Technical SEO Checklist for Service Businesses

Imagine this: You’re a plumber and just fixed a leaky pipe for Mrs. Johnson down the street. You’re feeling pretty good about yourself, but then you remember that you need more customers to keep your business from going down the drain. You’ve heard about this thing called SEO, but it sounds like a foreign language. Fear not, my friend! I’m here to break down the technical side of SEO and help you get your business in front of more people online.

Before we get started, let me share a couple of “Did You Knows:”

• Did you know that according to Klarna’s 2023 report, just over 2 out of every 5 shopping experiences start with a search engine? They also found that just over 6 out of 10 Millennials and over 5 out of 10 Gen Z'ers globally would opt for only shopping online if they had to choose.
• Did you know in a 2019 BrightEdge Research report, they stated that “Organic Search share of traffic increased to 53.3% on average across industries.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “I’m a plumber, I don’t have a retail store, and I’m not some tech guru!” But don’t worry, you don’t need to be a coding wizard to implement these technical SEO best practices. Just follow along, and I’ll guide you through the process.

What is Technical SEO?

Think of technical SEO as the foundation of your online presence. Just like you wouldn’t build a house without a solid foundation, you don’t want to build a website without a strong technical SEO foundation. Technical SEO focuses on improving the technical aspects of your website to make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, and index your pages.

Technical SEO Checklist for Small Service Area Businesses

Now that you know what technical SEO is, let’s dive into the essential tips you can’t ignore if you want to boost your online visibility.

1. Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Depending on your audience, more than half of your web traffic will typically come from a mobile device. So, if your website doesn’t look good on a smartphone, you’re missing out on a lot of potential customers. Way back in 2015, Google began to prioritize mobile sites with the release of its mobile-friendly update, coined “Mobilegeddon.” In 2016, they began to crawl as if they were a mobile device and would only index the content that they and their users could see when they accessed a website on their mobile device.

(Chart Souce: Statista)

2. Optimize Your Website’s Loading Speed

Nobody likes a slow website. If your website takes too long to load, people will leave before seeing what you offer. Google also uses page speed as a ranking factor. To improve your website’s loading speed, optimize your images, minimize your code, and use a content delivery network (CDN), such as Cloudflare.

3. Use HTTPS to Secure Your Website

HTTPS is a protocol that encrypts data sent between a user’s browser and your website, making it much harder for hackers to intercept sensitive information like passwords or credit card numbers.

However, HTTPS isn’t just important for security; it is a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. Back in 2014, Google announced that HTTPS would be used as a ranking signal, giving a small boost to sites that use the protocol.

Since then, Google has become more serious about HTTPS; in July 2018, Chrome began marking all HTTP sites as “not secure.” You can imagine what a warning sign like that could do for your traffic, let alone conversions.

HTTPS is constantly evolving, and every new version can offer benefits like better security and performance. So if you want to improve your site’s security and traffic and possibly boost your rankings, implementing HTTPS is a no-brainer.

4. Optimize Your Website for Local Search

As a small service business, most of your customers will come from your local area. That’s why it’s important to optimize your website for local search. Make sure your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent across your website and online directories. Also, create a Google Business Profile listing and encourage customers to leave reviews.

5. Use Structured Data to Help Search Engines Understand Your Content

Structured data is a way to tell search engines what your website is about. It’s like giving them a roadmap to your content. By using schema markup, you can help search engines understand things like your business hours, services, and reviews. This can help your website show up in rich snippets, which can increase your click-through rate.

6. Organize Your Site for Easy Navigation

How your site’s content is organized and how your internal link structure is set up can make your site more authoritative and relevant for search queries and offer a better user experience.

Google says this about site structure:

“When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site.”

For local service businesses, this means making it easy for potential customers to find what they need, whether it’s booking a service, checking out your reviews, or learning about your areas of expertise.

7. Enhance User Experience With Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals (CWV) are a set of metrics that measure a website's load performance (how fast a page renders), interactivity (how quickly someone can interact with the page), and visual stability (so there are no unexpected shifts).

