Today's post is an excerpt from The MFS Guide to B2B SEO: How to Integrate SEO into a Broader B2B Marketing Strategy.
While
thus far we have tried to steer clear of generic SEO best practices, they do have value and over the next 4 sections, we will look into which SEO best practices we would recommend implementing in each of the 4 key areas we have outlined - and how you can balance these activities with your general strategic concerns.
Within SEO, technical SEO is probably the most clear cut area. There are some general technical SEO best practices and they simply must be followed. These are not tactics or nice-to-haves that may or may not suit your business - they are foundational SEO activities and must be prioritized. Before examining any technical SEO best practices, let us first examine some high priority actions you can take to get your technical SEO to the place it needs to be.
Technical SEO - Initial Steps
The first action here is to run a technical audit to check if there are any technical reasons holding your site back from ranking on Google and other search engines. The possible reasons for an underperforming site are many and could include slow site speed, duplicate pages, low site authority, mobile unfriendliness, and issues relating to page indexing. There are any number of tools available with which you can run a site audit or, if you are working with an SEO consultant, a technical audit is normally the first port of call.
2. Implement Technical Recommendations
Typically, an SEO audit will present you with a rating or score for your website showing how you rate in the various technical areas. The audit - unless you are running an already perfect site - will also come with a prioritized set of actions that need to be performed to boost your technical SEO performance. The next step for you is to implement these technical recommendations and get your site to the place it needs to so you can build out your SEO program. There will most likely be a mix of recommendations - some will be very straightforward and will be able to be performed by the marketing team while others may need assistance from a web development resource.
3. Schedule Regular Site Audits
The next step is to re-run the audit once the work has been completed and confirm that your site is in a better place from a technical standpoint. You should also set up at least a quarterly technical audit so that you can quickly learn about and address any technical issues as they arise. In terms of site speed - which is only one area of technical SEO - you can use
Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool which will give you a score for your site’s speed performance on both desktop and mobile.
Technical SEO - Best Practices
Your goal in technical SEO is to always make sure that there are no technical reasons holding back your website. You want to make sure that Google can crawl your website as easily as possible. Now setting up an audit and ongoing audits will help you stay on top of any issues, but there are also some technical SEO best practices you should be generally aware of.
1. Create a Search Engine-Friendly Site Architecture - Make sure your site is organized in a logical hierarchy. You will have your homepage and top level pages on your main navigation menu. From these top level pages, you can link the various sections of your site. By following a logical hierarchy, your site will be easier for search engines to crawl and each page will have links pointing towards it. You will also minimize the potential for orphan pages which are pages that do not have any internal links pointing towards them and are more difficult from search engines to find.
2. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console - Submitting an XML sitemap to Google via the
Google Search Console is another way to help get your site and pages indexed. This step is especially important if you are launching a new or redesigned site - it will help Google index the most recent version of your site.
3. Use HTTPS - Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is a secure version of the previous hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) initiated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The secure variant HTTPS came into play in 2014 and has been used as a ranking signal since. If your site does not have a SSL/TLS certificate, visitors will be greeted with a “Not Secure” warning when they visit your site. letsencrypt.org provides SSL/TLS certs for free so this issue is one that can be easily remedied.
4. Fix Duplicate Content - If your site audit reveals a warning about duplicate content, then this issue is one you need to address ASAP. Too much duplicate content can see you penalized by Google. You are better off having a lower number of high quality pages than a high number of low quality pages. Figure out which pages are duplicates and consolidate any of the weaker pages into the higher ranking page where possible.
5. Optimize Page Speed - Page speed and site performance is another ranking signal for Google. Using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool, you can run checks on your website to see how it is performing. Typically, you will get some recommendations like compressing images, using a CDN, and minifying some of your website code. Work through these recommendations and re-run your site through the page-speed tool to monitor improvements.
6. Ensure Mobile Friendliness - Google uses a
mobile-first approach to indexing meaning a mobile-friendly site is now paramount. User experience and page speed also play a part in Google’s ranking algorithm, so if you have a site that is not displaying correctly on mobile, you will start to see a higher than necessary bounce rate and, as a result, may start to decline in terms of rankings.
7. Implement Breadcrumbs - Breadcrumb navigation is the trail of text links you commonly see on a website that informs the users where they are on the website and where the current page lies on the site hierarchy. These breadcrumb links can help to distribute link equity around your site.
8. Fix Broken Links - Broken links are another issue that can be easily remedied. Any audit will contain a list of broken links on your site. To remedy this issue you can either set up redirects or reinstate any older pages that were deleted by accident.
9. Check Backlink Quality - Very occasionally you might have to disavow a backlink that comes from a questionable website. Most of the time, Google is very good at ignoring those toxic links without any action on the user’s part. However if you are ever on the receiving end of a manual penalty, you should immediately disavow the link in question using Google’s Disavow Tool.
Above are some of the most important technical SEO best practices to be aware of - but, in general, the 3 steps we outline initially will cover most or all of these best practices and will help you stay in rude technical SEO health.
This post is an excerpt from the MFS Guide to B2B SEO: How to Integrate SEO into a Broader B2B Marketing Strategy. If you would like to read more you can access the guide in full here. If you have a marketing challenge you are looking for support with, you are welcome to set up a no obligation initial strategy consultation with our team.
