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7 Technical SEO DIY things every business owner can do

What is technical SEO?

Optimising website structure, coding aspects, semantics, and user experience (UX) is crucial for technical SEO as it enables search engines to comprehend and index the website’s content more effectively.

Minimising errors experienced by crawlers that visit your website means that instead of tripping over problems those search engine crawlers are putting effort into indexing and understanding your website. If it is well written it’ll have a better footprint – meaning you rank better.

Basic Technical SEO Tools you will need

YoastSEO for WordPress SEO

If you have a WordPress website for small businesses then make sure you’ve installed YoastSEO. RankMath is an excellent alternative, for small businesses who want to DIY some (or all) of their SEO, Ben recommends YoastSEO because there are lots of great help videos. Rank Math is excellent too, there are just less help videos out there and they’re usually at a higher level of complexity.

To install YoastSEO 

  1. go to your WordPress Dashboard (wp-admin)
  2. Click plugins (left hand side)
  3. Click “add”
  4. Search for “yoast”
  5. Install and then
  6. Activate

You will now have an “SEO” menu item that looks like this.

Connect Google Search Console

Connect your website to Google Search Console. If you have Yoast SEO or Rank Math you can use this guidance video.

7 Technical SEO Things you can do

These are written in order (roughly). You should familiarise yourself with the first ones first… and work your way down the list.

A scan in Bing’s Webmaster Tools will give you a detailed report identifying most of these issues.

1. Fix Broken Links 

Bing Webmaster Tools will identify any broken links on your site.

Visit the page, edit it and fix it or remove it.

This will improve user experience and remove this stumbling block that the search engine crawler trips over when it tries to index and understand your website.

Bonus Tip: Sometimes a page has been renamed, e.g. “about” becomes “about-2” you may be able to fix many broken links (at once) by just renaming the page back to “about”. Look out for this!

Technical SEO example

2. Improve Page Speed

Free tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix indicate how fast your page loads. GTmetrix is particularly useful in…

GTmetrix Summary

  • This gives overview metrics about how fast the website is loading. 
  • Does the server take a long time to load? That’s a hosting provider issue.
  • Does the DNS take ages to look up? That’s either a hosting, or a domain name issue.
  • More often the code of the website and how it is built is the issue.

Create a free account to be able to see these tabs, e.g. this timeline summary and the waterfall.

GTmetrix Waterfall 

Requires an account (can get for free).

This tab, down the page, can be selected to reveal a “waterfall” of when elemental parts of the website load – one by one.

This is excellent at slicing and dicing the website’s parts by file type (images, or scripts or html) and sorting by size.

Look for:-

  • Large images – make them smaller
  • Incorrect images. Use JPG for many colours, use PNG for few colours. Getting this wrong will always result in bigger than necessary images.
  • JavaScript or CSS files that have names related to plugins* you don’t want or need. You can turn off the plugin and see what impact it has.

*assuming you’re using WordPress.

3. Submit your Sitemap

Sitemaps are hidden files inside your website. When you install Yoast SEO your website will usually respond at the url “/index_sitemap.xml”

You should visit Google Search Console (which we connected to above)… click “sitemaps” and add your sitemaps. There may be more than one.

Google should discover them over time, but if you’re getting set-up it doesn’t do any harm to submit them.

4. Optimise for Mobile Devices

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Use responsive design techniques to make your site work well on all screen sizes.

Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix both give you advice and info here. You will probably need a skilled web designer to help make substantial changes, but someone the changes are as simple as making links larger for mobile devices…. 

Think: Fat fingers are harder to use than precise mice.

5. Meta Descriptions

If you’re only just starting with your Website’s SEO the warnings you get from Bing Webmaster Tools will almost certainly say “META Description” empty or too short.

The META DESCRIPTION is the piece of text that appears in Google underneath the link to your page. If you leave it blank you’re letting Google pick and choose what it thinks should appear there… and the likelihood of it being well crafted and attractive to humans who just searched is low.

Yoast SEO enables you to edit these fields and see, in the edit screen, how it’ll look in Google search results (see screenshot below). It is worth noting that the green bars help guide you on the right length of the title and the description.

6. Implement Proper Redirects (301 vs 302)

If you delete a page and replace it with something almost equivalent, my recommendation is to use the same URL. Sometimes you really need to change the URL, in this case make a redirect so that anyone linking to the old page’s URL gets to the right destination instead of a 404 error “not found” – which we covered in #1 above.

  • A plugin in WordPress called EPS 301 Redirects can do this easily.
  • You just need to enter the old url, e.g. “/old-page” and the new url, e.g. “/new-page”.
  • When adding the details you need to choose whether the redirect is permanent (code 301) or temporary (302).
  • Unless you are bringing back the “/old-page” very soon (within days or weeks), I would always use a permanent (301) redirect.

7. Update Robots.txt File

Manage your robots.txt file to control which parts of your site search engines can access and crawl. In a normal WordPress site for small business this shouldn’t be necessary, but if you have a private area or some information don’t want google to index you should use a “Disallow” directive.

This is quite a complicated topic. Only get into this if you really need to do something special. A good source of deeper information is the Google Search Central documentation about robots.txt.

Summary

In the recent presentation to the Business Owners Smashing It Online (BOSIO) Weekly Webinar I advised the audience to “have a play with the data” when they connect and get into Google Search Console

By digging around, thinking about the searcher’s intent behind the keywords and seeing which pages rank (or nearly rank) you can find nuggets of value for your business.

When you’re learning and trying to DIY Technical SEO for your WordPress website you should take the same approach. 

  1. Get Bing Webmaster Tools set-up 
  2. Regularly use it to scan your website
  3. Check the reports it generates regularly 
  4. When you find something important edit your website 

The result will be an increase in your confidence about managing your website, and you’ll reap the benefits of better rankings in the search results.

AI for Small Business: The Hands-On System to Turn ChatGPT into Your Ultimate Business Partner

Not sure where to start with ChatGPT or not getting the result you want?
Learn how to use AI to create leads, clients, and sales and run your business on autopilot!

INTRODUCING ChatGPT Unlocked: The Business Owner’s Guide to AI – The Definitive Entrepreneurs Introduction & Practical Blueprint to AI using ChatGPT.

Picture of Ben Maden

Ben Maden

Ben founded Matter Solutions before moving to Australia in 2006. He’s a Digital Marketer with skills in Technical SEO and WordPress Websites. He delivered a presentation to our Business Owners Smashing It Online Weekly Webinar on the 27th of August 2024.At the webinar he spoke about 3 Key Strategies for SEO Success based his SEO Triangle and Repeatable Google Search Console Pattern for SEO Success. The recording of that Webinar is on the SmashGo YouTube Channel, here.

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The Definitive Step By Step Guide To Creating Lead Magnets Cover 3D
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Generate Unlimited Leads for Your Business with This Free Step-by-Step Guide!

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