8 benefits to implementing a technical SEO strategy

In Annertech's Technical SEO Service for Drupal Websites, we talked about what we do during a technical SEO implementation. But let us now look at the longer-term benefits of implementing one for your organisation.

1. Increase Reach Across all Channels

When your content is created in such a way as to allow Google, Bing and others to easily discover it, index it, and display it, it stands to reason that more people will also find it. With this increase in reach across different channels, you have the inevitable increase in potential sales and engagement.

2. Increase Search Engine Ranking

Following-on from the last point, if Google can easily understand your content, it stands a much better chance of appearing higher in search results, up to and including “Position Zero”. This means not just being at the top of general search results, but also featuring within the "People also ask" and "Featured snippets" section. Being placed here is Google gold dust.

3. Rich Snippets in Search Results

When your content appears in search results, you want more than a title with a short description; you want images, video, ratings, call to actions, etc. Anything that makes the search result showing your website more enticing than your competitors is a real bonus. Remember, a more enticing or prominent result will mean more engagement.

4. Position-Zero Search Results

This is the holy grail of search engine ranking, being positioned at the top of the page in featured carousels and other promoted sections.

5. Improved Display and Layout Across Social Media

Automating this process eliminates the issue of the wrong image or text snippet appearing when your content is shared across social media platforms. Doing this helps ensure there is a consistent message across all channels.

If you have not automated which image field will be used for your social media image preview, Facebook, Twitter, etc will guess from the list of images available on the page. Automating a specific field for this gives you full control over what people will see on social media when your pages are returned.

6. Identify Technical Content Weaknesses

Keep up-to-date with any broken links, page not found errors, missing image alt tags, and more so your content is always fresh and stays relevant. You will be penalised in search results if you have links on your pages to other pages on your site that do not exist anymore. An automated process to check these and report them to you allows you to fix the issue before Google or others find it.

7. Reduce Costs of Search Engine Optimisation

Rather than paying a SEO agency to implement specific meta tags for every post you make, we can automate a lot of this with our “Sensible Defaults” approach. To do this we designate certain fields in your CMS as metadata fields which will be used by default - teaser image field for social media featured image, teaser snippet field for social media description, etc. Each of these fields can then be overridden on a per-page basis by your content designers, as well as the option to crop images on the fly to make sure the best focal point of the image is used when sharing content.

8. Reduce Editor Overhead

By automating as much of the above as possible, your content designers and creators can focus on “writing great content” - the very content that the technical SEO strategy makes easily findable, indexable, and presentable. They can then focus on the social media and search engine marketing of this content.

In conclusion

An automated approach to SEO is not a panacea, however. It is the first step on your SEO journey. Once this foundation is implemented, you can then start looking at custom SEO per page or per site section or per campaign to further boost your rankings. We'll leave discussion of that to a future blog post.