Freelance Technical SEO Consultant UK

Why is technical SEO so important?

Technical SEO is a critical component of your search engine optimisation strategy - it can make or break it. Frequently, technical issues can prevent your site from being the best site it can be - the result can be lost rankings and lost business.

This subject is broad, but as the name suggests it covers all the technical aspects of your site. From servers to code, plus more.

Think website engineering.

And high-engineering quality means better performance in the search engines. Don't be the poor technical site that hampers your quality analysis, strategy and content delivery. It's no good if your awesome landing page isn't being indexed - explain that to your head of marketing.

Poor quality - what does this mean in reality?

Poor technical aspects of your site may:

• Prevent pages from being indexed in search engines
• Give users a frustrating mobile experience
• Stop disabled users from finding your products and services
• Create duplication issues
• ... and many more issues besides

How do you know if you have a problem? A health-check.

The first sign of a problem is hoping for a landing page to generate leads that never arrive. A keen marketer will watch to see if the page is ranking for the targeted keywords. When it doesn't, it leads to the question... why? Especially, when you've done all your on-page SEO jobs.

The problem might be non-indexing of your page. It might be because you're ranking on page 2 of the search results (out back as surfers say) - you're outperformed by all sites on page 1. It could be another reason...

Fortunately, Google has gone to great lengths to help website owners understand the technical health of their site. They've created tools such as:

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) and Search Console.

PSI provides an easy to use interface that gives you four metrics: performance, accessibility, best practice (code) and SEO. These metrics provide a useful overview of your site's technical health. - essentially, the life-support system of your site.

What tends to happen with PSI, is that it alerts you that there's an issue. A health alert. But the outputs from PSI can be complex and not easy to understand. You need a grounding in how websites work to better understand the PSI alerts. But at least you know there's a problem.

Search console is another great tool. It can show you issues that you have with indexing (i.e. whether your pages are being listed). And what the status is of any new pages, e.g. discovered but not indexed yet. Plus a tonne more useful features - too many to list here.

Both tools can quickly provide you with that essential health-check.

How can I help? Solving Technical issues.

With my developer background, it means that I can provide hands-on help with your site. I've been building websites since 2003 and have immersed myself in all technical aspects. I've worked very hard on search engine optimisation projects, and have become specialised in core web vitals. Do a page speed test on this page here to see my work in action.

I'm happy working with:

• HTML, CSS, Javascript headaches
• Responsiveness problems
• Accessibility issues
• Domain name complications
• System type related troubles
• Google Tag Manager / third party code problems
• Sitemap obstacles
• And more...

I'm not a server admin but I can speak their language and get the help you need.

And finally, I have a lot of experience with different kinds of content management systems. Including: WordPress, Grav, Statamic and CloudCannon.

Feasibility first

Before I take on any work, I carry out a thorough appraisal of what's required and whether it is workable.

There's no way I can make an elderly dachsund become a greyhound overnight.

So, I'll look at your current tooling and judge whether I can make a difference. I may also judge that your setup is too fragile and needs some remedial work first. For example, migration to a higher-quality hosting environment, or ensuring you have a staging site (depending on the complexity of your setup).

I'm currently not working with e-commerce sites, but this may change, so check back.

Technical factors affecting your SEO

To give you a taste of the kind of support I can provide, read some of the following aspects that I will analyse. It will give you a feel for how I approach technical projects.

Aspect 1: Site Architecture

I can make site architecture recommendations. Usually in the form of a recommended sitemap.

A fragmented architecture is weak because it can confuse Google. Google wants to see evidence of expertise. For example, a landing page with related articles. Like this:

/landing-page

/landing-page/related-article-1

/landing-page/related-article-2

/landing-page/related-article-3

Your landing page gains extra SEO-strength by the child pages. It's like bringing extra evidence (photos, references, samples) to a job interview to support your CV.

If content isn't organised in this way, you're making Google work harder. It needs to piece the evidence together from multiple locations on your site. And from there, assess whether you've got the expertise.

Here's some examples:

• Related articles in disparate areas of your site when they should all be in one silo - like the URL example above.
• Careless naming of blog categories, where categories have the same semantic meaning.
• Content categorised incorrectly.

Aspect 2: Site Code

I have a background in coding from scratch. I can also use page builders too, but my strength is understanding and writing the foundational elements of a web page: HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I can also code in PHP, Liquid and Blade.

Here are some background articles for you to read:

• Web pages for marketers
• High performing HTML
• High performing CSS
• Optimising Javascript

There are good and bad ways of adding these vital web page ingredients.

Common problems include:

• Poor HTML can become deeply nested. It's essentially bloat around your nicely curated content. It slows your site down, and makes it harder for search indexing bots to read.
• HTML tags (the < > you see in the code) can be mis-used, making it harder for bots to recognise the core content of your page.
• Unused CSS (controlling the look and feel of your site) can end up on your site, extra KB that slow it down. Fast sites receive an SEO ranking boost from Google.
• Javascript can really put the brakes on your page loading. Don't let your SEO get penalised for interrupting your landing pages loading.

Another code aspect is accessibility. This is the process of making sure your website is readable and navigable by users with impaired vision and other disabilities. There are many on-page factors contributing to accessible landing pages.

Getting it right ensures that:

• Users can easily read your content and navigate from page-to-page.
• And screen-readers have a better chance of deciphering the structure of your content. E.g. which content heading belongs where.

Better accessibility supports SEO performance by helping search engines better interpret your content.

All these small boosts add up, so it's worth optimising them.

Aspect 3: Fixing domain and server issues

I'm happy to check and examine sitemaps.xml and robots.txt files to ensure they're doing their job.

Depending on the technology that is rendering your website. I will look into how your HTML pages are being generated. There's been a trend in recent years for single page applications (see article Exploring Progressive Web Apps). These are great and give a near software-like experience in the browser (no refreshing of pages). But they sometimes have index issues.

If you have an international audience, and your site is living on a server in the UK. I'll likely make recommendations to add it to a global content delivery network. That way it can be fast in the UK and the US - simultaneously.

Plus a lot more, depending on what is going on with your site.

Next Steps

If you would like to progress a technical SEO project with me, the please get in contact. I look forward to meeting you and discussing your website. If you're more looking for strategy, then please check out our strategy service.