Technical SEO services to improve your website’s health
Optimise your WordPress & Divi website for search engines & users with technical SEO
A healthy website is the foundation of successful SEO. Website Adelaide specialises in technical SEO for WordPress websites and Divi themes. We analyse and improve your site’s structure, speed, and functionality to help it rank higher and perform better.
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Technical website SEO
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO ensures that your website’s backend infrastructure effectively supports crawling, indexing, and ranking. For WordPress websites, this includes optimising plugins, themes, and configurations. As Divi theme experts, we ensure your site operates smoothly, is easy to update, and aligns with SEO best practices.
Why addressing these issues matters
When technical SEO problems go unresolved, they can undermine even the best content and marketing strategies. Fixing these issues improves your site’s performance and usability and lays a strong foundation for on-page SEO and other growth efforts.
How search engines work
Understanding technical SEO helps one to know how search engines like Google operate. They follow a three-step process to evaluate websites:
Crawling
Search engines visit your website and access its content, such as text, images, and videos. Google uses a mobile-first approach, meaning it looks at the mobile version of your site first. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, this could hurt your performance.
Indexing
Once the content is analysed, search engines save it in their database, a step known as indexing. Web pages that aren’t properly indexed won’t appear in search results.
Serving results
When someone searches for something, the search engine evaluates its indexed content to find the most relevant results to display.
Test your website for technical SEO
- Test Your Website’s Speed: Use Pingdom to check your website’s performance Test your website here on Pingdom.
- Why It Matters: Faster load times and a high-performance grade help improve SEO and user experience.
- Compare Your Scores: Test your site and see if you match up to our high standards.
Technical SEO tested on Website Adelaide
Our Results: 533ms load time, 95A performance grade, website performs excellently!
When is it a Technical seo issue?
10 signs when your website needs technical SEO
1. Slow load times
If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, visitors may leave before engaging with your content. This can result from large images, excessive plugins, or unoptimised code.
2. High bounce rates
Users leaving your site quickly without exploring further can indicate poor usability or technical problems, such as broken links or confusing navigation.
3. Mobile usability issue
A significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it’s likely affecting both user experience and search rankings.
4. Missing or poorly optimised meta tags
Meta titles and descriptions help search engines understand your pages and encourage users to click on your site. Missing or outdated meta tags reduce your site’s visibility.
5. Difficulty managing content
Websites with overly complex or custom-coded systems can make updating pages or adding new content hard, leading to outdated information and lost opportunities.
6. Poor URL and category structure
Broad or incorrectly named categories and poorly structured URLs make it harder for search engines to understand your site’s content, reducing your chances of ranking for relevant searches.
7. Unoptimised E-commerce pages
If products are added as blog posts instead of within an e-commerce system, they may not get their own URLs, making them nearly invisible to search engines.
8. Indexing problems
Pages not appearing in search results or missing important content by search engines can signal issues with your crawl budget or incorrect robots.txt settings.
9. Too many plugins and themes
Websites overloaded with plugins or unused themes can slow performance, increase the risk of errors, and make maintenance easier.
10. Outdated XML sitemap or robots.txt file
If your XML sitemap doesn’t include all your key pages or your robots.txt file incorrectly blocks essential content, search engines may struggle to crawl and index your website effectively. These technical issues can lead to poor visibility in search results and missed opportunities to attract visitors.
Start with a free SEO audit
Before making technical SEO improvements, it’s essential to identify where your website stands. Our free on-page SEO audit provides a high-level overview and identifies key areas for improving your website’s health.
Website audit
Technical SEO
How technical SEO impacts your website
Technical SEO is about controlling what you can’t see on the surface but significantly impacting your site’s performance. For example:
Crawl budget optimisation
Search engines allocate a specific amount of resources to crawl your site. If your site has unnecessary pages or too much duplication, this budget can be wasted, leaving key pages undiscovered.
Indexing configuration
Improper settings in your robots.txt file or missing canonical tags can prevent important pages from being indexed or cause duplicate content issues.
Mobile-first design
With Google prioritising mobile usability, a poorly optimised mobile experience can hurt your rankings.
Page speed
Slow-loading sites frustrate users and signal to search engines that your site isn’t providing a good experience.
Core web vitals
Google evaluates metrics like loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability to ensure a smooth user experience. Poor Core Web Vitals scores can lower your rankings and drive users away.
Structured data
Schema markup helps search engines understand your content better, enabling features like rich snippets, FAQs, and event listings to appear in search results. These enhancements make your site more engaging and clickable for users.
Website Adelaide technical SEO services
Website health and functionality audit
Our SEO audit combines a top-level overview of technical and on-page SEO to provide a clear picture of your website’s performance. Designed as a practical and actionable review rather than a lengthy report, this audit highlights critical areas to address, particularly for WordPress websites. It focuses on creating a foundation for improvement.
