Get ready to turbocharge your website's performance as we unravel the mysteries of technical SEO with Umair. In a market where split-second decisions matter, we dissect the critical need for lightning-fast page loads, diving into how mere seconds could mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion. But it's not all about speed – join us as we explore the importance of a technically sound website that plays nice with search engine bots, unlocking the secrets to climbing those SERP rankings and enhancing user satisfaction.
As the digital realm evolves with a mobile-first mantra, it's paramount to tailor your cyber home to fit the palms of your audience. We discuss the pitfalls and triumphs of mobile optimization, emphasizing the collaboration between SEO mavens and coding wizards to ensure your site isn't just a pretty face on desktop. With Umair's expertise, we navigate the common hurdles businesses encounter and how a proactive approach with a detailed technical SEO audit can lead to a streamlined user experience that translates into solid conversions.
Towards the end of our journey, we reveal how technical SEO is akin to the foundation of a house – unseen but vital. Oversized images, substandard hosting, and the lurking menace of cyber threats can all undercut your website's potential. We shine a light on these covert issues and how Jmarketing's suite of technical SEO services can be your digital guardian, keeping your online presence robust against the tides of change. With Umair's insights as our compass, we're here to guide you through the technical terrain towards a future of flourishing online success.
Get ready to turbocharge your website's performance as we unravel the mysteries of technical SEO with Umair. In a market where split-second decisions matter, we dissect the critical need for lightning-fast page loads, diving into how mere seconds could mean the difference between a bounce and a conversion. But it's not all about speed – join us as we explore the importance of a technically sound website that plays nice with search engine bots, unlocking the secrets to climbing those SERP rankings and enhancing user satisfaction.
As the digital realm evolves with a mobile-first mantra, it's paramount to tailor your cyber home to fit the palms of your audience. We discuss the pitfalls and triumphs of mobile optimization, emphasizing the collaboration between SEO mavens and coding wizards to ensure your site isn't just a pretty face on desktop. With Umair's expertise, we navigate the common hurdles businesses encounter and how a proactive approach with a detailed technical SEO audit can lead to a streamlined user experience that translates into solid conversions.
Towards the end of our journey, we reveal how technical SEO is akin to the foundation of a house – unseen but vital. Oversized images, substandard hosting, and the lurking menace of cyber threats can all undercut your website's potential. We shine a light on these covert issues and how Jmarketing's suite of technical SEO services can be your digital guardian, keeping your online presence robust against the tides of change. With Umair's insights as our compass, we're here to guide you through the technical terrain towards a future of flourishing online success.
Business owners. Do you want an unfair advantage over your competitors? Do you want to dominate in your area of expertise? You were listening to Business Life Hacks. Learn to influence consumer psychology and shortcut your way to business success with tips, tricks and hacks from award-winning digital agency J Marketing.
Speaker 2:One of the most overlooked aspects to conversion rate optimization for a website is technical SEO. Now, there are a lot of different things that go into technical SEO, but I think one of the biggest, most common issues that can also have the biggest effect on conversion rate is slow page loading speeds. If the page takes longer than three seconds to load, you'll lose the majority of the people. They'll just leave without even taking a look at your web page. Not only is that an aspect conversion rate optimization, that's also an aspect of technical SEO, because one of the factors that Google and Bing take into account when ranking pages is how well the pages perform. Here, to tell us a little bit about that and about the other aspects of technical SEO and how they affect conversion rate is Zumaera. Thanks for coming on the podcast again.
Speaker 3:Zumaera. Thanks for having me, alex. Thank you the study. I think there was a study done by Amazon and the stat you were referring to came from that. Amazon did a study that if it takes a page longer than three seconds, I think then there is an X amount of people, x percentage of people on your page they will leave. So one of the biggest impacts on a business website can be how quickly people can see the content on your page. If they land on your page and they have to wait a long time images are loading, some of the content is not loading, then they will probably leave. Go back to Google and search for one of your competitors that has done a better speed optimization. So speed optimization is not entirely the technical SEO, but it's a very important part of SEO. Technical SEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah, certainly is Probably the part that has the biggest effect on conversion rate, in my opinion at least. So what are some of the other parts of technical SEO, especially parts that are related to conversion rate optimization?
