Is Technical SEO Really Worth Paying So Much Attention To?

Most people, when they think about SEO immediately turn their attention to keywords, or to offsite SEO tactics like content distribution, link building, guest blogging and the dozens and dozens of other ‘tips and tricks’ that are commonly talked about and utilized in the world of SEO.

What is less talked about, and often ignored completely, is technical SEO. People just don’t seem to care very much about it. This is probably because the ins and outs of how a website is structured, coded and technically functions is pretty boring stuff. And hard to understand a lot of the time for those who are not highly ‘technical themselves.’

The problem is that Google, and the other search engines, the very things SEO is trying to please, DO care about Technical SEO. A lot. So failing to pay proper attention to it may render all of your other SEO efforts less effective at best and, if your site is in really bad shape, useless at worst.

So How Much Does Google Pay Attention to Technical SEO?

We often run into business owners who know enough about technical SEO to be dangerous. They know about H1 and H2 headers, they know about the importance of site security – mainly because Google has been making a lot of noise about that recently – and they know that their site should be as easy to read on a mobile device as it is on a desktop computer.

So, in knowing all of this, they assume that their site is all good, and really don’t want to talk about technical SEO a lot, they want to hear about all blogging and link building and social media and all of that ‘sexier stuff’. Which is all important and valid, but charging off into a big offsite SEO campaign without checking your technical SEO first is like trying to run before you can walk. It’s likely to end in tears.

Of the 200 ranking factors that Google takes into account when placing content in the SERPS it’s estimated that up to a third of them are technical. And some technical SEO factors – crawlability, site speed, security, schema markup – are some of the most important of all. And it is assumed that the same holds true for all the other search engines too.  

What Technical SEO Aspects Should You Care About?

Looking at the back end and ‘inner workings’ of the average website – no matter what CMS it runs on – IS tedious stuff. There are a few people who actually really do like doing it (they are called technical SEO specialists and they are a rare and very special breed) but most people are not fond of it.

Do we REALLY have to go through every URL to make sure it works and that it describes the content accurately? Do we REALLY have to worry about the size and ‘weight’ of every image used and that it has an ALT tag? And does a one second faster load time really make too much of a difference in terms of either SEO or UX, it’s only a second?

The answer is YES, YES, YES and more YES. More so than ever, technical SEO matters, and is key to the success of any SEO campaign. All of the offsite stuff is important, and will indeed, when done right, have a positive effect and help you get those page one rankings you are hoping for. But in the end, SEO has to begin at home, your home on the web – your website – and you have to make sure that everything is in order there first.