Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the pillar for achieving high online visibility for your website. A search engine is a dynamic space where the algorithms get evolved regularly. With relevant content and SEO, you cannot rank on the first page in Google. You need technical SEO techniques to attain that position. Technical SEO services from Webboombaa.org, a top rated digital marketing agency in Chennai ensure your website is discovered by the right audiences, effectively indexed, secure, loads quickly, and optimized for both desktop and mobile. More than the content, the functionality of the website plays an important role in increased online visibility and presence.

A technical SEO Checklist for Potential Digital Growth

1. Website Speed Optimization

• Speed of your site is essential in attracting the target audience. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, you are probably losing your potential consumers. Conversion rates are 3x higher¹⁹ for websites that load in 1 second than websites that load in 5 seconds.
• To enhance the speed of your website, compress large images into next-gen formats such as WebP and AVIF. This image compression boosts the loading time of your website and reduces the file size without compromising the quality of the image.
• Lazy loading is another effective way where your images and videos will load only when the visitor scrolls your website. This makes your website feel smoother and more responsive without the loading of images and videos all at once.
• Browser caching is helpful for visitors who visit your website constantly, where the browser stores the common elements of your website, such as the logo, stylesheets and scripts, locally. This reduces the loading time of your website during subsequent visits.
• It is essential to minify your CSS, JavaScript and HTML, which cuts out unwanted spaces, comments and lines of code for smooth performance.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN) is crucial for businesses with global audiences where website files are stored across multiple servers worldwide, which enables your users to access your website from the nearest server location.
• Fast-loading websites lower the bounce rates, effectively lengthen user engagement, and increase conversions with increased online visibility.

2. Mobile optimization is a must

• In India, 70% of online searches happen through smartphones. So, your website has to be optimized for mobile. If your website is not mobile optimized, you are not reaching the major sector of audiences who use mobile phones, especially in industries like travel, retail and hospitality, where decisions are made with just one click.
• Make sure your website is designed and optimized for mobile phones, and it has to be the first approach in technical SEO. Leverage fluid grids and flexible images that make your website more streamlined across various screens, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
• Buttons and links in your website have to be larger and spacious so users can easily tap on them with their thumbs. This increases conversions and reduces frustration of the users.
• The font size of your text has to be readable so that the users don't have to zoom and view the text, which enhances the readability of your website.
• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Integration is very useful for blogs, publishers and media-heavy websites where AMP delivers quick-loading, stripped-down versions of web pages on mobile devices.
• Your website has to undergo constant mobile testing with Google Mobile Usability Reports and other tools, and you have to repair the issues before they escalate and affect your audiences.

These steps are essential, as Google gives priority to the mobile version of your website before ranking it. So have an effective mobile-responsive website that improves the search visibility.

3. Enhance Core Web Vitals

• Core Web Vitals are crucial ranking signals of Google. This indicates that user experience of your website has an impact on the SEO. Core Web Vitals includes the loading of your site, user engagement and stability of the visual elements while browsing. These core metrics have to be improved, which increases the search visibility of your website. Only 11.9% of pages had at least one Core Web Vitals metric, and 93% of those had all three metrics.
• Three major metrics include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measures the website's loading speed. For instance, major and large content such as a hero image or a headline should load in under 2.5 seconds for an effective user experience.
• First Input Delay (FID) measures the website's interactivity. Usually users get a response within 100 milliseconds when they tap or click on your website. Conversions get reduced when your website has poor and slow FID, which also frustrates the visitors.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability of your website. The page layout has to be stable without issues such as elements like text, images or buttons suddenly moving when the user is about to tap or click, which frustrates a lot of people. This means that your website CLS score is below 1.0. Your website has to be predictable with a good CLS score, which increases conversions and visibility.

These effective tests with proper diagnostic reports will discover technical SEO struggles and fix them, which enhances the functionality and SEO of your website.

4. Leverage Structured Data

• Search engines are smart, but they cannot interpret every piece of data like how humans do. Structured data (schema markups) tells Google what exactly your content represents, whether it is an event, an article or a product.
• It is essential to highlight the products and services of your website, where you have to add schema for availability, pricing and ratings.
• Article schema has to be added for blogs, event schema for tourism-focused businesses and FAQ schema for guides. This increases the visibility of your website content.
• Add a local business scheme where Google can display maps, contact info and addresses directly on the search engine result page (SERP). This creates awareness of your brand among the audiences.
• Implement structured data to your website using JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD), the officially recommended format by Google, which keeps the website code separate from the website's HTML, making the website faster and cleaner.
• Make use of Google's Rich Result Test to ensure there are no issues and warnings, as even a small error could prevent Google from creating rich snippets.

