads.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is essential for improving both your website’s user experience and your rankings. By ensuring your site is fast, mobile-friendly, easy to crawl, secure, and well-structured, you can significantly improve its performance. Regular audits and timely fixes will help keep your site competitive in search results.

Start implementing these fixes today to enhance your website’s SEO and provide a better experience for your users.