CWVs are part of Google’s ranking algorithm, though how much weight they hold is up for debate.

Regardless of speculation, getting these right improves the site experience, which can definitely have an impact on how you perform in the search results and with your target audience.

Take, for example, all the data found on this page that shows the impact of web performance on user experience and business metrics.

As with many other ranking factors, think of CWV as that extra competitive edge. If all other sites are mostly equal, but one site is better at performing, which do you think will rank?

Google’s John Mueller stated on Reddit that CWV was more than just a “tie-breaker,” following up with some excellent advice:

“It is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance. Depending on the sites you work on, you might notice it more, or you might notice it less. As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on. Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.

The other thing to keep in mind with core web vitals is that it’s more than a random ranking factor, it’s also something that affects your site’s usability after it ranks (when people actually visit). If you get more traffic (from other SEO efforts) and your conversion rate is low, that traffic is not going to be as useful as when you have a higher conversion rate (assuming UX/speed affects your conversion rate, which it usually does). CWV is a great way of recognizing and quantifying common user annoyances.”

8. Optimize your site for search engine crawlers

Besides getting your content out there for the world to see, you’ve got room to tweak things a bit and make it easier for search engines to find and understand what you’re putting online.

This involves optimizing how search engine bots interact with your site, ensuring they can crawl and index your pages quickly and efficiently. This is particularly important for local service businesses where competition can be stiff, and you want to ensure your site is easily discoverable by search engines.

Some techniques to improve crawl efficiency include:

• Having an XML sitemap. Search engines use an XML sitemap to discover and index your pages. Sitemaps help improve the crawlability and visibility of your site.
• Using the robots.txt file to control bot access. Robots.txt is a text file placed at the root of a website that tells search engine bots which pages not to crawl. This is known as the robots exclusion protocol. However, it does not guarantee that excluded URLs won’t be indexed, as search engine spiders can still find them through links from other pages or past indexing.
• Implementing canonical tags to avoid duplicate content issues. The canonical link element helps solve duplicate content issues because it signals to search engines like Google which webpage is the original or best pick out of a group of pages that are duplicate or near duplicate.
• Minimizing redirect chains and loops. Redirect chains occur when a URL redirects to another URL, which then redirects to a third URL, and so on. This can slow down page loading times and confuse search engine bots. On the other hand, redirect loops happen when two or more URLs redirect to each other in a loop, causing crawlers to get stuck and preventing pages from being indexed properly.
• Monitoring and resolving crawl errors. Crawl errors occur when search engine bots encounter issues while crawling and indexing a website. Common crawl errors include 404 not found errors, 5xx server errors, and DNS lookup failures. Monitor crawl errors regularly and resolve them quickly to ensure that search engines can index your site and you can provide a better user experience for visitors.

FAQ: How can I effectively implement technical SEO to enhance my website’s performance and rankings?

Technical SEO involves optimizing your website so that it loads fast, renders properly, provides a good user experience, and more. It is a driving force in how well your website performs for users and search engines.

Here’s how you can effectively implement it to improve your website and search engine ranking.

Website Architecture

An important part of technical SEO is organizing and cleaning your website’s architecture. When your website is well-structured, it is easier for search engines to crawl and helps users easily navigate it. Establish a clear hierarchy with clean URLs, and it’s a good idea to include an XML sitemap. The goal is to make your webpages easily reachable—the fewer clicks it takes for users to get to your webpages, the better.

Page Speed

Page speed is a huge part of technical SEO and has become a major ranking factor for search engines. Fast-loading pages provide a better user experience and tend to rank higher on SERPs. Optimizing images, browser caching, and minimizing your JavaScript and CSS code can improve your page speed loading times. Using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to get insights and recommendations to improve your site speed is a good idea.

Mobile Optimization

Another key aspect of technical SEO is mobile optimization. Google has moved to mobile-first indexing, which means that search engines prioritize the mobile versions of webpages for ranking. Optimizing your site to be mobile-friendly improves user experience, page speed, and gives users the same experience across a wide variety of devices.

HTTPS

HTTPS protocol makes your website secure and also helps to establish trust. Visitors want to know that any personal or payment information they provide will be kept safe. Sites using HTTPS are preferred over non-secure sites by search engines because they offer encrypted communication that protects data integrity and user information. Implementing SSL/TLS certificates is a straightforward process that adds another layer of security.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a very common problem that can harm website ranking. Canonical tags should be used to tell search engines what version of a webpage you prefer. To consolidate duplicate pages, use 301 redirects. Google Search Console can help you identify and fix any duplicate content issues.

Structured Data

Structured data is a very useful tool in technical SEO. It enhances the appearance of a search engine listing and adds rich information to help searchers make a decision, which can improve click-through rates (CTR). Implement schema markup to improve your site’s SERP appearance and give search engines more context/details about your webpage content.

These technical SEO tips will help improve your website performance and your search engine ranking.

Step-by-Step Procedure

1. Audit your site: Use SEO tools like Screaming Frog or SEOToolSet® to run a thorough site audit and find any technical issues.
2. Fix crawl errors: Use Google Search Console to find and fix any crawl errors, including 404 pages and server errors.
3. Optimize site architecture: Your website must have a logical structure with a clear hierarchy. Create an XML sitemap and submit it to search engines.
4. Improve page speed: Evaluate your site’s speed with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights. Optimize images by compressing image files and using the correct file format. Implement browser caching and reduce CSS/JavaScript code.
5. Mobile optimization: Give your website a responsive design so that it displays and performs as intended across mobile devices. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check performance.
6. Implement HTTPS: Make your site secure with SSL/TLS certificates. Convert to HTTPS.
7. Manage duplicate content: Avoid duplicate content problems by using canonical tags and 301 redirects. The content on each of your pages must be unique and valuable to increase your chances of ranking.
8. Schema markup: Mark up your pages with schema markup to boost your SERP appearance. You can verify your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
9. Improve URL structure: Use clean, descriptive URLs that incorporate your target keywords. Do not use long, complex URLs.
10. Internal linking: Use logical internal links to improve user experience and crawlability.
11. Fix broken links: Regularly audit your site to find broken links and promptly fix them.
12. Optimize Robots.txt: Check your robots.txt file to make sure it guides search engine crawlers appropriately and does not inadvertently block important pages.
13. Regularly update content: Search engines reward sites with fresh, helpful content. Review your content regularly and update it as needed to keep its value and relevance.
14. Monitor backlinks: Use SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEOToolset to track your backlink profile and remove any links that may be harmful to your site.
15. Reduce server response time: Ensure a fast server response time by either optimizing your server settings or switching to a faster hosting provider.
16. Breadcrumb navigation: Use breadcrumb navigation to improve user experience and help search engines better understand your website structure.
17. Set up canonical URLs: Define canonical URLs to prevent duplicate content issues.
18. Use lazy loading: If you have any content like images or videos that are not essential, implement lazy loading to defer their loading. This will improve your page speed.
19. Implement pagination: If your website includes large lists of content, use proper pagination to improve efficiency.
20. Track technical SEO metrics: Regularly monitor your technical SEO performance with tools like Google Analytics and Search Console.
21. Update plugins and themes: Using Joomla, WordPress or some other kind of CMS? Keep your plugins and themes updated to avoid security vulnerabilities.
22. Regularly audit your technical SEO: Perform SEO audits regularly to ensure all elements are optimized and identify issues that must be addressed.

Wrapping It Up

Technical SEO might sound intimidating, but it’s essential for your website's health and success. By following these best practices, you can ensure your site is easy for search engines to crawl and index, fast and responsive for users, and secure and reliable for everyone.

Remember, technical SEO aims to create a solid foundation for your website. Once this foundation is in place, you can focus on other aspects of SEO, like creating high-quality content and building backlinks, to drive even more traffic to your site.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t worry! Here at Cube Creative Design, we take care of all the technical SEO for our clients. Schedule a free consultation with us today, and let us guide you through the technical SEO process to ensure your site is performing at its best.