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Technical SEO: The Best Opportunity For You To Add Value To Your Website Projects

POST WRITTEN BY
Tim Brown

Pubcon 2017, the multi-day conference for digital marketers, wrapped up last week in Las Vegas. For those of you who were unable to attend (like me), chasing down recap and reaction articles is the best way to stay on top of the latest insights that you can apply to your digital marketing strategies.

A comment from Gary Illyes, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst, caught my attention:

“Next year, there will be two things we want to focus on. The first is structured data. You can expect more applications for structured data, more stuff like jobs, like recipes, like products, etc.”

Google’s emphasis on structured data is not new. However, its continued progress in adding and improving search results pages with rich content should have you asking how your clients’ websites can take advantage of this trend.

Despite the obvious importance of having a strong content strategy to increase organic search visibility, technical and structural improvements to websites unlock massive value for businesses. Shoring up your technical SEO practices will differentiate you from other agencies and enable you to increase the value of your website development projects.

Give Your Client A Website That Includes Advanced Technical SEO

Nearly all project plans for a website build include some level of technical SEO. We want to give our clients the peace of mind that, once their website is launched, it will be warmly welcomed by Google into its search results. However, a lot of web development agencies don’t go much further beyond a sitemap, a robots.txt file and some basic keyword optimization (page titles, meta descriptions, etc.). What else can be done?

Site Speed Optimization

Improving website load times has been one of Google’s biggest SEO initiatives of the last couple years. They continue to roll out new tools, like Test My Site, and features to support the AMP projectHere are several deliverables for you to add to your web development project plans to cover site speed optimization.

Site Speed Testing: Demonstrate that your client’s website loads as quickly, if not more quickly, than their competitors.

Pro Tip: A number of free tools are available to diagnose site speed issues and run unbiased reports for competitive comparison:

• Chrome DevTools Lighthouse

 GTmetrix

 Pingdom Tools

AMP Implementation: The applications for accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are growing. Initially, AMPs made the most sense for content publishers, but now e-commerce retailers and advertisers are adopting the framework and taking advantage of the near-instant page load speed.

Pro Tip: Validate your AMP pages with Google’s AMP testing tool.

Image Optimization: One of the biggest offenders of slow load times is a website’s images. Scale and compress images before uploading them.

Pro Tip: Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will give you losslessly compressed images to download and re-upload to your website.

A fast website not only benefits SEO but can also improve a site’s conversion rate. The value of having a speedy site experience cannot be understated.

Structured Data Markup

Structured data unlocks opportunities for organic search result visibility that can dramatically improve rankings and click-through rates. Structured data isn’t just for company information -- it has applications across many industries and areas of a website. For example:

• Breadcrumb navigation

• Articles

• Products

• People

• Events

• Recipes

• Job postings

You can offer structured data markup as a means to give your clients’ websites greater visibility through rich content. Here are some deliverables to consider:

Structured Data Assessment: The opportunities to implement structured data vary by industry and business type. Determine the optimal ways to utilize structured data by reviewing search results for key terms.

Pro Tip: Know all of the available search features and decide which ones are relevant to your client.

Schema Markup Generation: Schema markup is a popular form of structured data and it's easier to implement than you think. In fact, there are plenty of free schema markup tools available that will auto-generate the code for you.

Pro Tip: Use the JSON-LD format to implement schema markup in order to keep it as clean and organized as possible.

Structured Data Validation: After the markup is implemented, validate that it is rendering correctly using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Pro Tip: If you’re not comfortable writing schema markup, Google Search Console has a tool called the Data Highlighter so that even non-techies can implement structured data.

Harness The Value Of Technical SEO

The technical side of SEO has somewhat fallen off in importance in the context of web development, but Google’s mission to organize and optimize the web has created a resurgence in technical optimization opportunities.

As web development agencies, we can build our clients best-in-class websites that take advantage of these SEO opportunities by reintegrating technical optimization into our project plans.

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