Let me start by saying that there is objective and significant value to have from well-done technical and on-site SEO.
Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site and site structure for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your site quickly and efficiently.
Having poor technical SEO while the rest of your site is optimized is like driving a shiny new Lamborghini without an engine.
On-site or on-page SEO refers to optimizing your content both for search engine rankings as well as for users (you want them to see you in the SERPs and be attracted to what you may have to offer).
With that said, you should view them both as a foundation to be expanded on. Without the basics, you’ll be stuck on an endless treadmill of mediocrity.
They Do Matter, But…
My frustrations stem from the idea that they are all you need or that “advanced” technical SEO course for three easy payments of $999 is going to make a significant difference for you.
This may be the case in some specific scenarios, but for the large majority of sites, they simply will not propel you ahead of the competition or fix your more important underlying issues (like poor content quality or a weak link profile).
What They Can & Can’t Do
Viewed as a foundation, there are a number of highly important components of technical and on-site SEO.
Here are the main pieces that can make a tangible difference:
- Crawl/indexability
- Site speed
- Site structure/architecture (and strong internal linking)
- Schema (in some cases)
- Review and rating schema, pricing, sitelinks, NAP for local businesses, miscellaneous others (primarily those that can assist in displaying additional content in the SERPs)
- Canonicals
- Proper redirects
- Mobile-friendliness
- Good meta content
- Optimized H1s/H2s and body content
- Avoiding “over-optimization”
- Topics > keywords
It’s these “basics” that have the most impact – investing significantly in improving beyond this will often not make enough of a difference to warrant it as a primary focus.
Schema, for instance, is a great tool to have in your arsenal and employ strategically, but going overboard and tagging every single page with every schema element possible will simply not make a difference in your search rankings. Don’t let “industry experts” convince you otherwise.
Schema is not even a direct ranking factor that we know of (right now).
There are some great capabilities with structured markup, but you aren’t going to make your site rank out of thin air with it. – Read more
