Complete Technical SEO Checklist for Improved Website Rankings

Technical SEO has a very crucial place in every comprehensive SEO strategy. The primary goal of technical SEO is to streamline the process of search engines finding, crawling, indexing, and ranking your site. Furthermore, it helps optimize your website for excellent user experience, improving the overall functionality and performance.

Here we’ve compiled a detailed technical SEO checklist to assist you in identifying and rectifying all potential technical issues on your site. Checking off all these points will enable you to present a website that is ideal in the eyes of search engines and users.

Let’s get things rolling!

Ultimate Technical SEO Checklist

This technical SEO checklist encompasses the five primary aspects of your website. Here’s a quick breakdown for you:

Website Architecture
Accessibility and User-Friendliness
Crawl and Index Efficiency
Speed and Site Performance
Content Quality

We’ll look into each of these, covering all necessary technical SEO elements for improved website rankings and overall SEO performance.

1- Website Architecture

The site structure or architecture showcases how well the pages are organized and linked together. A well-structured website offers logical and seamless navigation to the users.

Below are a few practices to ensure a user-friendly website structure:

Streamline Your URL Structure

Optimizing your URL structure allows Google to crawl and index your site more effectively. It also enhances the user’s navigation experience on your website.

Here’s how you can improve your URL structure:

Be specific: This helps both search engines and users know your page’s content. Use relevant keywords that accurately describe the page, such as “sitename.com/seo-tips” instead of “sitename.com/page-671.”

Keep it concise: Clean, short URL structures are more readable and shareable for users. Aim for conciseness in your URLs, like “example.com/about” instead of “example.com/how-our-company-started-our-journey-page-update.”

Mirror your site’s hierarchy: This helps establish a clear and logical site structure, making it simpler for users to understand their location. For instance, if your business offers any services to the users, all the services should be included under one category like this:

Include Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumbs serve as navigational aids to help users identify their location within your site’s hierarchy and make it easy to return to previous pages.

Breadcrumbs can be found near the top of the webpage, providing a series of links from the current page back to the homepage or major categories.

See this example here:

Implementing breadcrumbs is especially advantageous for larger sites with complex architectures, but even smaller sites can benefit from them for improved navigation and SEO.

For this, you can use breadcrumb schema in your page’s code or utilize an appropriate plugin.

Reduce the Number of Clicks to Important Pages

Ideally, users should need fewer than four clicks to navigate from your homepage to any other page on your site. Important pages should be accessible within one or two clicks.

When users go through multiple pages to locate what they need, it creates a negative experience, making the site feel complex and frustrating to navigate. Search engines like Google may also perceive deeply nested pages as less significant, resulting in lower crawl frequency.

Solution?

By utilizing tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, you can get a detailed internal linking report of your site. This report can quickly help you identify pages that require four or more clicks to access. If you have any of these pages on your site, you need to buckle up and start working on internal linking.

For example, if you operate an e-commerce website, link prominent product categories or best-sellers directly from the homepage. Additionally, make sure your pages are well interlinked.

One of the simplest methods to reduce crawl depth is by ensuring that key pages are linked directly from your homepage or main category pages.

2- Accessibility and User-Friendliness

Visitors coming to your site must have a decent user experience on all web pages and can access all the functionalities effortlessly. It means that their purpose of visiting your website should be accomplished no matter what.

Websites offering exceptional usability and accessibility can achieve higher engagement levels, lower bounce rates, and improve conversion rates.

Below are a few viable tips to consider:

Verify HTTPS Use on Your Site

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a secure communication method utilized for transmitting data between a user’s browser and the website’s server.

It encrypts this information, significantly enhancing its security compared to HTTP.

To check if your site operates on a secure server, click the icon next to the URL and look for the “Connection is secure” notification. It looks like this:

As a vital ranking factor, HTTPS is a crucial element on any technical SEO checklist. You can implement it on your site by obtaining an SSL certificate, which many web hosting providers offer during registration.

Implement Structured Data

Structured data refers to the information you incorporate into your site to provide search engines with better context about your page and its content.

