Search engine optimization is at the heart of any successful business online. Your customers will search your business on Google and or any other search engine to try and understand you. You will be surprised to learn that in recent times, Facebook is also becoming one of the most reliable search engines on the internet.
What Is Technical SEO?
With this simple conviction that SEO is crucial to your online business, how do you get the most out of technical SEO? That is what we will look at in the next few paragraphs.
Technical SEO refers to all the aspects of your website that contribute to its indexing and how fast search engines crawl it. Compared to regular SEO practices, technical SEO tries to dissociate itself from the actual content on your website and rather focuses on the infrastructure of your website. The following checklist will guide you on how to make the most of technical SEO to grow your business.
1. Have a Mobile Responsive Website
Since the start of 2018 and beyond, Google took a different approach to ranking websites. In the new approach, mobile first indexing is the key to ranking better on search pages on Google. While Google is not the only search engine available, it is the most widely used search engine in Kenya. Therefore, it is important that your business follow the principles that this search engine recommends.
A mobile responsive website is one that loads quickly, usually under two seconds, on handheld devices. As a businessperson, more often than not, you will operate your website from your computer. While this is not bad, it may give you the illusion that you have a website that offers the user an unbeatable experience.
It is important that to overcome this bias, you test out your website and how it performs on mobile devices. Additionally, it comes in handy if you are planning to develop a website; you have a sit down with the developer and get them to understand that you need a mobile responsive website.
According to the World Advertising Research Centre, an estimated 2 billion people worldwide access the internet via mobile devices. This represents roughly 51% of the people that access the internet. Experts expect the number to grow in the near future to about 75% by 2025. It goes without saying that a mobile responsive website is the way to go for your business if you are to remain competitive.
2. Improve the Speed of your Website
At the beginning, I mentioned that speed is a critical aspect of technical SEO that search engines use to rank your website. The speed of your website will largely be contributed to by the type of server that you website is on. The hosting provider plays a significant role in this. It is quite common to see many Kenyan businesses buy hosting and domains from companies not based in Kenya.
The effect of this is that these hosting companies are slower when it comes to responding to lags in their servers. With that, your website is likely to experience downtimes quite often. However, a Kenyan hosting company will serve you better for a couple of reasons;
- They will respond faster to your queries because they are in the same time zone as you.
- Kenyan hosting companies will not host as many websites on the same servers as international companies will.
- Being in operation in Kenya, many of these hosting companies will be better suited to offer you a package that meets the demands of the local market.
It is important that if you have no prior knowledge of running websites, you have an inside technician in your business to help. Choosing to outsource such services from different companies or individuals each time will result in failure to audit your website properly. This will contribute to longer downtimes and slow website that will cost you a lot of business.
3. Get Rid of Duplicate Content
Duplicate content works against the efforts that you make to improve your technical SEO. Google’s algorithms take this to be some form of black hat SEO technique to drive more traffic to your website. Google punishes this with worse rankings. If your website has been dropping down the pages rapidly, it is most likely that you have duplicate content that is contributing to this.
Audit your website from time to time and look with a keen eye to note any content duplication. You can rework such content to eliminate the duplication instances. Additionally, webpages can be duplicated too and this contributes to terrible SEO performance. Rework or delete these pages entirely and work on creating unique content and webpages.
Final Thoughts
SEO is a long-term game, while onsite SEO is the major focus for many businesses, ignoring technical SEO will work against you. Endeavour to be honest with all your SEO efforts and work tirelessly to make your SEO strategy cover all aspects of this complex game. For help with your website’s SEO, reach out to us at Kendesk and we will be more than glad to help you rank better on Google.
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