8 Technical SEO Tips to Increase Website Traffic and Conversions

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to techniques that web designers and developers use to optimize your website so search engines, such as Google can understand and index your pages.

Although these improvements are invisible to your visitors, sites with well-executed technical SEO are more easily found by search engines and rank higher on search engine results pages. You need to regularly maintain and adapt your site so that it keeps up with constantly changing web standards and search engine algorithms.

Technical SEO vs. on-page SEO vs. off-page SEO

SEO can be broadly broken up into three related areas: Technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

Technical SEO involves improving your site architecture, reducing the time it takes to load, ensuring it loads properly on all devices, such as desktops and smartphones, and tightening up security.

On-page SEO, sometimes known as content-focused SEO, is related to the text, images and videos on your site. Off-page SEO encompasses activities that boost your search engine rankings such as building backlinks, gathering online reviews and managing your online reputation.

Technical SEO tips to increase traffic and conversions

If you’re building a website for the first time or you want to improve your current site’s rankings, follow these eight tips.

1. Optimize your site structure.

Ensure your website’s layout is simple, logical and easy for people and search engines to use.

Seven ways you can do this include:

• Set up a clear structure: Adopt a pyramid structure for your content, starting with your homepage at the top with category pages below that and individual posts or product pages below that.
• Keep things simple: Flat architecture sites work best so make sure no page takes more than three to four clicks to reach from the home page.
• Use simple, descriptive URLs: Make sure your URLs reflect the structure of your site like this page: business.com (URL)/articles (category)/descriptive-title (individual post).
• Link related pages together: Spread link equity around your site to help visitors and search engines find more of your content.
• Create a sitemap: XML sitemaps help search engines to understand your site’s structure and find all the important pages. You can submit a new one every time you change your content on Google Search Console.
• Use breadcrumb navigation: For example, on this page at the top, you can see “Home > Marketing > Marketing Strategy.” These help visitors and search engines know where they are on your site.
• Identify and fix crawl errors: Check Google Search Console regularly to find these. Crawl errors are issues that stop search engines from accessing the pages on your site properly and are typically caused by broken and incorrect links that Google Console can help you identify.

2. Use metadata through your site.

Metadata helps search engines understand the structure and meaning of the content on your site. Your visitors don’t see it but metadata helps search engines show your pages correctly in search results.

You can add or edit metadata directly in the HTML code of your site. Metadata you should concentrate on includes:

• Title tags: Create unique, clear titles for each web page, ideally 50-60 characters long, to help search engines and visitors know what the page contains. Power words like “best,” “effective” and “proven” can catch searchers’ eyes.
• Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions are short summaries of a web page’s content. Aim to write engaging meta descriptions of around 150-160 characters. A great approach is using the first 100 characters to introduce the topic and then ending with a call to action that encourages people to click on your page in search results.
• Header tags: These are different-sized headings used to organize your content. Use H1 for your main title and H2-H6 for subheadings to create a clear structure. In the way this page is structured, you could have your H2 as “Technical tips” and H3s like “2. Use metadata through your site” to structure the narrative.
• Image alt text: This is the text you see if an image can’t load. This helps Google link the context of the image to the content of the text and can help users with accessibility issues understand what’s on the page better.
• Structured data: This is a way you can give search engines extra details about the content on the page. You can use schema markup to tell search engines whether a page is a blog, a product page or a review, for example.
• Open Graph and X Card tags: These control how your page looks when you or someone else shares it on social media. Use them to make sure your content looks its best when shared on platforms like Facebook and X.
• Semantic HTML5 elements: These are tags that contain details on the type of content part of a webpage contains. Use tags like <nav>, <header>, <article> and <footer> to clearly define different parts of your page.

3. Make your website secure.

HTTPS stands for hypertext transfer protocol secure. This is a secure version of HTTP that transfers data between your browser and a website more safely by using encryption.