Speed and core web vitals
A slow website impacts both user experience and search rankings. We analyse key factors like poorly configured plugins, oversized images, and unoptimised Divi elements that may affect your site’s speed. Ensuring your website meets Google’s Core Web Vitals benchmarks helps maintain strong performance and visibility.
Website structure and usability
We evaluate whether your WordPress content management system (CMS) is intuitive and user-friendly, ensuring you can easily update and manage your site. Many businesses need help with overly complex setups. Our expertise in WordPress and Divi themes ensures your website is streamlined, functional, and aligned with best practices.
Crawlability and indexing
We assess whether search engines are crawling and indexing your key pages while ensuring irrelevant or duplicate pages are correctly blocked. Proper indexing ensures search engines focus on your most important content.
Content structure and value
We take a detailed look at the structure and quality of your website’s content to assess how informative and valuable it is for your audience and search engines. This includes evaluating:
Informative and valuable content
Does your website answer the questions your audience is searching for? We assess whether your content provides detailed, actionable, and engaging information that establishes your authority and builds trust.
Service and product descriptions
Are your services and products clearly described? We review how well your offerings are explained, ensuring they highlight key features, benefits, and unique selling points in a way that resonates with your target audience.
Content organisation
Is your content structured logically with clear headings (H1-H6), subheadings, and sections? Properly organised content improves readability, user experience, and search engine understanding.
Search intent alignment
Does your content address what users are searching for, whether it’s informational, navigational, or transactional? We check for gaps and opportunities to better align your content with audience needs.
Internal links and navigation
Are internal links effectively connecting related content, and is your navigation intuitive? Strong internal linking ensures visitors (and search engines) can easily find and explore key pages on your site.
Performance optimisation for speed and mobile usability
Slow load times and poor mobile experiences drive visitors away, even if your content is excellent. Our expertise in WordPress and the Divi theme allows us to optimise your website’s performance to ensure it works efficiently for users and search engines.
Key optimisations include:
Reducing load times
To enhance speed, we should focus on compressing images, streamlining Divi-specific elements, and optimizing WordPress plugins.
Mobile responsiveness
Ensuring your Divi-built website adapts seamlessly across devices for a superior user experience.
Simplifying plugins and themes
Many WordPress websites have 40–50 plugins or unused themes, which creates unnecessary complexity. We reduce the number of plugins and ensure your Divi theme is fully optimised to keep your site running smoothly.
Fixing embedded content issues
Resolving slow-loading charts, maps, or videos that may cause performance bottlenecks on WordPress sites.
SEO plugin configuration and technical support
WordPress is a powerful platform, but getting the best results requires proper setup and maintenance. We configure essential SEO plugins and offer ongoing technical support to ensure your WordPress site, especially if using Divi, is fully optimised.
Plugin setup and configuration
We expertly configure tools like Yoast or Rank Math for WordPress sites, ensuring accurate meta tags, XML sitemaps, and schema markup.
Divi theme optimisation
For sites built on Divi, we fine-tune theme settings to improve performance, functionality, and usability, ensuring your site is both visually appealing and search engine-friendly.
Regular health monitoring
Monitoring plugin conflicts, outdated themes, or emerging technical issues common with WordPress sites.
Content structuring and e-commerce optimisation
A well-structured site is critical for both user experience and search engine rankings. Our WordPress expertise ensures your website’s content is organised logically and optimised for discoverability. For businesses using the Divi theme, we leverage its flexibility to create visually appealing and SEO-friendly layouts.
Category and URL optimisation
Poorly named categories or overly broad URLs are common issues on WordPress sites. We refine your category naming conventions to target relevant keywords and improve navigation. For Divi users, we ensure clean and structured URLs that integrate seamlessly with your design.
E-Commerce system fixes
Some WordPress e-commerce sites mistakenly place products in blog posts instead of using proper product pages, meaning they need unique URLs and are difficult to find in search results. We reorganise your e-commerce system to ensure each product has its own optimised page, improving visibility and usability.
Divi content structuring
Divi allows for intricate layouts, which can sometimes become overly complex or redundant. We streamline your Divi page designs to ensure fast loading times and logical content flow, making it easier for users to find what they need.
Internal linking optimisation
Linking between pages is vital for SEO. We ensure your WordPress and Divi-powered sites have strong internal linking structures, helping search engines understand the relationship between pages.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs) about technical SEO
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What is Technical SEO, and why is it important?
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimising your website’s infrastructure to make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your content. Unlike on-page SEO, which focuses on optimising the content, technical SEO addresses the behind-the-scenes elements that affect how search engines interact with your site.
