Big enterprises have many resources to market their brand, products, and attract more customers.
They have large marketing budgets so they don’t look for the shortcuts or freeways, even if their experiments fail they can again cash in and make the necessary arrangements to achieve the companies desired goals.
Whereas small businesses are short on marketing budgets and some are run by the owner itself he/she is the person wearing all the hats at once like:
- Handling the accounts
- Distribution
- Stock handling
- Marketing
All in one. Without any doubt it’s a very challenging task to handle all of these departments by a single person, thus have no rooms for mistakes.
Large businesses have different teams to take care of all these necessary arrangements, but as we are running a small business wearing all hats or a small team we should know the benefits and technicalities of SEO.
First of all, we need to understand what is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a process of making necessary arrangements for any website according to the Search engine’s technical aspects with keeping in mind to reach a higher ranking on SERPs.
This process consists of:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Executing
- Website architecture
Now some people might be thinking, why is technical SEO important?
We can invest thousands of dollars in creating the best website with the best content, but if our technical SEO is not up to the standards?
We can get it all messed up, and in return, we are not going to rank.
Any search engine especially Google wants to provide its users with the best results for their search query.
Before representing our website to the users, first Search engines need to crawl, render, and index our website to understand what our website is all about and what are the elements involved in it.
But don’t think technical SEO includes only these aspects, In fact, there are many other things involved in it.
For example – when a developer creates a website, we as a user only see the user interface, different pages, pictures, thumbnails, content categories and etc.
But, how these elements are shown to us, involves many technicalities of a website that the developer executes at the back end.
Up till here, we hope at least we were able to convey what is technical SEO and its importance.
Further, we are going to elaborate on the factors involved in technical SEO
Factors Involved in Technical SEO for Small Online Businesses
Site architecture
Site architecture is just like building architecture, it conveys the message where is a particular content, indexes all the titles and contents to instantly provide the relevant content to the user.
Just like a textbook index page, it makes it easy to access every topic directly from the index page rather than searching every single page again and again.
Now the search engines use robots to crawl our website, these crawlers don’t miss out a step so they crawl every single page every sentence available on our website.
But there are different ways if we want to give limited access to these crawlers, we can command the crawler to not follow the page we prefer not to show it.
- Robots.txt
By using the robots.txt file we can give commands to the robots on our website. Which is quite a sensitive issue so handle it carefully.
Even a small mistake can unintentionally prevent robots from crawling over our website.
Robots.txt files contain specific codes that tell the browser how our website works, and how should it display our website.
- The meta-robots tag
If we want a search engine robot to crawl the page but don’t index it on search engine results pages we can give commands through the meta-robots tag, we can also ask to crawl as well as not follow the links on a page.
- Building a sitemap
A sitemap is a guideline for the crawlers, it helps in crawling our website by arranging what is important, and how to find a certain page, it’s quite necessary to build an XML Sitemap which is not invisible to the users or an HTML sitemap which is visible to the users in our footer.
Fast website speed
Users searching for any query on the internet are mostly impatient, so people don’t want to wait for a page to open, according to research by Google 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if the website doesn’t load faster.
So if our website is slow to meet the expectation of the users, we will certainly lose out the traffic.
While ranking any website Google ensures the optimal experience of the website and the slow loading speed of a website is below optimal experience, thus we can end up lower in rankings on SERPs.
To check the speed of our website we can use Google’s speed checker.
Mobile-friendliness
With the grown importance of mobile and smartphones in our daily lives, the use of the internet on mobile devices is also increased.
Moreover, people prefer surfing the internet through smart devices, so if our website is not optimized for mobile, we are at a serious disadvantage.
Mobile-friendly design means ensuring that our website is good and accessible on mobile screens, now this doesn’t mean we need to create a separate version of our website but rather we can tune our website to be more responsive.
We can test how mobile-friendly is our website by using Google’s mobile-friendly test.
Use SEO tools to find duplicate content on your Small Online Business
When we have a large database of content on our site, it’s difficult to remove or update any content which is why they are not indexed, thus hiding our content from the user’s approach.
In recent research, according to Word press statistics “users produce more than 70 million new posts each month” with this much capacity of content being uploaded over the internet it’s very hard to rank higher in SERPs.
But unique content is the first step to rank higher in the SERPs, so very first we need to ensure that our content is unique and valuable for the users.
Now, how can we do that?
Well before publishing any content, we can check plagiarism online to detect any duplication while comparing sentence to sentence and word to word with other tons of online published contents.
If at all any part of our content is duplicated, we should make the necessary changes to our content.
To give a unique and valuable look to the audience, thus building trust and credibility of our website. Which is certainly a key factor for the search engines to rank us high on the SERPs.
Conclusion
Technical SEO is a daunting task, but it’s essential to ensure that our all efforts are crafted well enough to rank higher in the SERPs.
One cannot work without the other, just writing good content or having nice products on our website is not enough.
But properly arranging it, making the navigation easy, précising the technicalities are all the major things that are needed to be adjusted according to the search engine optimization guidelines.
Want to read more of our posts about SEO? Check out our SEO for eCommerce tips, our Small Business SEO tips, our SEO Marketing Tips for Franchise Businesses, or our post about the importance of Local SEO for Business.