You can improve your site security by taking these steps:

• Buy an SSL/TLS certificate: A valid secure sockets layer ( SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) digital certificate proves your website’s identity to users and browsers. It also encrypts the connection to improve privacy.
• Redirect HTTP pages to HTTPS: If your site is older, you may have a few pages that are still on an HTTP connection. You should recreate the page, assign it an HTTPS URL and then set up 301 redirects to take visitors that land on the old page to the new page.
• Update internal links: This is also for companies with older websites, make sure you go through all the internet links on each page of your site to check that none of them still point to an HTTP address. If you do find one, you should point it to the HTTPS address instead.
• Eliminate mixed content: On older sites, your pages may show in the browser as HTTPS but they could be loading images and other assets from an older HTTP directory. If that’s the case, you’ll get a mixed content warning in the browser. You should make sure all content comes from an HTTPS location.
• Implement HTTP strict transport security (HSTS): This security feature ensures that a visitor’s browser only connects to your site on a secure HTTPS connection. This protects your customers even if they accidentally type in ‘http’ instead of ‘https’ in the URL.
• Keep your certificate current: Remember to keep your SSL/TLS certification up to date by renewing it before it expires. If you don’t, that will trigger browser security warnings that could put off visitors.

4. Improve your website performance.

Selecting a web hosting service is important for optimizing your website.

Make sure you select a host with minimal downtime since this can hurt rankings. The first time Google finds nothing there when it crawls your site, each page on your website could drop two ranking spots. If the search engine’s spiders keep finding nothing to crawl, Google visits your site less often and it’s hard to come back from that. 

The best website hosting service offers better website download speeds. Slow loading sites are bad for user experience and search engines will penalize you with lower rankings. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or WebPageTest to check how fast your site is and get suggestions on how to improve it. [Related article: How Page Load Speed Impacts Your Customer]

For a deeper dive into performance, GTMetrix offers an analysis of how you perform against Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics. They not only assess the speed of your site but also the quality of the user experience.

If you run a GTMetrix test, your results will look something like this:

Here is a GTmetrix assessment of a website with good technical SEO. Total blocking time refers to the length of time scripts hold up your page when loading. Source: GTmetrix

Here’s what each web vital means:

• Largest contentful paint: This is how long it takes for a user to see the majority of the content on a page. Aim for 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to next paint: This metric is concerned with how long a visual update takes to appear following an interaction by a user. An example of this could be the time it requires for a drop-down menu to appear once you’ve clicked on an option on the main navigation menu. A good score is less than two-tenths of a second while a bad score is more than five-tenths.
• Cumulative layout shift: Have you ever been on a website where it takes a long time for the text and images to settle in the right place? This is known as cumulative layout shift and Google doesn’t like it. To score top marks, make sure that, when the page loads, everything is where it should be within a tenth of a second.

Some of these metrics will be affected by your host speed or the coding on your site. To find further improvements in performance, take these steps:

• Optimize images: Large images can slow down website speed. You can use online tools to compress your images to much smaller sizes without losing any quality. Many web hosts now automatically optimize images so you don’t have to worry about it. Consider setting up lazy loading on your page so that images only load when needed.
• Minify code: During a web build, there might be lots of left-over and used HTML, CSS and JavaScript remaining from features or functions you later dropped. Remove as much as you can reduce the size of your page and minimize the chance of browser errors. WordPress has plug-ins that will minify your code for you.
• Turn on compression: Tools like Gzip and Brotli send down compressed versions of your pages that your browser then unzips to speed up loading times.
• Activate browser caching: With caching, your browser downloads files like images and stylesheets and stores them for later use. This means that when visitors come back, the pages load faster.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN): Many web hosts offer CDNs ─ they’re interconnected webs of servers around the world that deliver your site. When someone visits your site, it’s the server nearest to them that they connect to.
• Optimize cascading style sheets (CSS) delivery: CSS is the code that controls how your site looks. To help pages load faster for users, load the most important CSS like fonts and page layouts first and delay loading non-essential styles like animations and icon sets.
• Give page elements specific dimensions: By specifying the exact height of videos, images and Lottie JSON files, you’ll score better on the cumulative layout shift metric.

5. Make your website responsive.

Nearly 60 percent of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, according to Statista. This is why a mobile-friendly website design is not optional anymore; it’s a key SEO requirement that companies need to adopt. [Related article: How to Transform Your Static Site Into a Responsive Website]

In 2019, Google prioritized indexing the mobile version of new websites first. Although it has not been announced yet, most SEO experts believe that Google will be mobile-first for the entire web soon, so you should start preparing for that to happen. 

