TECHNICAL SEO SERVICES

Choosing the right technical SEO agency is crucial for ensuring the long-term health and performance of your website.

Here are some steps to guide your decision:

Understand your needs: Before beginning your search, outline your website’s challenges and your objectives. Knowing what you need will help you gauge an agency’s expertise better.

Experience and specialisation: Look for agencies with a proven track record in technical SEO. Case studies and client testimonials can provide insights into their capabilities.

Ask about their process: A competent agency will have a structured approach to address technical SEO concerns, from site audits to implementation.

Communication and reporting: Ensure the agency provides regular updates, clear reporting and is responsive to your queries.

Tools and technologies: Find out which tools they utilize for technical audits, site monitoring and other tasks – familiarity with industry-standard tools is a good sign.

Continuous learning: SEO, especially the technical side, evolves rapidly. Ensure the agency stays updated with the latest trends and algorithm changes.

Cost vs. value: While pricing is essential, weigh it against the potential value the agency can bring. The cheapest option isn’t always the best.

Transparent practices: The agency should emphasise transparency and adhere to white-hat SEO techniques.

Technical SEO refers to the optimisation practices focused on improving the infrastructure of a website, ensuring it can be efficiently crawled and indexed by search engines.

Unlike other aspects of SEO, which revolve around content creation and promotion, technical SEO emphasises a site’s backend elements. This includes site speed optimisation, mobile-friendliness, secure and accessible website setups (like HTTPS), XML sitemaps generation, elimination of crawl errors, structured data implementation and website architecture enhancements.

By optimising these elements, technical SEO ensures that search engines can seamlessly access, interpret and index a site’s content, laying the foundation for better search visibility and user experience.

A technical SEO audit is an in-depth examination of a website’s technical infrastructure to identify and resolve issues that hinder its performance in search engine rankings. This process is crucial for enhancing the visibility, speed, and usability of a website, ensuring it can be easily crawled and indexed by search engines.

Here are some of the activities and tasks Submerge carries out as part of a technical SEO audit.

Crawl analysis

A comprehensive crawl of the website is performed using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs or SEMrush. This analysis helps identify crawl errors, broken links, redirect chains, and orphan pages. It also assesses the site’s URL structure, ensuring it’s logical and search engine friendly.

Site structure

The audit examines the site’s hierarchy and structure, ensuring it is organized in a way that is logical and easy to navigate for both users and search engine bots. A well-structured website helps search engines understand the site’s content hierarchy and the relationship between pages.

Speed and performance optimisation

Page speed is a critical ranking factor. Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix are used to analyse the loading times of pages and identify factors that may be slowing the site down, such as unoptimised images, slow server response times and bulky code.

Mobile responsiveness

With the advent of mobile-first indexing, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is non-negotiable. This part of the audit checks the site’s responsiveness across various devices and screen sizes, identifying any issues that might affect the user experience on mobile.

Security

Security plays a significant role in the trustworthiness of a site. An audit will check for HTTPS implementation, secure data transmission and any potential security vulnerabilities that could compromise the website or user data.

On-page SEO evaluation

Though primarily technical, the audit also briefly touches on on-page elements to ensure proper use of tags (title, meta descriptions, headings), content quality, and keyword optimisation. It ensures that these elements are correctly implemented to support the site’s SEO strategy.

Indexation analysis

This involves checking the site’s index status on search engines to ensure that all important pages are being indexed properly and no unnecessary pages are consuming the crawl budget. It includes reviewing the robots.txt file, sitemap.xml files, and the use of noindex tags.

Duplicate Content and canonicalisation

The audit identifies duplicate content issues and ensures proper use of canonical tags to tell search engines which versions of similar pages should be considered the “master” pages. This prevents the dilution of ranking signals.

Structured data

Reviewing and implementing structured data (Schema.org) helps search engines understand the content of your site and can enhance visibility in search results through rich snippets. The audit checks for the correct implementation of structured data.

Link health analysis

Examines the health and quality of internal and external links, identifying broken links, improper redirects, and opportunities to improve the internal linking structure to distribute page authority throughout the site.

Reporting

The culmination of a technical SEO audit is a detailed report highlighting the findings, including issues impacting the site’s performance and specific recommendations for resolving these issues. Our report serves as a roadmap for making technical optimisations that can significantly improve the site’s SEO performance.

Our team performs regular technical SEO audits to ensure that your website remains compliant with search engine guidelines, is competitive in the ever-evolving landscape of SEO and provides a superior experience to its users.