5 Technical SEO Tips to Quickly Boost Site Traffic

Does your website need to recover after the impact of an algorithm change? Is your traffic still too low to meet your desired target? An SEO agency can help increase it by looking into and fixing your organic marketing strategies. This article explains the top five technical SEO tips you and your digital marketing firm can do to quickly boost traffic:

• Take advantage of dead and broken links
• Be strategic when using robots.txt
• Perform a deep site audit
• Make your site ADA-compliant
• Design your site for mobile

Read on for more ideas on how to do these. Let’s go!

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Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

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5 Technical SEO Ideas To Rev Up Site Traffic

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the means to an end. In this case, it helps generate targeted traffic for your website to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Create leads and conversions

To achieve this, you must master three elements, including technical SEO. This is what gets your pages crawled and indexed by search engines in the first place. If you want to drive more traffic, fix and improve the site’s technical aspects with these tips:

     1. Take Advantage of Dead and Broken Links

One often-overlooked technique in technical SEO is taking advantage of dead and broken links:

• A dead link, or 404 error, is a hyperlink that leads to a page that no longer exists or is not accessible.
• Broken links are hyperlinks that lead to pages that are still accessible but have some technical issues preventing them from loading correctly.

Like other technical SEO mistakes, both can hurt your traffic by disengaging visitors and shortening their average session times. They can also lower your ranking because of poor user experience and site authority. You can fix these by:

• Redirecting dead or broken links to the right URLs
• Updating all of your internal links to point to the correct pages
• Verifying that all external links are working correctly

You can also take advantage of dead and broken links through reclamation. This is when you find websites that link to your old pages, then update the links with new URLs that you have set up as redirects. You can still benefit from backlinks while building better relationships with other marketers and publishers, and creating a better visitor experience, as well.

     2. Be Strategic When Using Robots.txt

The robots exclusion standard (or Robots.txt) allows you to provide instructions on how search engine bots should crawl and index your pages. This way, you can maximize the crawl budget, which refers to the daily number of pages Google can index from your website. Problems occur when you under or over utilize this technical SEO technique. You end up with non-indexed, keyword-rich, and valuable or indexed pages that do not have enough search volume. You can use robots.txt more wisely by knowing which pages deserve to be indexed. Usually, these are the ones with:

• Helpful content that meets Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines
• No duplicate content
• Pages that have enough search volume to generate traffic for the website and rank

To understand these points, let us say that you have an e-commerce website selling shoes, and we are analyzing three pages:

• The first page has a URL about running shoes. This is indexable because “running shoes” is a broad keyword with millions of Google searches. It is highly competitive, but you can rank better with good on-page and off-page SEO.
• The second page has a URL about “black running shoes.” Although the medium-tail keyword could have fewer visitors, the search volume is still high enough to provide your site with targeted traffic.
• The third page has a URL pointing to “checkered black running shoes.” This could have the lowest search volume among the pages, so that you can use robots.txt on this one.

     3. Perform a Deep Site Audit

A thorough site audit can uncover lingering and potential issues preventing you from having higher traffic, or succeeding in your SEO campaigns. It can also reveal opportunities to improve your site and make it more competitive, user-friendly, crawlable, and indexable. A good SEO agency maintains a technical SEO checklist that focuses on different areas of your website. These include accessibility, indexing, coding and structure, usability, speed, security, and more. It also conducts manual checks to find potential issues that automated tools might have missed. Overall, a comprehensive site audit should help answer the following questions:

• Does your website appear first when you search your brand name?
• What is your total number of monthly organic visitors? How long did they stay on your website? Which pages did they visit often? What are their bounce and exit rates?
• Have you set up Google Analytics properly? Is it tracking accurately?
• Have you submitted your website correctly to Google Search Console? Do you have any manual actions or data errors?
• Where does your traffic come from? Do you have referral traffic with an almost 100% bounce rate? It could be a sign that your site is dealing with spambots.

     4. Make Your Site ADA-Compliant

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance protects your website from lawsuits. It also helps you improve user experience and engagement, especially on mobile devices. Make your pages more inclusive and accessible with these technical SEO tips:

• Use alt text for all images and videos to provide descriptions for users who may be visually impaired.
• Design a clear, easy-to-navigate structure with properly labeled and formatted headings and subheadings and an updated XML sitemap.
• If you have an internal search engine, develop a schema markup that helps generate rich snippets, complete with texts and photos.
• Use descriptive link text that clearly describes the destination of the link, rather than generic text such as “Click Here.”
• Ensure that all forms on your website are accessible and easy for users with disabilities to complete.
• Make sure your website has sufficient color contrast, making it easier for visually impaired users to read and navigate.
• Regularly test your website for accessibility and make necessary updates or changes.

     5. Design Your Site for Mobile

Globally, mobile devices now account for almost half of the web traffic. In the last quarter of 2022 alone, it was 59%! Further, Google prioritizes indexing mobile website versions. In other words, having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory to rank higher and drive more traffic. But how do you optimize your pages for mobile? Take a look at this table:

Essential Mobile Optimization Factors	Tips to Improve These Factors
Site speed	– Ensure the page loads within three seconds. – Score at least 90% for your site’s desktop version in Google PageSpeed Insights. – Limit the time to first byte (TTFB) speed between 100 and 500 milliseconds, depending on the content. (TTFB measures when a user’s browser receives the first byte of data from a web server after making a request.) – Target a score of 2.5 seconds or 75th percentile of page loads for the largest contentful paint (LCP). (LCP measures the loading speed of the largest content element on a page, such as a text block.)
Navigation	– Keep navigation short, simple, and clean. – Show the most important pages and content above the fold (or first). – Make your pages responsive and intuitive. For example, changing its orientation or adapting to screen sizes should be easy. – Design for touch and multi-screen mobile users.
Ease of taking action	– Keep your first input delay (FID) score to no more than 100 milliseconds. (FID measures the time it takes for a web page to respond to the first user interaction, such as a click or tap.) – Minimize the number of steps users must do to accomplish a task. These may include calling your company, purchasing a product or service, or filling out a form. – Allow your users to store information securely.

Summing Up

These five steps can do wonders for your technical SEO plan. They can enhance the user experience, fix problems, and speed up crawlability and indexing. All these benefits can then support your goal of increasing traffic. You can do more, however, especially when working with Digital Authority Partners (DAP). We help you develop and implement a cohesive, holistic optimization campaign to meet and even surpass your organic marketing objectives. Contact us today to schedule a discovery call.