It’s essential because even the best content will not perform well if your website’s technical aspects are not optimised. Issues like slow loading times, poor mobile usability, or improper indexing can prevent your website from ranking well, regardless of how great your content is. Technical SEO ensures your site meets the technical standards required for optimal search engine visibility and user experience, making it a crucial part of any successful SEO strategy.
How does Technical SEO impact site speed and performance?
Site speed is a key factor influencing both user experience and search engine rankings. Slow-loading websites frustrate users, leading to higher bounce rates and lower engagement. Google has even stated that site speed is a ranking factor, meaning faster websites are more likely to rank higher in search results.
Technical SEO addresses site speed by optimising various elements, including:
- Image optimisation: Reducing image sizes without sacrificing quality to speed up load times.
- Minimising code: Streamlining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to reduce the time it takes for the page to load.
- Caching issues: Proper caching configurations can speed up page loading for repeat visitors.
- Reducing unnecessary plugins: Excessive plugins and themes can slow down your site, so we streamline your setup for better performance.
What tools do you use to identify technical SEO issues?
We use various industry-standard tools to diagnose and fix technical SEO issues, ensuring your website is optimised effectively. Some of the key tools we use include:
- Google Search Console: This tool helps us monitor your website’s performance in Google search, track indexing issues, and understand which pages are being crawled.
- Google Page Speed Insights: Provides in-depth reports on your website’s load time and Core Web Vitals, offering actionable improvement recommendations.
- Yoast SEO or RankMath (SEO plugins): These plugins help configure your meta tags, sitemaps, and SEO settings to optimise your site for search engines.
How do crawling and indexing affect search engine rankings?
Crawling and indexing are two crucial stages in how search engines like Google process your website. Crawling refers to when search engines visit your site and scan its content. Indexing is when that content is stored in the search engine’s database, ready to be used in search results.
If a page on your site is not crawled or correctly indexed, it won’t appear in search results, regardless of how great the content is. Several technical issues can affect crawling and indexing, such as:
- Blocked pages: If your robots.txt file or meta robots tag blocks essential pages, search engines can’t access and index them.
- Duplicate content: Without proper canonical tags, search engines may index duplicate pages, which can cause confusion and hurt rankings.
- Crawl budget limitations: If you have a large website with unnecessary pages or duplicate content, search engines may not prioritise crawling your most important pages, resulting in missed opportunities.
What is a crawl budget, and why is it important?
A crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site during a specific period. Google and other search engines allocate a certain amount of resources to crawl your website, depending on your site’s size, health, and content.
If your site has many pages that aren’t important or duplicates, search engines might waste their crawl budget on those pages and miss crawling more valuable content. Optimising your crawl budget helps search engines focus on your most important pages, ensuring they get indexed and ranked effectively.
For example, eliminating duplicate content, fixing broken links, and optimising your site structure can help improve your crawl budget efficiency, ensuring that search engines focus their resources on the pages that matter most.
How do canonical tags help with duplicate content?
Canonical tags are HTML elements used to tell search engines which version of a page is the “preferred” or “original” version when multiple versions of similar content exist. Search engines may index duplicate pages without proper use of canonical tags, leading to confusion and poor rankings.
For example, suppose you have the same content accessible via multiple URLs (such as a product page accessible with different parameters). In that case, the canonical tag directs search engines to the main version of the page. It helps consolidate link equity, ensuring that your most relevant pages rank higher and avoiding penalties for duplicate content.
Properly implementing canonical tags is a key part of technical SEO, which avoids content duplication and ensures search engines index the correct pages.
What is an XML sitemap, and why do I need one?
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website that you want search engines to crawl and index. It acts as a roadmap, helping search engines find and navigate your site more efficiently.
Having a properly configured XML sitemap ensures that search engines know about all the essential pages on your site, even those that might be harder to find through internal linking. For instance, if a page is buried deep within your site’s structure, a sitemap helps search engines discover it.
If your site has a large number of pages, an XML sitemap is essential to ensure all your key content is crawled and indexed. It also helps prioritise which pages should be crawled first.
Can technical SEO fix a poorly designed website?
While technical SEO can improve a website’s structure, performance, and visibility, it cannot fix poor design or content issues. If a website is hard to navigate, has low-quality content, or is not visually appealing, technical SEO will not solve these problems on its own.
However, technical SEO can make your site more efficient and accessible for users and search engines, which may improve your rankings and overall user experience. For the best results, technical SEO should work alongside high-quality design and content creation. Together, they create a functional and appealing website, improving your chances of ranking well and engaging visitors.
Are you ready to optimise your website’s health with technical SEO?
Your website has the potential to attract more visitors, engage your audience, and drive results, but only if it has the correct technical setup. We’re here to help your website perform better if you want to enhance your existing pages.
Contact Website Adelaide to discuss any questions about the project and how our technical SEO services can support your website. Let’s make your website work harder for your business!
Get a free website health check today.