Technical SEO Agency
Technical SEO is all about ensuring your website is in ‘good overall health’ so that Google perceives it’s well-kept and authoritative.
There are a number of factors involved in this and they can vary based on the initial development and build of a website. However, there are also fixes that can be made after a build. That means that whether we’re looking after your web development or just your SEO strategy, we can implement technical SEO updates at any stage with our in-house SEO team and experienced web developers.
The role of technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that your website is performing at its best. It involves making sure that your website has an adequate sitemap, a regularly updated robots.txt file and that the webpages that should be being crawled, are. It may also involve excluding particular pages from being indexed by Google (‘noindex’) so that they don’t appear in search results (e.g. blog categories, author profiles or pagination).
Technical website health can change over time too. For example, internal or external links might break, pages may be removed, or you may implement a new page that’s similar to one you already have and need a canonical tag.
With this in mind, monitoring the technical health of your website is something that should be done on an ongoing basis – errors can pop up seemingly out of the blue or in response to Google’s algorithm updates.
Our approach to technical SEO
We run monthly SEO audits designed to simulate how Google sees your website and alert us to any potential hiccups.
First and foremost, this ensures that all of the pages that should be crawled and indexed have no crawl errors and are showing in search. Then we can ensure that they are at their best both technically and with the right optimised content.
User experience vs. technical SEO
Ahh, the ongoing ‘battle’ that isn’t. As a technical SEO agency that offers web development services, we hear about this a lot.
Occasionally in SEO you can be faced with a dilemma: your developers are implementing something to improve user experience, but it’s not ‘SEO best practice’. This often leads to a dispute between technical SEOs and developers – and both are actually likely to be right.
Implementing an SEO best practice is all about including relevant, high quality content on a website that is easy to navigate and authoritative. Yes, there are guidelines to follow – but any SEO strategy must be approached holistically, and technical SEO is a part of that.
That said, an understanding of technical SEO is certainly going to help when it comes to building an effective website that presents fewer technical issues later down the line, and stands in good stead to rank well from the start.
User experience, as the name suggests, is all about optimising a website to ensure each user has the best possible experience with it. Easy to understand navigation, clear calls to action, and a well-chosen typography set are all examples of things that should be taken into consideration when creating a great UX.
The best way to ensure both technical SEO and user experience and optimised is to make sure both parties have some understanding of the other’s craft – if the SEO team has a basic understanding of web development, and the web devs have a basic understanding of SEO, confusion is less likely.
That is a core benefit of choosing an agency who offers both.
Technical SEO measurement
Technical SEO activity often provides clear, measurable metrics. Monthly SEO audits give a site health score and error count, which enable us to target our activity towards those areas. However, often these areas require wider context.
For example, an audit may present that a few of your pages are not crawlable. It may be the case that this is deliberate and, as long as this is shown in your sitemap, perfectly correct. It’s important to have a thorough understanding of SEO in order to properly analyse these ongoing updates. We take a holistic approach to SEO and use our expertise to recognise why things are the way that they are – and more importantly, whether they should be or not.
We also provide real-time data on our marketing activity which can be accessed by you, at any time (via a dashboard), as well as monthly SEO and technical health reports.
Why choose Patch as your technical SEO agency
Our in-house web development and SEO teams work continually together in partnership. Thanks to our combined expertise, we’re able to ensure every decision works not to boost arbitrary statistics, but to get you real results that ultimately convert into business.
Our approach to technical SEO is tried and tested. While it works best when implemented alongside a full SEO strategy, there is always value to be gained and we like to encourage regular technical SEO checks for all our clients.
We only want to provide the services that are right for your business – no more, no less. All you need to do is tell us your goals; then, you can let us do the rest.