SEO Campaign
Technical SEO Consultant
Technical SEO consultant
Technical SEO optimises the architecture, speed, and structure of a website. Good technical SEO helps search engines crawl and index content and significantly improves the chance of its content ranking above others.
Technical SEO doesn’t have to be scary, and it doesn’t have to be full of jargon. There are hundreds of free tools online that will assess the technical condition of a website from an SEO perspective and make recommendations to bring it up to scratch (there are links to some of those below – I pride myself on being transparent and helpful). Most web developers proficient in your website framework will be able to follow the recommendations given by those tools to bring your site up to scratch but when it comes to technical SEO, the roles of technical SEO consultant and web developer are different.
What does a technical SEO consultant do?
A technical SEO consultant like me is useful because someone needs to interpret the problems flagged by audit tools and apply SEO strategy to the solutions being implemented. I’ve yet to meet a web developer that can’t follow an SEO developer’s guide outlined by me or another SEO consultant but there aren’t many that can develop an SEO strategy and apply it to technical SEO without assistance.
I compare a website to the other sites its competing against for search visibility. SEO is a competitive activity so the level off technical perfection required depends on what’s typical in your market. Once the level of required perfection has been defined, I divide implementations into those that require a web developer proficient in your framework (like load speed improvements or minifying CSS and JavaScript), those that need a developer but SEO strategy applied (like redirect strategy, URL structure or schema markup) and those that need an SEO consultant (like headers, meta descriptions and goal tracking and analysis).
When deciding who to work with as your technical SEO specialist the choice is usually between a web developer turned SEO consultant or an SEO strategist that works with a web developer. I’m an SEO strategist that works with a web developer. I can build a WordPress website and do maintenance but there are better and faster developers, so I stick to SEO strategy and campaigns.
Technical SEO’s impact and what you should expect
I’ve achieved number one ranks for extremely competitive keywords with websites that had a poor SEO technical condition and I’ve seen technically perfect websites rank for barely anything. Google’s webmaster guidelines are all about authority of content and how well users interact with it. You need to be crawled and indexed but it’s possible that a technically poor website can rank.
Technical SEO becomes important because in most cases it impacts the way users interact with a site, so it impacts user behaviour (an SEO signal). It also impacts a websites authority score, and it puts one site a cut above others when there are many sites that are equally authoritative on a topic. Google and other search engines want to organise the world’s information, they are going to respect authority above all else but when choosing between two or more authorities on the same topic, they’re going to favour the one who has organised their website in the best way and that’s exactly what a technical SEO consultant does.
What’s Mr SEO Consultant’s approach to technical SEO?
Most technical SEO consultants start with a technical SEO audit, and I do too. As well as auditing your site I analyse your competitor’s technical condition and define what level of technical improvements you require to compete effectively. There are some SEO specialists and SEO agencies that charge their clients to pass every aspect of an audit but in my experience a site only needs to be the best among the websites its competing with and if you chose me as your technical SEO consultant that’s all I plan to charge for.
If schema markup isn’t used in your industry, you probably don’t need it and can live without 100% score on an audit. The same goes for meta descriptions on policy pages, image meta descriptions if you’re not pursuing ranks in the images search vertical and many other things you might not need but could end up paying for if someone scares you into thinking an audit is something you pass or fail. Technical SEO is a state you are either better or worse at than your competitors.
Like nearly all SEO consultants I use premium tools, some of the free ones I’ve linked to below offer limited results, or on certain websites due to their structure, false results. I use around twelve different tools to ensure the results are accurate and recognised by different types of website crawlers.
I partner with a handful of web developers that can implement my technical recommendations or I can advise your own developer if you already have one.
How quickly should a website’s technical SEO be improved
In my opinion the faster the better. Some technical SEO consultants do it gradually, month by month. It creates a steady income for the SEO consultant but there’s no benefit to improving technical SEO gradually. Developing authority (like backlinks) is sometimes best done gradually (otherwise, if not done properly, it might seem a little black hat) but there’s nothing black hat about improving a website in a short space of time and that’s the best way to do it. My recommendation is always to get the technical condition up to the minimum required level as soon as possible. A poor technical condition could be holding you back.