4 technical SEO tasks that are critical to organic success

“Driving revenue and awareness from search relies on your website health — today’s success in organic search is about a lot more than just keywords and content,” said Shachar Radin Shomrat, CMO of Deepcrawl, in her presentation at The MarTech Conference. “It demands technically sound websites in today’s marketing landscape.”

“Over a longer timeframe, the technical aspects of your website play a huge role in how well your content performs,” she added.

If SEOs don’t take the time to optimize critical technical aspects of your site that influence page speed, indexing, and more, it could mean lost traffic and revenue.

Here are four key technical tasks SEOs should take care of to help increase organic visibility.

1. Optimize site architecture

“Architecture is your foundational stage,” Shomrat said. “If the overall website structure is not optimized for search performance, then any individual page on that site is not set up to have its best chance at being crawled, appearing with search results and ultimately converting into a revenue-driving asset.”

No two sites are the same, but most search professionals agree site architectures should generally have a logical flow with a hierarchy of pages. This helps users and crawlers make sense of your site.

2. Ensure pages are crawlable

Your pages should be accessible to search engines and users via valid status codes. SEOs should make sure the pages they want to be included in the index have a 200 HTTP status code.

Search marketers should also ensure their robots.txt files aren’t blocking pages they want to be indexed. A misplaced disallow directive could prevent crawlers from viewing your pages at all.

3. Check which pages allow indexing

Just because your pages are crawlable doesn’t mean they’re indexable. Marketers need to make sure their pages’ robots tags allow for indexing.

“If a page is not indexed by search engines, then it will not appear to users in their search results at all,” Shomrat said.

4. Improve page experience

People are less likely to convert on sites that offer poor experiences, such as slow-loading pages. Google and other search engines encourage site owners to optimize their technical structures to prevent this from happening, allowing their content to shine in the search results.

“If you do not fix your [technical] foundation, your content and keyword investments are not going to get the return that you expect,” Shomrat said.

The necessity of technical SEO

Paying attention to the technical quality of your site is vital to SEO success. Yet getting company team members and executives on board can be a tricky task.

“Creating a strong technical foundation for your website to rank well in Google and to provide an excellent experience to your site users involves a lot of moving parts,” Shomrat said.

"It expands beyond the boundaries of most marketing teams," she added.

She encourages marketers to prove the worth of technical SEO to their teams by establishing clear goals and showing how their efforts are meeting them. She also recommends providing colleagues and executives with studies and other educational resources to show the full impact of technically sound sites for organic search.

“Get the support you need from leadership by promoting organic and website health KPIs as business-wide OKRs [objectives and key results]," she said. "There is great data out there about the impact website health and technical SEO can have as a comparatively low-cost customer acquisition channel.”