Technical SEO

Mobile Friendliness

In 2015, Google rolled out an update termed “Mobilegeddon” that was specific about how mobile traffic can influence search rankings. You can check the degree to which your website is mobile-friendly by entering your URL into Google’s Mobile-Friendly Checker Tool.

It can give clear ideas on what Google thinks of your page. Additionally, you can check all your pages of a verified website on Google Search Console for Mobile Usability. There are three major approaches to making your website mobile-friendly – responsive design, specific URLs for desktop & mobile or serve different content as per device used to access the website. Among these a responsive design is the most viable; the design shrinks and expands according to the type of device involved.

Site Architecture

In order to make the best possible use of Google search for website visibility. It is important that you make the job of Google bots easier when they crawl your websites. You can do this by creating clear and simple site architecture that would be easily indexed and rank faster. These are pointers to creating an efficient architecture:

• Sitemap: Create a list of URLs on your site, gives easy hints to spiders while crawling.
• Silo Content: Organize your content into separate categories to create a hierarchy.
• URL Structure: A descriptive and brief URL works best optimize to make it SEO friendly.
• Crawl errors: Get rid of anything that obstructs efficient crawling, you can take the help of Google Search Console.

Thin or Duplicate Content

Having duplicate content on your website does not go well with search engines. It tends to confuse search engines with more than one copy of the same content. Creating a scenario where deciding the relevancy of an individual page becomes difficult.

Google has increasingly become efficient at detecting duplicate content and it can directly affect traffic to your website. You can utilize available online tools to detect such content or can take help of Google Search Console. Alternatively, you can individually delete duplicate content; and/ or reduce such content by practices like merging similar pages or adding unique content. The best option is to have a canonical link to a specific page telling Google about the best version among repeated content.

Structured Markup

Modern search engines have evolved enough to understand what is on a given web page. However, you can take it to the next level by including structured data. It will enable the display of your product or service on search results with rich snippets.

You must be familiar with rich snippets, these are pictures and stars that are displayed along with plain text on search results. These can influence your search rankings by improving your click-through rate. Thereby, telling Google that your page is more relevant than others for better ranking odds. You can add schema terms to the existing HTML code manually to describe a section of content or can download plug-ins when operating with content management systems (CMS).

Google Search Console

GSC is a free service provided by Google to fix, monitor and improve visibility and presence on Search Results Page. You start on GSC by verifying the ownership of your website. The tool is divided into four major sections, which are:

• Search Appearance: This helps give you a user’s point of view about how the search results would look. This includes structure data, rich cards, data highlighter, HTML improvements etc.
• Search Traffic: This provides actionable data on SEO. This includes Search Analytics, backlinks data, and more.
• Google Index: This gives you reports on crawling and indexing action by crawlers on your site.
• Crawl: This report about website crawl rate and errors it found on site.