5. Develop a Streamlined URL Strategy

• A well-structured URL is very important for SEO. Both users and search engines understand the context of your website using the URL. These URLs increase crawlability, enhance user experience and boost rankings.
• A short and concise URL clearly communicates to the users and the search engines better than long and clustered URLs.
• Hyphens are the considered word separator for Google. So use hyphens instead of underscores, which improves the readability and increases the awareness.
• Add primary and relevant keywords to the URL without keyword stuffing. These keywords should describe your website immediately to the searchers.
• Use a static URL without any unnecessary dynamic parameters which might make it look spammy and create duplicate content issues.So have a clean and concise URL that reflects credibility. Mention your site architecture in the URL.

6. Verify Crawlability and Indexability

• Crawlability and indexability ensure your website not only gets identified by Google but also gets placed in the search engine result pages.
• Check Robots.txt audits constantly, where a single wrong line or a minor issue can prevent Google from crawling major pages of your website. With robots.txt audits you can make sure low-value sections like the admin page get blocked, not other major content pages of your website.
• A properly updated XML sitemap through Google Search Console will help Google to crawl all the major pages, especially recently added ones.
• Crawl errors have to be immediately fixed before crawlers don't reach dead ends. Crawl errors include 404s, server errors or blocked resources used in your website which are flagged by Google.
• Remove the duplicate content and pages that confuse the Google search engine. So utilize canonical tags or 301 redirects to strengthen authority and weak content.
• Crawl budget optimization is essential for the website. Often large sites waste Googlebot's limited crawl frequency on duplicate pages. It is crucial that the bot focuses on high-priority pages rather than the low-value and irrelevant pages.

7. Strengthen Website Security

• A secure website offers credibility to the users and search engines. If Google shows your website as 'Not Secure', people will bounce back from your website, and you will gain a low ranking from Google.
• Install SSL certificates for HTTPS where every page and transaction is encrypted. Personal and sensitive data are protected, which increases the online visibility.
• Migrate every subdomain securely from blogs to landing pages that run on HTTPS, which removes the weak spaces that affect the rankings.
• Conduct regular audits on your site, identifying malware, hacks or any irrelevant and outdated scripts.

8. Refine Internal Linking of the Website

• Internal linking is one of the most overlooked SEO strategies. This not only helps in effective indexing of your website by Google but also navigates the user in your website and guides them to the valuable content. 73.6% of domains have reciprocal links, meaning that some of the sites they link to also link to them.
• Relevant Page Linking makes the readers connect to their interested topics with relevant links. This increases the user experience and relevance of your website in the search engines.
• Use keyword-rich anchor text instead of generic links like 'click here'. Use descriptive anchor texts with relevant and target keywords which signal the relevance of the pages to Google.
• Highlight the relevant and important inner pages of your website. Make sure the blog page, product page and service page are strategically linked, which need more online visibility and traffic.
• Don't add many links that feel excessive for the users; add links that are relevant and needed, which enhances the value of your website online.

9. Redirects and 404 errors

• Your website landing page has to be cleaner and more streamlined than being a broken page, which frustrates the visitors. A poor redirect strategy with multiple 404 errors weakens your SEO and visibility of the website.
• 301 redirects make sure that the users and search engines are sent to the correct page whenever the URL of the page gets changed. This preserves the SEO of your website.
• Irrelevant broken links and deleted content that lead the users to dead ends frustrate them. So a regular audit of identifying 404 errors and resolving them is essential, which causes harm to your website visibility.

Hidden Power of the Technical SEO

It is a common practice among businesses where they focus more on content SEO than on technical SEO. Technical SEO plays a significant role in online rankings, visibility and traffic. Without technical SEO, search engines might not crawl your website, slow speed and ineffective UX will push back the visitors, and security issues will break the trust of the users. Technical SEO, along with content SEO, boosts provides a report on the crawl, index and usability of your website from Google. It helps to track how Google views your website and offers the performance review of your website.

• Screaming Frog – This is an effective SEO tool which detects broken links, duplicate content and crawl issues. This is an excellent tool for off-page SEO.
• Ahrefs and SEMrush – Extensive SEO platforms that track the site performance, backlinks, keyword rankings and competitor analysis. This gives great insights for both technical and off-page SEO.
• Google Page Speed Insights and GTMetrics – These tools analyze the website speed and performance. They also offer insights on fast loading speed, effective core web vitals and improved user experience.
• Deepcrawl – This tool is ideal for large-scale websites by performing in-depth technical SEO audits, identifying crawlability, indexing and structural issues.
• Google Mobile Friendly Test – This tool analyses and evaluates the website performance on mobile and provides insights for mobile optimization, which is essential for increased visibility.

SEO Success with Strong Technical SEO

More than just keywords, SEO involves creating a seamless, fast and effective user experience in a website that attracts both the users and search engines. At webboombaa.org, a leading SEO company in Chennai, we craft tailored technical SEO strategies and checklists that enhance your website and brand visibility with increased conversions, user engagement and online traffic. Boost Visibility with Webboombaa's Checklist!