By now, you’ve heard the term “search engine optimization.” Maybe you even know a thing or two about keyword research, meta descriptions, and producing high-quality content. But where many web pages fall short is actually beyond the content strategy — it’s the technical aspects of your website.
As you might guess, technical SEO focuses less on content and more on how search engine crawlers experience your site. It includes technical elements that help web crawlers efficiently crawl and index your pages to improve search engine rankings.
So what can you do about technical SEO? Our St. Louis digital marketing team at Integrity is here to break it down.
What is Technical SEO?
SEO is typically divided into three pillars:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
On-page SEO refers to the site’s content—what your target audience reads and interacts with. This includes keyword optimization, image alt text, content quality, and internal linking.
Off-page SEO focuses on building authority through backlinks and third-party validation to improve your domain name’s reputation.
Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of a website to ensure search engines can crawl and index it efficiently. This includes site architecture, page speed, mobile usability, canonical URLs, and more. These are all ranking factors that influence how your site appears in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Technical SEO is not a one-and-done fix. It’s an ongoing process requiring regular site audits to identify and address technical SEO issues.
What is Included in Technical SEO?
There are many key factors that fall under technical SEO. Integrity’s digital marketing team uses powerful tools like SEMrush for site audits, and references Google Search Console and the URL Inspection Tool to identify technical issues and enhance search visibility.
Here are some technical SEO best practices you should prioritize — and actionable tips you can start applying today:
Website Security (HTTPS vs. HTTP)
Tip: Make sure your website uses HTTPS by installing an SSL certificate. This boosts trust with users and search engines. Also, eliminate mixed content by ensuring all elements (like images and scripts) use secure URLs.
Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Tip: Use Google PageSpeed Insights to identify slow-loading pages. Focus on improving metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to reduce bounce rates.
Mobile Usability and Responsive Design
Tip: Test your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Update your design or layout if pages don’t function properly on mobile devices.
Broken Links
Tip: Run a site audit or use a broken link checker to locate dead links. Fix or redirect any broken internal or external links to preserve user experience and SEO authority.
Duplicate Content Issues and Canonical Tags
Tip: Consolidate duplicate pages using canonical tags. Ensure only one preferred version of each page is indexed by search engines.
Site Architecture and Structure
Tip: Simplify your site navigation so users can find any page within three clicks. Include an XML sitemap and submit it via Google Search Console.
URL Structure
Tip: Create clean, descriptive URLs that use hyphens and include keywords. Avoid long, cluttered slugs and unnecessary parameters.
Rich Snippets and Schema Markup
Tip: Implement schema markup for key pages like product pages or blog posts to enable rich snippets that improve your visibility and CTR.
International SEO
Tip: If your site serves multiple regions or languages, implement hreflang tags to guide search engines in serving the right version to the right user.
How Do I Know Where My Site Stands?
Start with a site audit to get a sense of where your technical SEO stands. Google Search Console, the URL Inspection Tool, and Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test are all free tools that offer valuable insights. They highlight technical SEO issues like crawl budget waste, slow page load time, and indexing problems.
If your internal team can’t tackle everything, don’t worry. Many technical aspects require collaboration between strategists, content creators, web developers, and SEO specialists.
That’s where Integrity comes in.
We have a full SEO marketing team in St. Louis who specializes in improving technical aspects of your website. Our team runs monthly site crawl reports and prioritizes findings into errors, warnings, and notices. We address issues like duplicate content, broken links, title tags, site structure, and crawlability. Our developers and marketers work together to optimize your site for organic search.
Partner with Integrity for Technical SEO
Whether you’re a blog post writer, online store owner, or managing a corporate website, maintaining technical SEO is the best way to boost your site’s performance. From fixing canonical URLs and optimizing for page experience to ensuring your web server is configured correctly, we do it all.
Want higher rankings and better user experience? Our digital marketing agency in St. Louis can help you identify and fix the technical aspects of a website that are holding you back.
Let’s make your site faster, stronger, and ready for more organic traffic. Contact Integrity today.
Additional Resources
- SEO Tips for Beginners
- Learn more about our SEO services
- Leading with Design: UX and SEO are More Intertwined Than Ever