technical SEO agency newcastle

Technical SEO is one of the major components of the SEO service overall. It’s the practice of ensuring technical aspects of the website meet Google’s standards and in turn promote the ability for better rankings. Generally when we talk about technical SEO we aim to ensure a website can be crawled and indexed by Google without any blockers, website architecture is structured and we have a healthy page speed.

Technical SEO helps ensure a good user experience, it is the foundation for a good SEO strategy. Whilst having a fast and easily crawlable/indexable website are factors that aid a website's ability to rank, it’s the way in which these factors translate to a good user experience that makes technical SEO so important. In the same way Google uses content on a page as a weighting factor for rank, it also looks at the way users behave on-site and the way they interact with the website. Having a fast and structured website makes user navigation easier and advocates for longer session durations and pages viewed per session. 

Zimple’s technical SEO services are based on research and data, including competitor analysis. We offer technical SEO audits, including in depth review of your site’s ability to rank. Here, we use tools like screaming frog, SEMrush and Ahrefs to crawl your website and determine if there are any errors hindering the website in Google’s eyes. These errors are typically 404 errors, unnecessary 301 redirects, missing or duplicate meta titles/descriptions, duplicate content, sitemap issues, broken internal and external links. 

Using Google search console we conduct a crawling/indexation review using the indexing section. It is here we are given the full scope of how Google is perceiving the site from a technical viewpoint. We are given information on basic problems similar to SEMrush like canonicalisation issues, no index pages and 404s. Lots of inexperienced SEOs will often skip over these areas; they believe there is nothing to be done and these problems are purely in the hands of Google. While this is partly true, there are a variety of things that can be done to resolve this. If pages exist in these sections Google cannot see the value in them, and actions must be taken to rectify this. 

Using the tools mentioned above it’s here we take a deeper look into the sites navigation and internal linking structure. Ensuring a site is easy to navigate is vital, this means if you’re an ecommerce site you have product categories and products set up correctly and the same for service based sites. For example, a bad website design and navigation could mean a cluttered layout, not easily identifiable navigation menu, pages that aren’t linked in the navigation menu creating orphaned issues (not linked anywhere on the site). When site navigation isn’t done right it can cause high bounce rates and a lack of engagement on-site. The process of internal linking is usually done during on-page optimisations. However, when conducting a technical audit it’s important to look at any internal link issues. Such as any broken links, poorly optimised URL structures and pages that have too high of a page crawl depth (having to click through too many pages to reach the desired page).   

Here we ensure the site has the correct structured data markup or schema based on best practices. Schema markup gives Google further information on what a page's purpose is, what it’s about and more information on the business as whole. 

Website migrations are an important consideration when it comes to SEO. Ensuring a website is migrated correctly involves a variety of components, including correct 301 redirects, site architecture review, content review, page speed and core web vitals. 

Here we use tools like Google’s page speed insights and google lighthouse to identify what issues are causing slow page speeds. Utilising our in-house developers we can effectively address these problems to improve speeds.