Technical SEO might sound a bit of a nightmare when you first hear the term. You may think complicated server tweaks and complex maths, but it’s really just about making your website easily accessible by the search engines and Google.
On this blog, I have already covered many of the topics. In this article, I bring everything together. Just think of technical SEO as one of the main parts of Craft CMS SEO. Whilst this after references Craft, these guidelines can very easily be transferred over to other CMS’s. I just use Craft daily, so that’s my tool of choice, but equivalent plugins and workarounds are available for other platforms.
Mobile friendly
Your site has likely got more traffic from mobile than from other devices, such as tablets and desktops. Therefore, your site has to work well on mobile. Google sees mobile as so important that they has implemented a mobile-first indexing strategy for a few years now. This means they crawl your site with a mobile bot rather than a full desktop page automated device. How your site appears to Google on mobile is critical. If your site is incredibly slow on mobile and the user experience is poor, Google will punish you.
Web performance
I wrote about web performance in Craft CMS a few weeks back, and it’s seen as one of Google’s 200 ranking factors. If all other things are equal, your site has a page load time of 12 seconds, and your competitor's site has a more optimal 2-second page load time, your competitor's site will rank above yours. That said, it is one of hundreds of factors that go into how Google ranks pages. There are diminishing returns, too; taking your site from the above-mentioned 12 seconds to 2 seconds will make a big difference, taking it down to 0.2 won't have anything like such an effect. You can only make your site so fast.
Beware with JavaScript
Craft CMS has a headless option, which means you can use the power of JavaScript to power your site's content. This is a preferred approach by some, but NOT here at Media Surgery. If you are serious about SEO, then I’d advise building your site using Craft in the traditional method, with good old HTML, CSS, and sprinkles of JavaScript. Yes, Google can read JavaScript-powered sites, and it seems to be getting better with time, too. However, i heard on the Search Off The Record podcast that it takes Google's bots more than 10 times the resources to compute JavaScript and then index it. That’s a huge difference, and it shows how much work the bots have to do to crawl JavaScript content. You want to make things as easy as possible for the search engines to crawl and index your content, and by building your sites the recommended way and NOT by using a headless option, you give your site the best possible chance of Google rewarding you for site architecture decision-making.
Https or non https
The vast, vast majority of sites now are powered by HTTPS, and yours should be no different. Google will likely mark you down if you do not have that padlock at the top of your browser near the URL bar. This has been standard for a number of years; you would need an excellent reason for not adhering to the guidelines that require https. You can easily check your site for HTTPS validation in Google Search Console, which i recommend every site have.
Structured data
While it's said that Google won’t rank you higher solely for having additional structured data on your web pages, Google will manage to understand your content better, and that can only be a good thing. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go in depth into the ins and outs of structured data, but it allows you to ‘mark up’ your pages with additional tags and code that gives more meaning to your content. For instance, you can add review data, which Google can pick up and display your review rating on the search engine results page. If you are an e-commerce site, you would definitely want to have your products properly coded using structured data. This will entice Google to include your e-commerce offerings in the ‘shopping’ part of the search results.
Using Ai
Using a tool like ChatGPT to help you with structured data can help enormously. Simple prompt Ai to give you a template to insert your structured data, and it will oblige, giving you fully valid code which you can place on your site through your CMS.
Google Search Console is your friend
Google has a built-in tool that is excellent for validating your structured data code. With a tool like ChatGPT not being very accurate, this isn't needed as much as it was prior to Ai’s meteoric rise, but its still good to check your structured data code through it.
Internal linking and canonical tags
Internal linking is one of the most underutilised parts of SEO, but it can be easy to get it wrong if you haven’t had much previous experience. You can easily link to the same age with different paths.
You could link to the same page with 2 different URLs, like
<a href="https://domain.com/page">Anchor text here </a>and
<a href="https://domain.com/page//">Anchor text here </a>(notice the extra 2 slashes at the end)
Whilst someone clicking on those 2 different links will go to the same page, from a technical standpoint, those links are different.
You can solve this by using a canonical tag, which SEOmatic provides out of the box. Using this tag, it tells the search engines and Google that this is the page I want you to index and see as the important page.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://domain.com/page">Plugins and tools
SeoMatic
I mentioned SEOmatic again above, which you don't necessarily need, as you can code your own tags and parts like title tags, but it allows you to add these knowing they are in the correct formatting and are valid. You don't really need any more SEO specific plugins for your Craft sites, but in some situations, you may want a tool like Retour, which makes it easy to handle redirects.
Google Search Console
I highly recommend you install Google Search Console on every site you build, it provides a plethora of data that is useful for building sites and prompting you if Google uncovers anything untoward on your site. As well as structured data testing, it provides details on backlinks to your site, which is useful for analysing your site against the competition.
Conclusion
Sure, technical SEO can get a little more complicated than the examples I have shown above, but it’s not rocket science, and if you can handle a standard Craft CMS build, then you should be able to carry out competent technical SEO up to a good level.
Written by John Macpherson