Build a Solid Foundation

Technical SEO boosts your website’s performance, search visibility, and customer experience. Without a solid technical foundation, your website will provide a poor customer experience and struggle to appear in Google search results.

Quality content is not enough.

Quality content, good design, and good visitor experience are table stakes. Google strives to rank well-written web pages and websites that provide a good visitor experience.

What is Technical SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of increasing your website’s visibility on Google (and other search engines such as Bing) search engine results page (SERP). It typically includes:

• On-page SEO, which is content targeted to specific keywords
• Off-page SEO, focused on getting links on other websites
• Local SEO, which helps your website rank high in specific locations
• Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of your website’s infrastructure to ensure that search engines can efficiently crawl, index, and rank your content. It is the behind-the-scenes work that is easily ignored by marketers, website designers and developers, and content creators because it is not visible to someone viewing a web page.

Customer Experience and Technical SEO

It’s not enough to create good content and design a pretty website. Good design, good content, and a solid technical foundation are all necessary to provide a good customer experience.

A Technical SEO website review can find problems that:

• Keep you from ranking high in Google and Bing search results
• Provide a poor customer experience for all your website visitors

Google understands this and ranks web pages accordingly. Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV) is a set of metrics designed to measure the quality of a visitor’s experience on a web page. CWV focuses on customer experience metrics. It takes both good content and a good customer experience, as measured using Google’s CWV criteria, to rank well.

When Should You Do a Technical SEO Review?

A technical SEO review is recommended:

• Before spending money on digital ads that drive people to your website
• Whenever website lead generation or traffic drops significantly over a period of time
• Before implementing a content marketing strategy
• Before and after a website redesign
• Whenever you feel your website is not performing the way you’d like

Technical SEO Report

After completing the Technical SEO review, we create an actionable report that consists of a prioritized list of recommendations. The recommendations are clearly explained and supported by data. This normally consists of action items for content editors and website developers, written in language each discipline understands.

The process doesn’t end with the report. Moderno Strategies helps explain the action items and runs further reports to confirm high-priority action items are resolved.

Technical SEO Review Process

A Technical SEO review identifies and addresses critical issues such as website navigation, page speed, and mobile device optimization, allowing you to remove barriers that impact ranking and the customer experience. It is a quality check that can identify improvement opportunities across many disciplines, including:

• Content Editing
• Design
• Web Development
• Customer Experience

The person conducting the review should have an in-depth understanding of each of these disciplines so that reporting is done in a way that each discipline understands, and so a prioritized list of recommendations can be created for each discipline.

A long and expensive website development project is normally not required to make significant improvements with minor technical or content changes.

After performing dozens of technical SEO reviews for end clients as well as content and web design agencies, Moderno Strategies has created a review process that quickly assesses your website. The process results in a data-intensive report, but the real value is the list of prioritized action items for content editors, web designers, and developers.

Technical SEO Analysis Checklist

The review consists of a thorough analysis that looks beyond the content and design of the website. Moderno Strategies’s Technical SEO Review includes the following items.

1. Configure Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
2. Verify the site implements HTTPS and www redirects correctly
3. Page Speed Analysis
4. Mobile-Friendly Assessment
5. Internal Linking Analysis
6. Site Speed Analysis
7. Google Analytics Assessment
8. Content Structure Quality Assessment
9. Canonicalization Review
10. Backlink audit
11. Local SEO Audit
12. Structured Data Markup Review
13. Keyword Analysis
14. Competitor Analysis