TECHNICAL SEO ANALYSIS
Technical SEO, at least our approach to technical SEO at Elementive, is about optimizing three main things: code, server configuration, and site structure. Optimizing these areas requires solving not-found and server errors, properly setting up redirects, fixing crawl budget inefficiencies, getting rid of duplicate or thin content, updating your website's navigation and internal linking structure, configuring dynamic rendering, optimizing images, improving mobile design flaws, speeding up websites, fixing HTTP response headers, and more.
Fixing these technical and structural issues doesn’t just help improve your SEO. It also helps improve your website's user experience, which increases customer loyalty, visitor engagement, and website conversions.
The hardest question is what do you fix first? Fixing technical SEO issues isn't about blindly optimizing in the hope that robots will have an easier time crawling or understanding your website. Instead, you need to take advantage of the wealth of data available to figure out not only that the problems and opportunities exist, but which problems are having the biggest impact on search rankings and which opportunities will help you stand out in today’s crowded search results.
In our in-depth technical SEO analysis & audit, we review the technical issues that can cause your website to not rank in search results and help you determine the priority to fix those issues. We also help clients regularly identify and prioritize items to fix with ongoing technical SEO consultation support.
When issues are found, we help clean up those technical SEO issues or work with the client's developers to get the issues resolved. For websites with complex technical issues, we can also help monitor and resolve technical SEO issues on an ongoing basis.
If our consultation services are not right for you or your budget, we also offer a Technical SEO Mastermind Group.
Matthew and his team took a closer look at the technical SEO part of one of our content website and came back with a huge package of ideas and solutions to solve issues quickly and to increase our performance. We especially enjoyed that the audit and discussion have always been focussing on the practical side - which enables us to work on these aspects and to monitor them in the future with minimal ressources. In the future, we will definitely collaborate with Matthew and his team again - clear recommendation!
— Benjamin Schardt CEO, ever-growing GmbH
Technical SEO Analysis & Audit
In our technical SEO audit, we review all aspects of the technical and structural aspects that affect how Google accesses, crawls, understands, indexes and ranks your website. This includes:
- On page: errors, canonical tag usage, robot crawlability, robots.txt, Core Web Vitals (speed and layout shifting), mobile usability
- On-SERP: title, meta description, schema, on-SERP features, SGE effect on SERP appearance
- Structural: crawlability of pages, navigation and content layout, duplicate content, thin content, keyword/topic targeting, XML sitemaps
- Backlinks: review links for quality and relevancy, detect broken backlinks, setup disavow files
The final report with findings and recommendations will be delivered via a video call with your entire team. During this meeting, we'll review your questions about this report and discuss next steps. We will work with you to decide who is the best person to complete the various recommended tasks and finalize the priority of recommended action items.
Our tech SEO audits are perfect for websites targeting a national or international audience, regardless of industry or type of website. We help websites with several dozen pages as well as websites with hundreds of thousands of pages.
Ongoing Technical SEO Services
If your website is more than a simple online brochure, you are going to need help monitoring for and resolving technical SEO issues on a regular basis. As your IT department releases new changes and features, you need to make sure Google can crawl and understand that content—if Google can't see that content, it won't help your rankings. In fact, if new features or content are hidden from Google's view, it may have the opposite effect. Along with that, Google is also routinely making updates and enhancements to how they crawl websites and you need to make sure you are staying on top of any necessary changes or taking advantage of any new opportunities Google's recent changes allow for.
To help keep on top of these changes, our ongoing technical SEO work includes regular monitoring of certain key areas that can affect rankings and traffic, including:
- Core Web Vitals, including website speed and layout shifting
- Uptime and server errors
- "Not found" 404 errors
- Duplicate content issues
- Thin content issues
- Content rendering issues
- Spider traps and robot blocks
- HTML and JavaScript coding errors
- Proper usage of title, meta description, canonical, hreflang and other tags
- Mobile usability errors
- Crawl errors
- Problems with schema
- Excluded content or non-indexable content
- Errors with XML sitemaps
- And so much more…
Along with this basic set of items we monitor on a regular basis, our technical SEO services can also allow time for open-ended consultation. This gives us time to research issues more deeply, discuss the problems we are currently working to resolve, review the problems with the executive team, QA changes before release, or work through items with your developer or IT team so they understand what needs to be done. As well, if you don't have an IT team or developer currently, we can also help you find a developer who has the skills necessary to help your company.
Our ongoing services can be delivered on a monthly, quarterly, or retainer basis. We're flexible in size and scope for these services. Our goal is to help you find the right mix of services that will give you a good outcome but also help you stay at a budget that makes sense for your organization.
Technical SEO Clean Up
Not all websites need help with technical SEO on a regular basis. Instead, a one-time cleanup of a broad spectrum of technical SEO issues or fixing a specific issue is the right answer. Our one-time services are designed to target the biggest issues affecting your website. If you don't already know what those issues are, we can conduct an in-depth technical SEO audit to help you find and prioritize the problems and opportunities present.
Once the issues are identified and prioritized, we'll help you fix the most critical technical SEO issues that are present on your website and having the most impact on your website's ability to rank higher in search results. Fixing isn't enough though, so we'll also help you monitor this issue after fixes are implemented to make sure the problem is resolved. SEO problems can sometimes be time intensive and complex, but we will work with you till a solution is reached.
Technical SEO Training
If you have a bigger marketing team or a bigger IT team, it is important the entire team understands the basics of technical SEO. Not everybody needs to be an expert at SEO, but developers and marketers working on the website need to have an awareness of the technical SEO fundamentals like how bots crawl a site, how status response codes work, how JavaScript can help and hurt SEO, what parts of speed matter, and so on. Armed with this knowledge, your team will know when to ask questions so that you can avoid common pitfalls.
We can help with formal training, typically in the form of an all-day workshop, designed for developers and marketers. This training can be customized for your company's specific needs and can be delivered remotely or in-person. We also offer informal training sessions to address specific items being worked on. Our aim is to help you get the information you need in the format that is appropriate.
Working with Elementive and Matthew was a joy. Language Intelligence first approached Matthew for help with a one-off technical problem with our website and then hired Matthew to do a comprehensive technical SEO audit for us and we couldn’t be happier. Not only was Matthew completely accessible for any questions/guidance before, during, and after the audit, he presented his findings in an easy-to-understand manner, especially for non-techies like me! After going through his findings with us, Matthew presented solutions and was able to explain “big picture” technical concepts thoroughly and how his findings and solutions will positively impact our business. I highly recommend Matthew and the Elementive team to anyone in need of a technical SEO consultancy- you won’t be disappointed!
— Kelsey Rausch Marketing and Communications Manager, Language Intelligence
Additional Services
- Pre-launch Technical SEO Review. If you are planning to launch a new version of your website, you want to make sure you are transferring correctly between old and new. In this review, we thoroughly test your new website before it launches so that we avoid any post-launch SEO performance issues. This includes testing all redirects to confirm the most important content has migrated correctly.
- White Label Technical SEO. All of the technical SEO services discussed on this page can be white labeled for marketing agencies, design and development firms, and business consulting companies.
Technical SEO Resources
- Tech SEO Guide. Written by Elementive partner, Matthew Edgar, this book provides a go-to resource to understand how to address technical SEO issues.
- Tech SEO Fundamentals. This free, seven-class course dives into the fundamentals of technical SEO.