What is Technical SEO? And Why is it Important to Your SaaS Business?
Websites have many moving parts, so your online marketing success depends on optimizing your site to be functional, fast, and user-friendly. One essential component is technical SEO, a piece of the entire (SEO) puzzle that helps optimize your website’s infrastructure.
Technical SEO refers to the strategies involved in optimizing and creating a site so that search engines can easily index, crawl and render it. Many online marketers and business owners leverage technical SEO to boost their website’s chances of ranking well in the search engine results pages (SERP).
Let’s look at technical SEO and how it benefits your site.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is a part of SEO that involves optimizing your website’s infrastructure, so it’s easily crawled. It also helps search engines index your site easier. Technical SEO deals with your site’s technical components, including sitemaps, URL structure, page speed, schema, site navigation, and many more.
A technically optimized website is crucial for attracting organic traffic from search engines. Your effort in building a site’s content and design will all go to waste if search engines aren’t ranking it higher.
Why is technical SEO important?
Website owners usually know why on-page SEO and content are important, but they overlook technical SEO as it seems too complicated.
Technical SEO involves everything that makes your website easy to navigate, fast, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and functional. Without it, you might have a well-designed and built site that loads slowly, doesn’t direct the right information to your visitors, isn’t compatible with mobile devices, or glitches when visitors try to buy your products.
Benefits of Technical SEO for online businesses
One of the benefits of technical SEO is to generate more organic traffic to your site. However, there are other benefits of implementing technical SEO. The benefits include making your website easier to index, crawl, and navigate to get more visitors from search engines. Here are the benefits of technical SEO:
- Sticking to Google’s best practices to optimize websites
- Make your website mobile-friendly so that users can access it from any device (not only on mobile)
- It loads your website quicker for anyone accessing it
- Removing pop-ups and other elements that hinder the user experience (UX)
- Make an easy-to-navigate experience for your users and let them find the correct information
- Keeping a URL structure that’s search engine friendly
- Maintaining a safe and secure website
- Taking out broken links and 404 pages from your site
- Getting structured data for improving how your pages are displayed in the search results
- Setting up a sitemap as a roadmap to your site, which improves indexing
- Adding a robots.txt file to guide search engines on what to crawl and what not to crawl
By looking at all these points, technical SEO helps your site get indexed and crawled by search engines to drive more traffic. Furthermore, a technically sound site loads faster and is easy to navigate, which keeps your visitors on your site for longer. This is the overall goal, as you want to turn that traffic into customers and leads.
Common issues in technical SEO
When trying to optimize your site with technical SEO, you might encounter some common technical SEO issues that may hurt your site’s performance. Here are the most common issues in technical SEO that we have encountered when doing plenty of site audits every year:
- No HTTPS Security
- Website is not indexed correctly
- No XML Sitemaps
- Wrong or missing Robots.txt
- Slow page speed
- Missing, broken or incomplete Schema
- Not optimized for Local searches
- Missing Hreflang and Canonicals
- The list could go on!
These common issues are usually overlooked, yet are simple to fix and vital to boost your site’s visibility and success in SEO.
Why is technical SEO important for SaaS companies?
The SaaS business is growing bigger than ever. And as people worldwide consider digital services, in-browser platforms, and apps an essential part of their lives, the range of competition for SaaS companies is also growing.
The next step for SaaS companies should be to use technical SEO to take advantage of organic traffic flow. But how does it work? How do businesses use technical SEO for SaaS as part of their online strategy?
Search optimization can be broken down into two primary forms: content optimizations and technical SEO. Technical SEO means optimizing a website’s technical elements and making it perform better in search engine algorithms. This usually includes important code/HTML-based elements, such as crawl, ability and site speed, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS securities and more.
If you’re marketing your SaaS business through SEO, you’ll need to optimize these elements to help improve rankings in search engines. As software businesses and SaaS are entirely online, it’s crucial to ensure that a site isn’t only set up correctly for better UX and SEO performance.
Many businesses go through a technical SEO audit checklist, whether regularly or at the beginning of their SEO campaign.
Technical SEO for SaaS companies can involve many factors, such as site design, speed and optimization, which usually fall in the website developer’s realm or whomever the company puts in charge of the site’s design.
Many businesses coordinate between their SEO team and web developers to resolve and fix crucial technical issues.
Conclusion to technical SEO
Technical SEO isn’t something you can be an expert on in a few days, as it requires a lot of trial and error and hours of research. Technical SEO consists of a list of checks and settings you need to optimize to help search engines index your site without any problems.
The word “technical” alone means that you must have some technical knowledge and experience to carry out the tasks such as page speed optimization and adding structured data. It’s also necessary for the site to reach its full potential.
In many cases, once you get your technical SEO right, you won’t need to deal with it again besides doing SEO Audits from time to time.
