Technical SEO is ensuring that a website has been configured correctly at a server level, has well-formatted sitemaps, has a good database structure, and canonicalisation is in place, amongst other things.

While offsite SEO (link building) may often steal the limelight in an SEO campaign, good technical and onsite is very powerful and still plays a very important part in Google’s ranking algorithm. Technical SEO cannot be faked – it takes a level of expertise and knowledge to know where to look for any potential issues, and to then interpret the data.

Getting it right with technical SEO excellence

With a new client (who has an existing site), the first thing that I do is conduct a technical SEO audit.

A thorough technical SEO audit covers over 250 individual points ranging from content and the use of robots, to crawl issues and code bloat.

The audit also takes into account the site’s URL structure and database structure, and includes a brief look at the site’s backlink profile in order to identify any spam, unwanted links or overcooked anchor text. A site can be technically sound with great content, but if the backlink profile has been overcooked there is a problem.

Google favours websites that are built with good structure and categorisation.

After conducting the audit, we then strategise how the site can be improved and make recommendations based on the issues raised in the audit.