Technical SEO is vital to any digital marketing campaign. If your website is not running smoothly, it will be hard to improve your keyword rankings–even if you produce the best content in the world.
If you’re an SEO professional, then having profound knowledge of the technical aspects provides you with a cutting edge to rank better over competing websites.
Let’s discuss the qualifications of a technical SEO specialist and consultant and how they can improve your SEO.
What Is a Technical SEO Consultant?
For the uninitiated, technical SEO refers to optimizing a website’s speed, usability, user experience, and crawlability. Think of technical SEO as the foundation on which your online marketing house is built.
The technical SEO consultant or specialist is responsible for managing these aspects of your business, ensuring your website loads quickly, renders nicely on mobile, and can be crawled and indexed by search engines. They can serve as both a consultant or the main SEO campaign manager, depending on their qualifications and role.
Ways a Technical SEO Specialist Can Improve Your Website
Website usability is not just important from a diagnostics perspective but impacts every aspect of your business, from website traffic to lead conversion funnels. Let’s explore five ways hiring a technical SEO expert can improve your organic web presence.
- Improve Functionality: The primary job of the technical SEO is to ensure proper site functionality, working hand-in-hand with your developer. Technical SEO specialists will diagnose problems ranging from indexation issues to 404 errors that prevent users from accessing your website.
- Boost Traffic: Technical SEO experts are also well-versed in keyword research and can implement keywords strategically across your site to improve intended rankings.
- Improve User Experience: Technical SEO specialists will ensure that pages render properly across devices and are registered in the preferred language of the user to improve the UX of your site.
- Increase Click-Through Rate: Technical SEO specialists are highly knowledgeable in off-site SEO tactics, including schema markup and metadata optimization, which help improve the click-through rate of organic listings.
- Increase Conversions: By improving all technical aspects of your website, from speed to proper interlinking, a technical SEO expert can plug leaks in your funnel and improve your underlying conversion rate.
Technical SEO Consultant: Main Responsibilities
An ideal candidate must have a comprehensive hold on technical SEO – crawling and indexing errors to improve website performance. From thorough content evaluation to hands-on experience in HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, and/or other programming languages, technical SEO strives to fix the loopholes and drive your website performance.
If you plan to hire a Technical SEO specialist to strengthen your website, we’ve broken things down for you here in a simple format, starting with the responsibilities.
- Detailed understanding of search engine algorithms to determine what governs the crawlers’ behavior and influences them to rank pages.
- Sitemap knowledge.
- Optimizing page load speed.
- Manage keyword rank tracking and reporting.
- Finding and fixing content duplicate issues.
- Link building and outreach efforts.
- Fixing Indexing errors.
- Installing SSL certificates on websites.
- Optimization of landing pages and blogs across different devices – desktops and mobile phones.
- Build and optimize a mobile-friendly website.
- Identify, monitor, and implement on and off-page changes to improve the website performance.
- Troubleshooting website performance issues – crawling and indexing errors.
- Responsible for registering, fixing, and maintaining weekly logs for SEO-related bugs/errors.
- Collaborating with other SEO professionals, web developers, digital marketers, and many other specialists to eliminate recurring technical glitches.
- Administrating web tools – Google Analytics, CMS, and many other industry-leading tools.
- Updating websites following the client’s KPIs and industry-recommended practices ( algorithm updates).
Technical SEO Consultant: Main Qualifications:
- Well-versed with HTML, CSS, JS, and site architecture.
- Ability to make calculated changes in the website content.
- Theoretical understanding of on and off-page SEO strategies, including backlink profiles.
- Hands-on experience in opening and managing client accounts on Google Analytics and Google Search Console and tools like Moz, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and other relevant SEO tools.
- Functional knowledge of Chrome DevTools, structured data markup, content analysis tools, and AMP.
- Proficiency in managing robots.txt files, canonical tags, pagination, and redirects.
- Conceptual Knowledge of Conversion Rate Optimization and UX principles and practices.
- Broad understanding of social media platforms and their influence on SEO practices.
- Agency experience would be given preference.
- Anticipates common website problems and provides detailed analysis along with performance recommendations.
- Must possess excellent verbal and written communication.
- Good interpersonal skills to coordinate with internal teams and manage projects with senior managers/leadership.
Technical SEO Consultant: Bonus Competencies
- A go-getter and team player with an ingrained passion for mastering digital marketing practices.
- Stay updated on the latest happenings in the industry and market competition level to formulate razor-sharp SEO strategies.
- Exceptional capability to coordinate with multi-disciplined teams to find and fix core problems and establish coherence in project management.
- Creative, flexible, and willing to unlearn and learn to break the mold and excel in the field while supporting organizational goals.
- Assertive enough to voice opinions in front of project managers, senior executives, and leadership for the larger good of the stakeholders.
- Demonstrates confidence to take on challenges, technical and otherwise, to deliver promised results within the deadline.
From on-page to off-page to technical SEO, every aspect has to be thoroughly understood to achieve maximum digital impact.
Regarding technical SEO, having an inventive mind with relevant experience removes the most pesky bugs and can quickly reinstate your business performance.
Yet, it is not a sure-shot formula for the complete success of any digital marketing campaign.
We recommend you attract and assimilate serious technical SEO talent for the success of your business and clients.
FAQs: Technical SEO Specialist
What does a Technical SEO Specialist do?
A Technical SEO Specialist is responsible for optimizing websites to ensure they meet the technical requirements of search engines like Google. Their primary focus is on improving the website’s structure, performance, and accessibility to enhance search engine rankings. This includes tasks such as optimizing website code, improving page load times, addressing crawl errors, and implementing structured data markup.
What tools are essential for Technical SEO Specialists?
Essential tools for Technical SEO Specialists include Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEO auditing software (e.g., Screaming Frog, SEMrush), website speed testing tools (e.g., PageSpeed Insights), and schema markup generators. These tools help diagnose issues, monitor performance, and make data-driven decisions.
What is the future of Technical SEO?
The future of Technical SEO will likely continue to evolve with advancements in technology and changes in search engine algorithms. It will be increasingly important to optimize for mobile devices, voice search, and user experience. Technical SEO Specialists will also need to adapt to emerging technologies like AI and machine learning that impact search rankings.