6. Eliminate duplicate content on your website.

Google strongly dislikes plagiarized or copied content. It dislikes duplicate content (the same content on two or more pages of a site) slightly less but it can still harm your rankings. Here’s how to find out whether your site has any duplicate content:

Use Siteliner to check for duplicate content on your website. Source: Siteliner

Go to Siteliner ─ it’s free. Enter your website address and click “Go.” You’ll see this:

Siteliner shows a summary of duplicate, common and unique content. Source: Siteliner

Then, click “Duplicate content” to the right of the chart. You’ll see this:

Here, Siteliner shows the results of duplicates on usa.gov. Source: Siteliner

Sometimes, duplicate content appears because you have not specified a canonical URL. A canonical URL tells Google that you realize that there are multiple pages on your site with the same content but that there’s one preferred URL that you want Google to index and leave out the rest. 

Without this, Google would, for example, consider the following URLs as different pages and penalize you for duplicate content:

• http://www.example.com 
• http://www.example.com/index.html  
• http://example.com   
• http://example.com/index.html 

Installing this manually can be difficult, especially for those without much experience in creating, uploading and maintaining sites. Look for plugins that can automate the process for you on your WordPress dashboard.

7. Ready your site for global audiences.

The internet has made going global much faster and more manageable than ever before. If you want to expand your e-commerce store internationally, you need to make sure that you reach customers in various countries who may speak a different language.

Follow these technical SEO tips to optimize your website for a global audience:

• Use language tags: The HTML tag <hreflang> tells search engines what language you’re using on a page and which country you’re targeting. This makes it easier for search engines to include your site in the right local results.
• Structure your URLs for different markets: Mark out in your URL structure the language and country you’re targeting and be consistent. Choose either subdirectories (like business.com/de and business.com/uk) or top-level domains (like business.de or business.co.uk).
• Use geotargeting in Google Search Console: Following up on the last tip, set your target country in Google Search Console if you’re using top-level domains to help Google better understand which version of your site visitors should see in specific countries.
• Localize your content: Google and artificial intelligence translation tools are excellent however they do have their limitations. Consider getting a native speaker to translate each page on your site so it contains idioms, nuances and cultural references that would appeal to the audience in a specific country.
• Create language-specific sitemaps: Indicate to search engines which content belongs to each site variant by creating and uploading separate sitemaps for each language version.

8. Enhance your site’s interactivity.

One great way to get visitors to stay on your site is by making it more interactive. The two key tools web designers and developers use to do this are JavaScript and dynamic content.

JavaScript is a programming language that powers on-site animations, pop-up menus, multimedia and more. JavaScript often powers the dynamic content that appears on a website so that it changes what it displays according to information it receives from a database and the actions and/or preferences of visitors.

Four ways you can improve your site’s interactions with users that work well from a technical SEO standpoint are:

• Server-side rendering: Instead of processing JavaScript on your browser, the server does that instead. This is effective for sites that update frequently and have a lot of content as it makes the page structure easier to see for search engines.
• Dynamic rendering: The interactive elements of your website are designed for humans to use, not search engines. With dynamic rendering, your website visitors see the standard version of your site but search engines get a static and prerendered HTML version. This improves site crawlability.
• Progressive enhancement: This is a version of dynamic rendering but for human visitors. Not everyone will be using the latest browser so when someone using an older version with less functionality visits, they get a simplified version of your site.
• AJAX optimization: If content loads dynamically on parts of some of your pages (like a stock ticker or social media feed), you may be using Ajax. So that your content is visible to search engines (even the dynamic content), use correct URLs in your site’s routing and apply the History API to update the URL dynamically to stop your page from reloading unnecessarily.

The importance of a solid technical SEO strategy

Improving technical SEO on your website will deliver a significant measurable impact on your business. If the content on your site and your competitors’ sites are good, better technical SEO may help you outrank them because Google finds and lists your pages more often. 

With so much web traffic coming from smartphones and tablets, you need to make sure your brand and its products and services are seen when people want them on whatever device they’re using. Each search is a potential sales opportunity. 

It’s not just about search engines, though. Simple improvements, such as making your site easy to navigate and ensuring it loads quickly, mean that your visitors have a better experience. People will stay on your site, explore what you have to offer and be more likely to buy or contact you.