I’ve done every form of technical SEO on my portfolio of websites. Technical SEO is one of the most critical tasks one must do when trying to grow the organic traffic of a website.
In layman’s terms, technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank better. This can include page speed optimization, fixing page structure (i.e., headers), improving navigation, mobile-friendly website, among other things.
Technical SEO can be cumbersome so it is often a task (nowadays) that I outsource to tested agencies and individuals.
In this article, I will share some of the best services I have used, and provide a more detailed breakdown of technical SEO.
Audit Report Services (PDFs, Videos)
Many firms (and individuals) offer technical SEO audits that come in the form of a PDF report or a video. I found PDF reports to be more useful as you can refer to the report over time and slowly fix the issues but videos can also be beneficial for those that like to see visuals.
Here are my favorite services that I’ve used in the past.
Detailed.com Video Report by Glen Allsopp
Glen Allsopp is a well-known individual in the world of SEO. He has worked with top brands in the industry managing their SEO to doing audits.
His audits oftentimes have long waiting times (due to the demand for his services). He charges $40 for a quick 10-minute video audit of your site. In our industry, this is a steal of a deal.
Easy Win Teardown Report by Mushfiq Sarker
My team and I at The Website Flip offer an easy win teardown report. In this report, we find easy wins that you can implement encompassing content, revenue, SEO (technical included), and more.
The report is broken up into the following sections:
- Easy Wins At A Glance (30 Days)
- Long Terms Wins You Should Implement (3-6 Months)
- Traffic Analysis
- Revenue Optimization
- SEO Improvements
- Content Improvements
- Out Of The Box Ideas
- Easy Wins Valuation
The only downside to the report is that you must implement the fixes and suggestions. This again can be a daunting task to DIY. But it is usually a cheaper option to get a report than having a done-for-you service take care of everything.
Full Implementation Services
Technical SEO can be boring to do yourself. That’s why there are agencies that handle the full implementation, making it hands-off for you. If your website is generating enough revenue, this can be a good option to save time but more importantly, get someone who is an expert to fix up your site.
Here are the recommended service providers that I’ve used.
Technical SEO Implementation by Jase Rodley
Jase and his team manage the entire process, either working with the client’s internal dev team or implementing the fixes themselves.
Instead of performing a single audit, they look at this as a continuous improvement process, where they perform a technical audit, find solutions, apply those fixes, check the outcome, and then repeat.
Sometimes implementation is programmatic; some changes to a few PHP files or a search and replace in the database can have a massive, site-wide impact. Other times, the implementation requires grunt work, replacing thousands of in-content links, each of which only fixes a single issue on a single URL. Either way, they get it done.
WebOperators.com by Mushfiq Sarker
WebOperators.com is a brainchild where you can hire my team of website operators to manage your website’s (content, eCommerce, SaaS) SEO and growth.
The team has grown websites and exited over 200 times. This is the same team that manages my portfolio and is now open for anyone to hire. We manage large 9-figure eCommerce brands, to smaller niche sites.
Within our website operations, we handle SEO (technical SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO), content production, content revamping, revenue optimization, and much more.
More Details About Technical SEO
With technical SEO, the goal is to make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your website.
This can include, but is not limited to:
- Improving the structure of your site so it’s easier to craw and hence index content
- Improving page speed so users do not bounce off your site
- Ensure your site loads properly on desktop and mobile, and across all web browsers
- Ensuring you have SSL properly installed
- Ensuring the navigation of your website is optimized for maximum crawl ability
- Fixing unnecessary redirects and/or broken links
And so much more…
The “science” of technical SEO is ongoing. You may fix issues at any given time but as the site continues to grow with new content and categories, there will always be a new set of issues. It’s a recurring process to fix.
3 Most Common Technical SEO Issues
Here are some common issues I’ve found on most sites I’ve bought, grown, and flipped over the years.
Pagespeed Optimization
No site is perfect. Most are slow. There is always something you can do to speed up a website. And for some reason, the site becomes slow again after a while. That’s the nature of the game.
Most website owners miss the following:
- Optimizing images: reducing images saves a ton of time loading a site. Make sure to reduce image sizes, use modern frameworks like WEBP to load, and lazy load images
- Minify CSS and Javascript: this is a common one. Reducing the size of the files being loaded can drastically reduce page speed.
- Installing a CDN: utilizing a content delivery network, like Cloudflare (free version), can improve your page speed. It’s a one-time fix and a no-brainer.
You can check your current page speed using GTMetrix and also use Google’s Page Speed tool to check Core Web Vitals.
Improving Click Depth
In other words, how many clicks does it take for the user to get to your content? Oftentimes, websites can have 1,000s of pages but the owner pays little attention to how to “structure” the content such that the visitor does not need to click more than 3-4 times to get to any article.
I like to optimize to ensure the click depth is less than 4 clicks.
To fix this, you can do the following:
- Add more internal links throughout your content
- Add more categories and assign content to close categories. Then add the categories to your navigation menu
- Clean up content. Yes, this is a strategy to decrease your click depth. Delete and/or merge irrelevant content is a legitimate strategy to let search engines focus on the content that matters.
Keeping your click depth as low as possible is a recipe for success. Why would you want visitors to have to click more to get information? Your goal is for them to feel like they found value when they visit your website; not the opposite.
Fixing Broken Links
As websites grow, they get broken internal/external links, redirects, and more. These need to be audited and cleaned up frequently.
You can use tools like Screaming Frog crawler or Ahrefs to crawl the website. The tool will point out broken links and or unnecessary redirects.
You can then fix these up one at a time. It’s cumbersome but necessary.
Actionable Takeaways
Having a proper foundation in SEO is extremely important; without it, you just will not rank to the maximum potential.
These are my actionable takeaways for you:
- Perform an audit to understand the issues around your site. Either do this yourself or use a third-party service
- Implement the issues you can fix yourself or outsource the rest to technical SEO audit services
- Technical SEO is 80/20 (pareto principle). 80% of the improvements will come from the major 20% of the issues. The challenge is determining what are the 20% of the issues to fix (that’s where experts come in)
- Do a crawl via tools like Ahrefs and/or SEMRush to understand if there are any issues. This won’t catch everything but it will give you a rough idea.
