There are many different factors that play a role in your organic search engine rankings. Many people tend to focus on on-page SEO, such as quality content, title tags, meta descriptions, and more. But it’s just as important to ensure the technical aspects of your site are in place and properly optimized to help improve your SEO.
These 3 technical SEO tactics can help improve your organic search rankings:
Make Sure Your Site is Secure (HTTPS)
Google is constantly taking security measures to protect the privacy of their consumers. In 2014, Google announced that they would be using HTTPS as one of their many ranking factors. HTTPS is encrypted to increase the security of data transfer. Since then, many websites have obtained SSL certificates in an effort to improve their SEO. Today, secure websites have become much more standardized, but still not all sites are HTTPS.
Making the switch over to a secure site can build more trust with both users and search engines, resulting in better rankings. Prior to entering an HTTP site, Google gives users a warning to let them know the site is not secure and asks how the user would like to proceed. Upon seeing this, many users are hesitant and are deterred to another website. An SSL certificate can capture more traffic by making users feel safe, keeping them on your site and indicating to Google that your site can be trusted.
Studies have found a correlation between HTTPS and higher search rankings. Google will even use this as a tiebreaker in some cases. When all other factors are considered equal, the SSL certificate can be the attribute that pushes you to that #1 spot. This can lead to increased visibility and website traffic.
Responsive Design
Responsive design is a web development technique that creates dynamic changes to the appearance of a website depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. This is especially helpful for mobile users.
We continue to see that more and more users are visiting websites from mobile devices, so it’s important that they’re able to access everything they need as quickly as possible. Mobile optimization for your site should be standard, so a good responsive design is a must. A better and more responsive design can help improve loading time, improve user experience, increase mobile traffic, and boost your organic rankings.
Loading a full site on a smaller mobile screen can be frustrating for users, but the responsive design condenses the webpage and makes it easier to load. Positive user experience can increase conversions by as much as 400%, so it’s important to have a responsive design that’s easy to navigate. When users visit a site that loads quickly and is easy to use, they are much less likely to bounce.
Responsive design also prevents the chance of duplicate content. In the SEO world, content is king, and duplicate content can have negative impacts on your rankings. When Google sees duplicate content, it then has to weigh various other factors in order to determine which site will rank higher. Luckily, with responsive design, every page of content has one URL, so you can easily avoid any potential duplicate content penalties.
Faster Loading Time
It’s no secret that users prefer a fast loading time over a slow loading time. No one likes to have to wait for minutes on end for a webpage to load. In fact, studies have shown that approximately 53% of websites are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
For this reason, site speed and/or page speed optimizations can be extremely useful to improve your SEO and boost your rankings. There are many different ways to improve the load time of your website, including file compression, reducing URL redirects, content distribution networks (CDNs) and more.
Improving your site speed will inevitably improve user experience, which is one of the most important factors Google uses to determine rankings.
We Can Improve Your Technical SEO
At Haley Marketing Group, we have the knowledge and experience to help you improve your overall SEO by increasing your website’s visibility and driving more traffic. Contact us today for a free consultation.