For instance, it can include your products’ average customer rating or your business’s operating hours.

One of the most widely used methods to label this data is through schema markup.

Applying schema enables Google to understand your content more effectively, potentially resulting in rich snippets appearing for your site in search results. This can help your content stand out and may draw in more visitors. You can create this structured code via any Schema Markup Generator.

For example, recipe schema displays information on the SERP such as ingredients, review counts, website links, cooking time, and more. You can apply schema to various types of web pages and content, such as:

Blog posts
How-to guides
Product pages
Local business listings
Job postings
Event pages
Recipe pages
Video content

Check out our exclusive blog post to explore some remarkable SEO benefits of schema markup for your website.

3- Crawl and Index Efficiency

Search engines such as Google utilize crawlers to find (crawl) content and include it in their database of web pages, often referred to as the index.

If your website encounters indexing or crawling issues, your pages may not appear in search results, resulting in reduced organic visibility and traffic.

[Also read: From Zero to Thousands: How to Boost Your Website’s Organic Traffic Like a Pro]

Here are the key crawlability and indexability problems to examine:

Fix or Swap Out Broken Internal Links

Broken internal links lead to pages on your site that no longer exist. This can occur due to a URL being mistyped, a page being deleted, or a page being moved without a proper redirect.

When you click a broken link, it usually directs you to a 404 error page:

VirrgoTech’s error page displays ‘nothing to see here’.

Broken links harm the user experience on your site and make it difficult for them to locate what they are looking for.

You can use Google Search Console and Semrush’s site auditor tool to find broken links on your website.

On encountering any broken links on your site, you can either replace them with links to relevant active pages or eliminate them completely.

Eliminate Redirect Chains and Loops

A redirect leads users and crawlers to a different page from the one they initially attempted to access. It’s an effective method to ensure visitors do not land on a broken page.

However, if a link redirects to another redirect, it can create a chain. Long redirect chains can decrease your site’s speed and utilize the crawl budget inefficiently.

Redirect loops, conversely, occur when a chain circles back on itself. For instance, if page A redirects to page B, and page B redirects back to page A.

Redirect loops complicate search engines’ ability to crawl your site and can entrap both crawlers and users in an infinite cycle, stopping content access.

To address redirect chains, link directly to the destination page.

If you want to avoid redirect loops, identify and correct the faulty redirects and ensure each link leads to the proper final page.

Implement an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap lists all the significant pages on your website, assisting search engines like Google in discovering and indexing your content more efficiently.

Your sitemap may resemble this:

In the absence of an XML sitemap, search engine bots depend on links to navigate your site and find your crucial pages, which might lead to some pages being overlooked.

This is particularly true if your site is extensive with a complex website structure.

If you’re utilizing a content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, it may automatically generate a sitemap file for you.

You can generally access it by entering ‘yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml’ in your browser. Oftentimes, it could appear like this: yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Configure Your Robots.txt File Correctly

A robots.txt file provides guidelines for search engines, specifying which pages to crawl and which to avoid.

This directs crawlers to prioritize your most essential content, preventing them from consuming resources on less significant pages or those you prefer to keep out of search results, like login pages.

Key point: A robots.txt file does not stop pages from being discovered (by either search engines or users). To restrict sensitive pages, consider employing protective measures like password access.

Inefficiently configuring your robots.txt file may accidentally block valuable pages from appearing in search results, ultimately diminishing your organic visibility.

If your site lacks a robots.txt file, you can generate one using a robots.txt generator tool. Alternatively, if you use a CMS, relevant plugins may assist you. Incorporate your sitemap URL into your robots.txt file to guide search engines towards the most significant pages on your site.

4- Speed and Site Performance

Page speed influences rankings for both desktop and mobile searches, meaning enhancing your site’s speed can boost its visibility. This could lead to increased traffic and even higher conversion rates.

Here are some effective ways to enhance your site’s speed and performance through technical SEO:

Optimize for Mobile Responsiveness

Websites that are mobile-friendly typically rank better in search result pages. In fact, being mobile-friendly has been a key ranking element since 2015.

