Technical SEO for Non-technical Business Owners

Asking a non-technical individual to understand technical SEO isn’t an easy task, I must admit that I didn’t start on the technical side too. I was just an accountant trying to figure my way out in page optimization.

Some terms like ‘crawling’ could be unheard of for some, but with the evolving business market, you need to understand technical SEO concepts to remain competitive. It merely involves learning what search engines need to find in your pages to show your website in the search results. So, for all non-technical business owners, here are the basics of what you need to observe for technical SEO.

Duplicate Content

According to Google, duplicate content is any content that appears replicated from other webpages. Search engines don’t show similar versions of the same result. This is to provide the best experience to their users.

It filters them out so that only those with distinctive information appear. If your page doesn’t show up, then you won’t generate the required traffic for higher ranking. All you need to do is publish original content.

Mobile-friendliness

To optimize your website for SEO, you need to ensure that visitors can access it irrespective of the devices they are using. With more people gathering information from their mobile devices, Google now prioritises mobile-friendly sites.

There are tools available to check the overall mobile performance of your page. For example, check the level of your page’s mobile-friendliness through Google’s Mobile-friendly test. If your site isn’t satisfactory, you will need to make changes like adjusting the site architecture and structured data mark-up.

Page Speed

The loading time of your website is very important for SEO. If your pages are too large and slow to load, they are at risk of getting skipped or crawled partially. However, if you improve your load speed, you can achieve quick gains with your websites position in the search results.

You can use Google’s page speed insights to assess your page loading speed. If there is an issue with slow-loading pages, you need to compress your images for better efficiency, minify JavaScript, and CSS by using HTMLMinifier or leverage browser caching. For best results, Google recommends that your page should load within 4 seconds.

Optimize your URLs

Never forgot to pay attention to URLs; this is a simple mistake that often goes untreated. The right URL helps search engines to understand what kind of information and the value you are offering so that they can index and rank it accordingly.

Use shorter URLs that are understandable, which contain keywords, especially towards the front, and also the use of dashes instead of underscores. These small changes have really helped my ranking to improve.

Linking Structure

Links are important ranking factors with Google; without them, your webpage will struggle to compete. You need to create an internal linking structure that allows bots to find your content as Google crawls your website. It is essential to check for broken links in case you delete a post and redirect them accordingly to send users to the correct location.

Conclusion

As a business person, you need to get relevant messages to your target clients; you, therefore, need to improve your website performance to make it easily indexed by Google. SEO can be a bit challenging, but doable; you might want to consider the above points to improve your website.

About the Author

This article was written by Seamus Dunne of Conversation Piece. John has recently carried out an SEO campaign on his website to attract more online customers. He actively researched digital marketing strategies to ensure he stays ahead of his competitors.