Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is technical optimization?
The three core SEO strategies are:
- Technical optimization
- On-page optimization
- Off-page optimization
We’ll now deep dive into technical optimization. First of all, what is it? Technical optimization involves improving the overall functionality and load times of your site across various devices. To achieve this, you may have to get help from a web developer or someone technical because many changes require code tweaks within the website.
There are lots of great tools that can help diagnose technical issues with your website. These include:
- Google Search Console
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
Using Google Search Console to diagnose technical issues
You can use Google Search Console to diagnose many technical issues. It’s a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. You can set up Google Search Console and link it to your website.
To do this, you can use different verification options, which are outlined in the tool. These include:
- Putting some HTML on your home page
- Verifying DNS settings on your domain
- Using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager
Note: Bing has a similar Webmaster Tools offering.
When you have access to Search Console, you will periodically be alerted to issues around broken 404 pages, page speed, mobile usability, spam issues, and user experience issues. You can then fix these issues to improve technical SEO.
These alerts are sent automatically by Google. You don’t need to do anything except decide to fix or ignore the issue. Bear in mind that it’s not always feasible to fix every technical SEO problem that Google notices. However, you should be mindful of the most important issues such as broken pages, spam issues, or major mobile usability issues and try to fix these.
The XML sitemap
You can also submit your XML sitemap to Google Search Console. This is a list of all of the pages on your site and contains basic information such as last modified dates and the numbers of images on the page. When you update your website, this will automatically update your XML sitemap. Then, when Google reads the sitemap and notices changes, it may go back and re-crawl your site for new content.
In essence, you’re connecting a summary of your website updates to Google. This can then be used as a way of alerting Google to any changes you made so it can stay up to date with your new content.
Back to TopJoe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
These walkthrough videos give clear, step-by-step demonstrations and guidance on how to apply key digital marketing concepts and strategies, and use industry-standard tools. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.
