How Technical SEO Impacts Site Architecture?

It's no secret that SEO is a critical part of any successful digital marketing strategy. After all, it can help shape your content and direct potential customers towards your website. However, many organizations overlook the technical aspect of SEO when constructing their site architecture. Technical SEO refers to optimizing the code on a page in order to improve its ranking on web search engine results pages (SERPs). Drawing upon my experience as an experienced Digital Marketer, I am here to show you why it is important to include technical SEO into your site architecture and how doing so could potentially benefit your online performance!

Impacts of Technical SEO on Site Architecture

It Fixes Site Crawlability Issues

Site crawlability is a crucial factor in website architecture. It is a process where search engine robots crawl into your site to understand it. They go through all your website pages and subpages to appreciate your site as a whole.

A website is considered perfectly crawlable when the visitor and robots can visit one page to another from within the website. That means there should be no dead-end during the crawling process.

That means you need to build your site architecture in a way that each and every page is interlinked. Technical SEO can help with that. You can include internal links on each page. Other technical SEO practices include adding breadcrumbs, schema markup, and following structured data formats.

Reinforce Your Site Structure

A bad site structure can split the equity of a page. That means Google will favor one page over the other. It can be a problem when the wrong page gets ranked in Google. This can affect your business as people will land on the wrong page.

With proper technical SEO practices, you can build a robust site hierarchy. It allows you to pass equity through domains. Plus, you can direct users to a desired link of your choice.

You can submit an XML sitemap to search engines featuring all the essential links you want to rank.

Switch to HTTPs Without Losing Site Equity

More than 50% of websites have moved to HTTPS from HTTP. This is an important thing to do as Google considers it as a ranking factor. HTTPS offers security from hackers and malicious activities. If your website stores users' information or do a financial transaction, getting SSL certification is a must.

However, migrating to HTTPS could affect your link equity for all the pages that use HTTP. You can use canonical tags or 301 redirects to fix this issue. Besides, you can use robot.txt, telling Google which page to crawl and which to avoid.

Fix Duplicate Contents Issues

Duplicate content of any kind can harm your website's SEO. This includes onsite duplicate content too. You can use Google's Search Console to identify duplicate content and remove them. However, sometimes your site automatically creates multiple links for one link.

This happens when you migrate to HTTPS or HTTP. Another way is if you have similar content for all variations of the same product. For instance, selling the same phone in different colors. In such cases, it is a waste of time to develop unique content for each variation of the same product.

However, Google couldn't differentiate between genuine duplicate content from content that is mistakenly identified as duplicates.

Technical SEO practices like 301 redirects and canonical tags can solve this issue. With 301 redirects, you direct Google crawlers to another URL. For example, when Google crawls into the HTTP URL, you can redirect it to the HTTPS URL. Similarly, you can also use robot.txt to direct crawlers to the master URL instead of crawling all the pages of the same product.

Improves Navigation And User Experience

The user experience standards of a website have improved significantly over the years. A single error can make your visitors move to other options.

Google aims to provide the best user experience for its users, which includes the quality of content and user interface. Search engines like Google and Bing favor websites with easy accessibility and good navigational structure. That's why you must ensure to develop a site that is simple to use and doesn't confuse your visitors.

Technical SEO practices to improve your web page experience −

• Use meaningful heading tags.

• Optimize your images.

• Use graphs.

• Test your pages on different mobile devices.

• Minimize using CSS, JavaScript, and other third-party scripts.

• Remove VSS and JAVAScropt functionalities like sliders and contact forms when it is not required.

• Test your page speed with the Pagespeed Insights tool.

Optimizes Your Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a set of factors Google considers while ranking a page. It is measured with three specific page speeds and user interaction. This includes −

• First input delay

• Cumulative layout shift

• Largest contentful paint

In short, Core Web Vitals are factors that dictate Google's page experience score.

Optimizing First Input Delay

• Use a browser cache.

• Minimize JavaScripts.

• Remove non-critical third-party scripts.

Optimizing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

• Set a separate space for ad elements.

• Add new UI elements below the fold.

• Use specific size attributes for all contents.

Optimizing The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

• Upgrade your web host.

• Set up lazy loading.

• Remove the large page element.

• Remove unnecessary third-party scripts.

Optimize Mobile Friendliness

Mobile friendliness is a crucial ranking factor. Search engines can easily detect if your website is mobile-friendly. If not, your site can be penalized.

Tips to Increase Your Site's Mobile Friendliness

• Avoid plugins like Silverlight, Java, or Flash.

• Make your font size readable for users without zooming in.

• Make navigation simple.

• Use Google AMP.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is an extremely important component of web design, and it should not be overlooked. It is essential for businesses to consider technical SEO when constructing their site architecture in order to ensure that they can effectively reach their desired audience. Not only will doing so increase the visibility and ranking of their website, but it will also improve the user experience which leads to more conversions and better engagement. The best way to optimize for technical SEO is to have a thorough understanding of its objectives and principles, utilizing tools such as analytics platforms to track progress along the way. Ultimately, by making use of proper site architecture that incorporates technical SEO considerations, any business can drastically improve their website's performance capabilities and reach heights beyond what they originally thought possible.