If you’re launching or already running a website for a medical or healthcare business, there’s a good chance you have a strong SEO strategy. But have you looked past on-page and off-page SEO, including keywords and backlinks, to consider the technical elements?
Feeling unsure what these elements actually are? You wouldn’t be alone. In the guide below, we break down technical SEO and why it’s so valuable.
For expert advice on all things SEO, contact the friendly team at practiceedge today.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising a website to help search engines like Google find, crawl, and index your content (more on these steps later). It also refers to various technical factors and requirements that contribute to your search engine ranking.
Technical SEO enhances the technical foundation of a website, and is used alongside on-page and off-page SEO to help your web pages rank higher in search results. It also improves the user experience on a website by making it faster and easier to navigate.
Why Is Technical SEO So Important?
Technical SEO ensures your website is visible to search engines. If your website isn’t visible, it won’t appear on search engine result pages (SERPs), meaning your website won’t have as many visitors and will ultimately lose the good stuff like sign-ups, leads, and revenue.
This area of SEO also shapes user experience for a website, including load times and mobile-friendliness. Web pages that take ages to load or are difficult to navigate are more likely to be abandoned. Not only does this impact your search ranking, but is frustrating for users.
The Difference Between Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO
Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of SEO, including the three main categories or areas: technical, on-page, and off-page SEO. When used together, they make content more accessible to search engines and enhance the user experience.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is centred around the technical components of a website, including the backend structure and systems. Key elements of technical SEO include XML sitemaps, robots.txt, secure connections (HTTPS), site speed, and mobile friendliness.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to the optimisation of content elements that live on a website and provide relevancy for users. These elements may be headlines and body copy, meta descriptions and title tags, images and alt-text, page URLs, and internal and external links.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO refers to a range of activities that occur away from the website, but help establish the website as a credible and trustworthy source. These activities include social media marketing, PR campaigns, and building high-quality backlinks.
Key Components of Technical SEO: Crawling and Indexing
We’ve already mentioned crawling and indexing, but what do these terms mean? In a nutshell, crawling is what search engine bots do when they use links on web pages they already know about to detect new, unfamiliar pages. Once the bots find these new web pages, they examine and try to understand the content. Finally, they store these pages alongside millions of others in a huge database known as a search index. Your content needs to be stored in search engine indexes to appear in search results.
Good technical SEO ensures crawling and indexing happens as it should, with positive results for your website. This can be achieved through many methods, including a few key ones listed below.
1. Create and Submit an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap plays a key part in the crawling and indexing process. It’s a file that lists important pages on a website, including metadata for each URL. Search engines use it as a shorthand to discover and index content.
2. Create an SEO-friendly Site Architecture
The framework or architecture of your website also helps search engines crawl and index your content. An SEO-friendly architecture will include a clear hierarchy of pages, intuitive navigation, and internal links. If, for instance, your top-priority homepage links to a service page, Google will understand this service page is also important and rank it accordingly.
3. Review and Utilise robots.txt
The Robot Exclusion Protocol, otherwise known as the /robot.txt, helps determine how web robots crawl your site. Your robot.txt can be used to help search bots match your content with relevant search queries or prevent bad bots from spamming or causing other issues on your website.
4. Use Canonical Tags
If you have multiple web pages with similar or identical content, search engines might be confused about which pages should be indexed and shown in search results. To maintain a good ranking and improve SEO performance, a canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) can be added to a URL to identify that web page as the original or primary version.
Other Technical Considerations
- Use structured data, or schema markup, to help search engines analyse your content and increase its visibility. This data may translate in search results as rich snippets such as star ratings, product information, or event details.
- Implement hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), the more secure version of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). HTTPS will help protect user passwords, credit card details, and other sensitive details.
- Check the mobile-friendliness or responsiveness of your website. This is a ranking factor for Google, which predominantly uses the mobile version of web content to determine indexing and ranking.
- Also check site speed, as fast-loading websites are prioritised in search engine results. Site speeds can be improved by optimising images, leveraging browser caching, and minisiming HTTP requests.
- Find and fix duplicate content and broken links and pages. Duplicate content can cause a range of issues, including high rankings for undesirable URLs, while broken links affect the user experience.
- Add hreflang tags if your site displays content in multiple languages. Hreflang is an HTML attribute that helps search engines deliver the correct versions of your web pages to users.
- Enhance user experience and SEO results for your website through a range of navigation tools, including breadcrumb navigation, which shows readers where they are on the website with text trails at the top of the page, and pagination, which divides large amounts of content into multiple pages and helps search engines access it.
practiceedge Can Help You Master Technical SEO
Great SEO for medical and healthcare businesses involves more than just keywords and content. The practiceedge team can work with you to understand your technical SEO needs and action a new strategy, whether that means optimising your website to be crawled by Google or finessing your site speed, mobile responsiveness, and other metrics.
To find out more about technical SEO and how our expert team can help your business, book a free 30-minute discovery call today.
