How does Technical SEO help in identifying and fixing website issues?

Technical SEO involves optimizing a website's infrastructure, coding, and configuration to improve its search engine visibility and user experience. Here's how it helps in identifying and fixing website issues:

Crawlability and Indexability: Technical SEO audits often start with checking whether search engine bots can crawl and index the website's pages effectively. Tools like Google Search Console and crawling software like Screaming Frog help identify crawl errors, blocked pages, or issues with robots.txt directives. By fixing these issues, you ensure that all relevant pages are discoverable and indexed by search engines.
Site Speed Optimization: Technical SEO involves optimizing website speed, which is crucial for both user experience and search engine rankings. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix analyze website speed and provide recommendations for improvement, such as optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, or minifying CSS and JavaScript files. Addressing these issues can enhance site performance and decrease bounce rates, leading to better SEO.
Mobile-Friendliness: With the increasing use of mobile devices, ensuring that a website is mobile-friendly is essential for SEO. Technical SEO audits include checks for mobile responsiveness and usability. Google's Mobile-Friendly Test tool identifies issues with mobile usability and provides suggestions for improvement, such as optimizing viewport settings or fixing touch elements. By addressing mobile-friendliness issues, you improve user experience and potentially boost rankings in mobile search results.
Website Structure and Internal Linking: Technical SEO evaluates the website's structure and internal linking to ensure efficient navigation and distribution of link equity. Tools like site crawlers can identify issues such as broken links, orphaned pages, or excessive redirects that hinder crawlability and user experience. By fixing these issues and optimizing internal linking, you create a logical site structure that helps search engines understand the website's content hierarchy and relevance.
Schema Markup and Rich Snippets: Implementing structured data markup using schema.org vocabulary helps search engines understand the content of a webpage better. Technical SEO involves identifying opportunities for implementing schema markup, such as product reviews, events, or FAQs, to enhance search result visibility with rich snippets. By incorporating schema markup, you increase the likelihood of rich snippets appearing in search results, improving click-through rates and user engagement.
HTTPS and Security: Technical SEO includes ensuring that the website is secure and uses HTTPS encryption. Secure websites are favored by search engines, and HTTPS is now a ranking factor. Technical audits involve checking SSL certificates, addressing mixed content issues, and implementing security best practices to protect user data and enhance trustworthiness.
Canonicalization and Duplicate Content: Technical SEO addresses issues related to duplicate content and canonicalization, which can dilute search engine rankings. Using canonical tags and proper URL structures helps consolidate link equity and prevent duplicate content issues. Technical audits identify duplicate content issues and recommend canonicalization strategies to ensure that search engines index the preferred version of a webpage.
By focusing on these technical aspects of SEO, website owners and developers can identify and fix issues that may hinder search engine visibility and user experience, ultimately improving the website's performance and rankings.