A Website Technical SEO Checklist for Beginners
Our technical SEO checklist for beginners was built to help you understand some of the key pieces to improving your website visibility. While there are more in-depth tools, tips, and tricks, we’ve highlighted the key metrics to review when beginning to analyze website health and performance.
Crawling
What is site crawling? Google’s site crawler visits and reads website pages and analyzes content and meta information. If your website is not crawled by Google, there is no ability for people searching on Google to find your website or content.
How do I know my site is being crawled? Use a third-party site audit tool to determine the health of your website. Site audit tools crawl your websites pages and provide a list of errors with suggested fixes.
Unsure of where to start? Reach out and we can help you review your website’s overall health.
Indexing
Once Google crawls your website the content is stored and appears in Google’s results when a relevant search is submitted by a user. The best way to ensure Google is indexing your website is to Google Search Console. This is a free tool that allows you to submit sitemaps, review errors, identify gaps in your mobile to desktop experience, and more.
Pro tip: Missing navigation links causes confusion when indexing. Include Breadcrumbs where possible to allow Google to navigate easily between pages on the website.
Wait, but what is a sitemap? A sitemap is typically an HTML file that tells Google where the important content lives on your website, and which pages have the highest authority.
Core Web Vitals
As we mentioned, finding the errors in the build of your website is one of the first technical steps towards improving organic rankings. Reviewing the Core Web Vitals through Google Search Console helps paint a picture of the time it takes for the main content on a web page to render/load. It also measures the number of shifts in the page layout (too many shifts negatively impacts your vitals score).
Some key metrics to web vitals include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shifts (CLS). In recent years, Google has added significant weight to your organic rankings based on your CLS score.
Ideal metrics:
- LCP under 3 seconds
- CLS score of .2 or under
Looking for a quick overview of your website’s health? Check out our Free Website Audit.
Mobile-First Indexing
In recent years, Google has rolled out Mobile-first indexing, which means mobile versions of web pages are prioritized for indexing. As technology continues to evolve and smart devices are used increasingly more, it is important to review the Mobile design of your website. Are you missing links or content that is only found on desktop? Is this leading to missed conversions or sales?
The moral of the short yet long story is, technical SEO is crucial to web page visibility on search engines. If you don’t know where to start, we can help! Reach out and we can work together on evalauating the health of your website and provide solutions and recommendations to increase your website visibility
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Faith Hagen
Faith graduated from the University of Sioux Falls in 2018 with a Business Administration and Marketing degree. Her passion for creativity has driven her to explore interior design and teaching before finding her niche in digital marketing. She is passionate about meshing creativity and technology to develop campaign strategies and building websites. Faith has experience delivering WordPress and Magento website projects and is considered the expert on the team in content creation/writing. In her free time, Faith enjoys watching sports, spending time outdoors, and playing with her dog, Thor.