Moreover, Google primarily indexes the mobile version of your site rather than the desktop one. This process is known as mobile-first indexing, making mobile adaptability crucial for ranking.

Below are some essential characteristics of a mobile-friendly website:

Responsive design that adjusts content for varying screen sizes.
Clear and straightforward navigation.
Easily readable text without needing to zoom.
Touch-friendly buttons and links with sufficient space between them.
Quick loading times.

Compress Webpage Sizes

Reducing the size of webpage files is one element that can help speed up your site’s loading times. Smaller file size allows for quicker loading from your server to the user’s device.

Multiple optimization practices can help you reduce the size of the web page. You can minimize the CSS and JavaScript files using tools like Minify. Examine your HTML code and enhance its structure or eliminate unnecessary inline scripts, spaces, and styles.

Furthermore, activate caching to save static copies of your web pages on browsers or servers, leading to quick future visits.

Optimize Image Sizes

Well-optimized and compressed images load swiftly because they are smaller in size. This translates to less data for the user’s device to download.

Additionally, the reduced time required for images to display on the screen results in faster page loading and a better user experience.

Here are some suggestions to help you begin:

Compress images using software like TinyPNG and Bulk Resize to shrink them without sacrificing quality.
Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) as it enhances image delivery speed by caching images on servers that are geographically closer to the user. Hence, when a user’s device asks to load an image, the nearest server will serve it.
Select appropriate image formats as certain formats are more suitable for the web. They occupy less space and load instantly. For instance, WebP can be up to three times smaller than JPEG and PNG.
Utilize responsive image scaling because it ensures that images will automatically resize to accommodate the user’s screen dimensions, preventing them from being larger than necessary and slowing down the site.

5- Content Quality

Your website’s technical content issues can also influence how search engines index and rank your site on SERPs.

Here are a couple of technical fixes for your website content:

Resolve Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content refers to content that closely resembles or is the same as material found elsewhere on the internet, whether on a different site or your own.

Having duplicate content can damage your site’s reputation and complicate Google’s ability to index and rank your content for relevant search terms.

You can resolve duplicate content problems by using:

Canonical tags to specify the main version of your content.
301 redirects to guide users and search engines to the correct page version.

Ensure Metadata is Complete on All Pages

Metadata provides information about a webpage, aiding search engines in understanding its content, which allows for better alignment with relevant search queries.

This includes elements such as the title tag and meta description, which outline the purpose and content of the page.

(Although the title tag isn’t classified as a meta tag in HTML terminology, it plays a vital role in your SEO and deserves mention alongside other metadata.)

[Also read: Complete Blog Post SEO Checklist To Boost Rankings]

Improve or Expand Thin Content

Insufficient or thin content adds minimal value for site visitors, failing to meet search intent or address reader concerns.

This type of content leads to a subpar user experience, potentially causing increased bounce rates, dissatisfied users, and even penalties from Google.

To pinpoint thin content on your site, seek out pages that are:

Poorly crafted and fails to convey a valuable message.
Duplicated from other websites.
Overflowing with advertisements or spammy links.
Automatically generated using AI or a programmatic approach.

In such cases, consider redirecting or removing it, merging the content with another similar page, or transforming it into a different format, such as an infographic or a social media post.

Why Should You Look for Technical SEO Professionals for Your Site?

Now that you have a complete technical SEO checklist, it’s time to execute it and reap amazing benefits. But if you’re running a business, you might not be able to focus on all the aspects of this SEO checklist.

Instead of spending time on trial and error, hiring a professional team for a technical SEO audit can save valuable time, allowing you to focus on your core business activities.

Connect with VirrgoTech’s SEO experts or check out our exclusive SEO packages tailored to your business needs. Our skilled team with a solid track record will work in your business’s best interest and boost your search visibility and rankings, leading to remarkable business growth.

[Also read: International SEO: Best Website Optimization Tips for Multiple Countries]

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