3 Technical SEO Tips To Boost Small Business Websites

Any website that wants to dominate the search engine results pages (SERPs) should not neglect technical search engine optimization (SEO) — yes, even if yours is small.

The best way to execute technical optimization is by working with an SEO agency with the tools and expertise to handle complex and challenging techniques.

You can also learn effective tactics to collaborate with your team better. In this article, we talk about:

• Keeping your site secure
• Setting up your platforms correctly
• Performing a site audit

How do you do all these? Read the article below. Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

3 Formidable Technical SEO Tips for Small Businesses

The most effective technical SEO tactics for small business websites are no different from those with hundreds to thousands of pages. Given limited resources, such as budgets and time, you must prioritize. Focus on those that will create the biggest impact at this moment.

For example, if you’re still adding articles or product pages, adding a robots.txt file may not be at the top of your to-do list. Unless you have already performed opic clustering, you will know about those that do not need indexing.

Instead, consider these three ideas:

     1. Keep Your Site Secure

In the age of disinformation and cybersecurity breaches, site security is critical for you, your visitors, and search engines. In fact, HTTPS has been a well-known ranking signal for years.

Regarding technical SEO, there are two options for keeping your site secure:

• Switch from HTTP to HTTPS.
• Ensure that your server side is safe.

Here is how to switch from HTTP to HTTPS:

• Obtain an SSL/TLS certificate from a trusted certificate authority (CA), which encrypts data transmitted between the website and the user's browser.
• Install the SSL/TLS certificate on your web server.
• Update all internal links on the website to HTTPS instead of HTTP.
• Update your content management (CMS) settings to use HTTPS instead of HTTP.
• Set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS to redirect all traffic to the secure version of your website.
• Update your sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console to ensure the indexing of all URLs as HTTPS.
• Verify that your website uses HTTPS by checking for the padlock icon in the browser address bar.

With server security:

• Keep server software up-to-date, including operating systems, web servers, databases, and other applications.
• Implement firewall protection to protect your server from unauthorized access and block suspicious IP addresses.
• Enable server-side encryption for all sensitive data, such as databases and backups.
• Monitor server logs for suspicious activity, such as failed login attempts or unusual traffic patterns.

     2. Set Up Your Platforms Correctly

Contrary to popular belief, Google Search Console and Analytics are different in many ways:

They can also work together to provide you with potential SEO goldmines of information:

• Search Console can identify which keywords are sending your site the most traffic. In turn, you can change the website accordingly to maximize its visibility. For example, update the page title and meta description to make them more relevant for a specific keyword.
• Google Analytics can help optimize content further by focusing on topics that resonate with your targeted audience.
• Both provide a comprehensive picture of your optimization efforts.

You’ll need to set these tools correctly to maximize their features and benefits, including boosting site traffic:

• Go to the Google Analytics website to create a new account and follow the prompts.
• Set up a new property for your website, by entering your website’s name and URL.
• Install a tracking code on every page, by placing it in your website’s HTML header or footer section.
• Verify that the tracking code works properly, by checking the Real-Time reports in Google Analytics.
• Set up goals to track specific actions on your website, such as form submissions or purchases.
• Customize your reports in Google Analytics to track specific metrics and dimensions relevant to your website.
• Link your Google Analytics account to Google Search Console to see how your website performs in search results.

     3. Perform a Site Audit

A technical site audit is essential for small business websites because it helps to diagnose and fix issues that can harm website performance, earning potential, and conversions.

Further, it:

• Lets you optimize the website experience to attract more customers, while making sure you can keep up with the competition
• Ensures that search engines can crawl and index your pages
• Tells you which optimization techniques to prioritize
• Helps with managing your crawl budget

SEO agencies usually use a technical SEO checklist to make sure that they can identify issues quickly and efficiently. What is on the list can vary, but it often includes the following:

• Check for broken, missing, and dead links.
• Verify your website is mobile-friendly, by running it through Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
• Test your website’s loading speed to ensure it loads quickly and efficiently.
• Look into any incorrect robots.txt files and improper internal linking structure.
• Evaluate your website’s meta descriptions, titles, and headings to ensure that they are SEO-friendly.
• Search for any duplicate or thin content on the pages of your website.
• Confirm that all images have the proper ALT tags.
• Check for crawl errors, redirects, and canonical issues.
• Ensure that the schema markup is correct, and that the XML sitemap exists and is updated.

Summing Up

Maintaining a website is essential for small businesses because it allows them to reach their target customers, gain visibility in the SERPs, and generate conversions.

The steps above tackle one of the fundamental optimization factors. For your digital marketing plan to work,however, technical SEO should go hand-in-hand with on-page and off-page optimization. Digital Authority Partners (DAP) helps you create a customized, holistic online marketing approach that aligns with your needs and goals. Call us today, so we can start working with you!