5 Best Technical SEO Practices for San Diego Businesses

Some online marketing efforts work best behind the scenes, and a San Diego technical SEO agency knows how to do them efficiently.

This article outlines five technical SEO best practices, why they matter, and how they complement other optimization strategies, especially local search:

• Publish separate product pages to avoid duplicate content.
• Create and improve structured data to maximize organic search exposure.
• Use HTTPS to enhance website security.
• Focus on Web Core Vitals to optimize mobile website performance.
• Manage your crawl budget to ensure that search engines can index your optimized pages.

Read below to learn how to execute each essential tip. Let’s go!

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

1. Publish Separate Product Pages To Avoid Duplicate Content

Many businesses doing search engine optimization (SEO) are notorious for creating similar content on their product or service pages. This situation leads to duplicate content.

To be clear, Google does not penalize you for doing it — at least not yet. Unless, of course, you purposefully try to manipulate the organic search. But it remains a problem for several reasons:

• It confuses search engines on which version of the content to index and rank.
• It dilutes link equity. Any inbound links will be split between the pages, reducing the link authority of each page.
• Duplicate content affects the user experience when your leads cannot get the information that they need from your indexed pages.
• Multiple content versions are inefficient because they only force you to spend more time maintaining the website.

Avoid duplicate content with these strategies:

• Conduct a technical SEO audit to determine if you have duplicate content and how they are performing in the search results.
• Optimize each page for local SEO by including location-specific keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and content.
• Use canonical tags to tell search engines which version you prefer.
• Implement a 301 redirect when you want to move a page to a new URL and do not want the search engines to continue indexing and ranking the old one.

2. Create Structured Data To Maximize Organic Search Exposure

One of the biggest benefits of technical SEO for San Diego businesses is getting more organic exposure in different ways. These include generating rich snippets in local search that promote a better user experience.

You might also earn a spot in Google’s local map pack, which includes the first three businesses that appear in the search for location-specific keywords. Because you occupy a higher position than the first organic link, you get more substantial clicks.

But how do you maximize these opportunities? Use structured data, especially with schema markup. 

3. Use HTTPS To Enhance Website Security

Security is a major priority (and concern) for Google. It has been a ranking signal for years. It is unsurprising, considering Americans lost almost $8 billion in 2022 because of fraud. The Internet played a huge, unfortunate role in it, as well.

A secure site also increases the user experience and brand credibility. These two alone can readily help you rank higher in the search results, get more leads, and even boost your revenues and returns.

While you can perform many strategies to make your website safe, using HTTPS (hypertext transfer protocol secure) is the best. This differs from HTTP in many ways:

Note that you can lose the HTTPS status if the certificate expires. Make it a habit to keep track of the expiration date, usually every two years.

4. Focus on Web Core Vitals To Optimize Mobile Website Performance

More people use mobile devices as personal assistants. For instance, in the third quarter of 2022, 32.2% of Americans shopped online weekly using smartphones.

This consumer shift is also one of the primary reasons that Google has decided to do mobile-first indexing, preferring to lead with crawling mobile versions.

But how do you get your website ready for it? A San Diego technical SEO agency incorporates Web Core Vitals in its optimization plan.

Web Core Vitals has three primary components:

• Stability, measured with cumulative layout shift (CLS)
• Speed, with the largest contentful paint (LCP) as its metric
• Visual stability, assessed through cumulative layout shift (CLS)

You can power up these vitals with these ideas:

• Optimize images and videos for faster loading times by minimizing JavaScript and using CSS files.
• Use a content delivery network (CDN). It works by caching copies of your website and delivering them to users according to their location.
• Be careful with lazy loading content, where you display images only when needed. It might reduce the user experience.
• Minimize redirects on both desktop and mobile sites.
• Enable browser caching to store frequently used resources.
• Reduce server response time by optimizing server settings and code.

5. Manage Your Crawl Budget to Help Index Optimized Pages

Local business websites can easily accumulate different content types. These include blogs, product and service pages, case studies, and guides. 

But these articles are not created equal. For instance, some have a higher potential to drive more traffic and conversions than others. How do you ensure that these are the pages that search engines can index?

One technical SEO strategy is managing your crawl budget — the number of pages Google bots can index daily on your website. Here is how:

• Create a logical website structure with a clear hierarchy and navigation.
• Make a breadcrumb trail, which provides search engines with more information about the page’s hierarchy.
• Use robots.txt files to tell Google and Bing which pages you do not want to be crawled. 
• Add an XML sitemap.
• Regularly monitor crawl errors and fix them promptly.
• Avoid using too many redirects and broken links.

Summing Up

The first step in online conversion is visibility. Technical SEO helps San Diego businesses achieve it by complementing on-page, off-page, and local search optimization. It improves the site’s crawlability, indexability, and accessibility. 

But this strategy is not easy. Digital Authority Partners (DAP), a top-tier San Diego technical SEO agency, takes this load off of you. We build a solid plan, execute the strategies, and monitor their progress. To learn more about SEO, contact us today.