Did you know that by ignoring on-page and technical SEO, you could be severely hurting your website traffic? And when your traffic decreases, so does your potential to create leads and drive new sales.
Ignoring SEO best practices is never a good habit to get into when hosting a website for your business. Therefore, you should be aware of the full and wide-ranging consequences for doing so.
But before we dive into that, it’s important to understand what on-page and technical SEO is.
You’ve likely heard of SEO before, but you may not have heard of on-page and technical SEO. Truth is, they play a bigger role in your overall ability to rank on search engines than you may know.
To understand how ignoring these two aspects will undermine your business, you need to understand what they mean.
On-page SEO -- The practice of optimizing webpages individually in an attempt to rank higher on search engines and earn more relevant traffic. On-page includes both content and HTML source codes.
Technical SEO -- Refers to both website and server optimization to help search engines crawl and index your site more effectively. Even small issues with indexability or crawlability can result in your site dropping in Google search results.
Now that you know what these two types of SEO encompass, you can probably see why ignoring these would have negative effects on your company’s website.
Here are three primary ways that ignoring on-page and technical SEO undermines your business:
Effective SEO can attract a large number of visitors to your site. And the more traffic you’re getting, the more chances you have of creating new leads and even increasing your sales. By neglecting technical SEO, you’re allowing potential customers to walk right by without noticing you.
Not only can this hurt your sales; it also opens the door for your competitors to steal customers. In niche industries with long sales cycles and big contracts, it’s vital to grab the attention of your customers first.
If you’re browsing options for computer security software, how likely are you to buy from a brand that seems less robust or capable? Not very likely.
Today’s online customers are a bit more well-informed, and tend not to navigate past the first page of search engine results to find what they’re looking for. They’ll notice (or perhaps more accurately, not notice) if your site doesn’t rank near the top of organic results.
And even if you used to rank highly, ignoring these types of SEO can cause you to fall in the rankings, putting you back at square one.
Google has just about mastered the ability to provide trustworthy and relevant search results. Google’s one-of-a-kind algorithm allows it to filter out any sites it deems untrustworthy or irrelevant for specific searches.
And by neglecting on-page SEO, you could be one of those sites filtered out. This can be a difficult thing to bounce back from.
Google continually updates its search algorithms. It’s important for your business to consistently produce new, relevant content that contributes to user experience and proves to Google that you’re a leading authority in your industry.
Simply ignoring the behind-the-scenes health of your website is a great example of what not to do for SEO. But if you have been, either accidentally or purposefully, there are some ways to improve them.
Here are five tips for improving your on-page and technical SEO:
With so many people using search engines on their mobile devices, it’s downright crazy to ignore your site’s mobile compatibility. If your site is a jumbled mess on their screen, they’re going to click away quickly.
Optimizing for mobile is also important to ensure that images and other graphic elements don’t make the page impossible to navigate or even load.
Nobody likes waiting. If your website takes more than a few seconds to load, you’ll likely lose the interest of your visitor.
There are many free online tools available to test your website speed. Many of them also offer solutions for improving it, such as using smaller image files or decreasing the amount of animation on your site.
Internal links are hyperlinks that direct users to another page of your website. They are crucial for helping search engines understand the hierarchy of your content.
Make sure you have these sprinkled throughout your site in additional to external links that back up certain claims you make or statistics you provide.
Images make a great addition to your site. However, Google won’t know what’s in the image unless you tell it. This is achieved through alt text.
Make sure you add important keywords to your alt text as well. Just be sure not to overstuff it, and actually describe what the photo is about. The same principle applies to meta descriptions and URLs as well.
Broken links are never fun for either side. They hurt your SEO, are a chore to fix en masse, and give users a sense that you don’t keep your site updated.
Find any links that lead to an error message or blank screen and either replace them with a new working link or remove them entirely. Stay on top of your link situation so you don’t have to someday fix 900 of them at once.
Ignored SEO tasks can negatively affect your website’s visibility and user experience. For both new and existing websites, make sure you have all your bases covered.
Luckily, we have just the resource for you! Download our free SEO checklist to help keep yourself (and your website) more organized: