The Ground Work
If Google can not crawl or index your site, your optimization efforts have come to a screeching halt before you’ve even started. Technical SEO lays the foundation of your ability to rank. Without it, you’re a ‘fish out of water’, as the saying goes.
Let’s take a deeper dive into elements that play a major factor in how important technical SEO is.
Mobile Speed & Usability
Google switched their algorithm to focus on mobile first. This means in todays world, more users browse with their phones than their desktops. Because of this change over the past several years, Google places an emphasis on how your site performs on a mobile platform.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals as its known as, set of standardized metrics from Google that help developers understand how users experience a web page. You’ll hear fancy acronyms such as ‘CLS’ thrown around that help pin point elements on a page that will provide a better user experience. Better user experience means longer engagements. And as you may have guessed, longer engagements on your site means higher rankings, per Google’s latest algorithm update.
TTFB (Time to First Byte)
More technical acronyms, but one that is super important for your site. TTFB refers to how fast your content becomes interactive (or simply usable) by the user. Pages do not have to be fully loaded, in order to begin working appropriately. Scripts often continue to fire in the background but users can still interact with your site. Optimizing for TTFB is imperative and is a ranking signal Google uses within its algorithm.