5 Important Technical SEO Tips to Implement in 2020

As marketers who are familiar with the SEO landscape and how it adjusts and transforms over time, it’s no surprise that 2020 not only brings a new decade but also new and important technical SEO techniques for us to implement.

Technical optimization should still be your very first port of call when it comes to conducting on-page SEO or off-page SEO, but what elements of technical SEO is still proving relevant in 2020? It’s difficult to cut through the noise, yet once you know the technical SEO points to hit, you can have a very technically healthy website in no time.

What are the very best technical SEO tips, though, and how can you implement them into your marketing strategy?

What is technical SEO?

Quite simply, technical SEO is the optimization techniques relating to a website’s structure and the technology used to build it. While there is no standard definition, many SEO experts relate technical SEO to ensuring that your website complies to guidelines set by search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) so that your content can rank highly.

Technical optimization means enhancing a website’s speed, responsiveness, data structure, and Accelerate Mobile Pages (AMP), amongst other things, too.

Technical optimization tips for 2020

1.   Responsive Web Design (RWD)

We live in an age where web design has to be fluid rather than static. RWD is making your website able to be viewed on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone – without compromising on render, quality and speed.

The primary benefit of RWD is having a website that does not distort when loading on different devices and screen sizes. By using RWD, your customers don’t have to resize by zooming in and out when trying to read content – this makes your website much more customer-friendly, increasing your chances of higher conversion rates.

RWD is made possible because of fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. All of this helps the website calculate the correct proportions so that it can size up or down.

The benefits of RWD are:

-     Increased mobile traffic

-     Low maintenance needs

-     Faster pages

-     Simplified and easier analytics reporting

-     Improved SEO

-     Better browsing experience for the customers

2.   Page speed

Not to be confused with ‘site speed,’ but page speed is a page’s load time (how long it takes for your content to be fully displayed on the page in question). Fast page speeds are considered to be the best practice as it improves user experience, and Google has heavily indicated that site speed (and page speed) is a signal the most recent algorithm uses when deciding how to rank pages.

Firstly, you should evaluate your page speed; this can be done with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Your page’s PageSpeed Insights Speed Score combines data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report) so that it can build reports on First Contentful Paint (FCP) and DOMContentLoaded (DCL).

How can you increase your page speeds, though?

-     Reduce the size of your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files if they are larger than 150 bytes. You can do this by using the software application Gzip. Avoid using Gzip on images, however, as this will impact the quality of the image.

-     Keep redirects to a minimum. More redirects mean additional time as your site tries to bounce from one page to another. This slows down your page speed.

-     Make use of Content Distribution Networks (CDN). Copies of your site are stored in many geographically data centers, meaning users worldwide can access your site more reliably.

3.   Image optimization

Media is relied on, with people more likely to watch videos or view images than read long-form content. More websites are becoming heavily reliant on images for their design, so it’s important to optimize any media you have included.

Be sure that your images are no larger than they need to be, are in the correct format, and compressed properly. Buttons and/or icons can be turned into a larger image by using CSS sprites, which will reduce your HTTP requests.

4.   Image SEO is incredibly beneficial to your SEO strategy

First, you need to choose the right file name – you need Google to understand what the image is, so use a key phrase that’s relevant. For instance, you have an image of The London Eye at Christmas time, so how should you name the file? Ensure the main subject comes first, which would make the file name ‘the-london-eye-christmas.jpg’.

Your image also needs to be in the right format, so JPEG for larger photos, PNG for background transparency, and SVG for logos and icons.

5.   Fix your site of any errors by performing frequent technical SEO site audits

Any on-page SEO issues need to be fixed. You can do this by undergoing weekly technical SEO audits – essential if you want to improve your ranking in the SERPs. By doing this, you will learn how to implement SEO strategy that works and is incredibly effective moving forward.

Key benefits of a technical SEO audit include the identification of the following issues:

-     Crawl and indexation

-     Coding

-     Website’s health and performance

-     Technical issues

SEO auditing should be done by a professional SEO consultant that understands the results and can provide an SEO strategy that’ll counter and fix any issues that may be flagged. Once you know the problems of your website, it’s time to plug any holes.