Speaker 3:Yes. So one of the other important aspects is if the websites we are making for people are not just for people, they are also for software. You can call them bots from search engines. So if you are a business and it's important for your business to get people from search engines such as Google, then the people working at Google they usually will not come to your sites and manually see if it's a good site. They will normally send a software, a bot, on your website. So a bot is basically a program, and if a program cannot interact very well with your program, which is your website, then obviously that robot will not have good things to report back to Google.
Speaker 3:So it's very important that software from search engines can crawl your website in a no-transcript, efficient way as possible, like if bot is landing on your page.
Speaker 3:Your page is loading slowly, it has lots of JavaScript, it has code that makes it very difficult for the bot to crawl your web pages. Then it will cost them a lot more than when compared to a more efficient website. So this aspect of making sure your website is technically well built is very important. Another aspect that I come across in technical SEO that is usually overlooked is how good your mobile version of the website is made. A lot of the developers we work with usually develop websites on their desktops or laptops. So in organizations that do not focus on mobile user experience, it's possible that your business gets a lot of, or majority of, the traffic from mobile devices. And if your website is not very well, maybe your website looks fine, it loads fine on the desktop version, but if it doesn't work well, doesn't look well on the mobile, you may be losing a lot of business because of that. So that's another part of technical SEO that can be overlooked.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, and I think it's important to say that when most people, when most you know SEO professionals work on their websites technical SEO, they don't necessarily have like conversion rates in mind. They're trying to get their pages to rank higher in Google. But the reason that there is like a correlation is because this Google bot and whatever Bing bot- you know, you were talking about.
Speaker 2:When they're crawling your page they're trying to you know simulate how good of an experience a user would have. So you know if they think your technical SEO is bad, your page takes too long to load, it's not mobile optimized, that all your technical SEO isn't great. That'll hurt your rankings, but it's. You can also apply, you know, those insights to conversion rate optimization. Like, as we were saying, if your page takes too long to load, you'll lose a lot of potential customers. If your website is not mobile optimized properly, you'll lose a lot of customers on mobile. So technical SEO and conversion rates aren't necessarily directly linked. But technical SEO can give you important insights into how to optimize conversion rates right.
Speaker 3:Yes, and one of the points I missed earlier is that how many times you have come across links in emails and other places in, maybe in ads? When you click on them, you are taken to a page that doesn't open, or it opens but there is nothing on it that is useful to you. So how much the business is affected if you are spending money on ads, spending money on email campaigns or other campaigns maybe offline campaigns and when people click on those links they are not working. And that's another aspect of very important aspect of technical SEO that can sometimes be overlooked, especially by websites that are older, like when people have been adding or deleting or editing content on their websites, pages and content over the period of a few years, your site could have accumulated a lot of links internal and external that are not working at all. So the people who are landing on those pages with broken links will have a very bad experience and your business might be suffering because of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, the broken links, non-mobile optimized, slow loading pages those are some of the most common technical SEO issues that are also issues that will hurt conversion rates. So say, a business has realized that their technical SEO isn't great, their pages are loading too slow, they're not mobile optimized, they have a lot of broken links and they know that not only will this hurt them when they're trying to rank but also hurt their conversion rates. So say, a business has realized that and they realize they need to do some fixes. So what are some quick fixes, relatively straightforward fixes that website managers can apply that will help with technical SEO and also conversions.
Speaker 3:Okay. So to get started with the process, you should know what resources are available in your organization. It should not be entirely the responsibility of a website administrator or even SEO person to fix all of the technical SEO stuff. So if your organization doesn't have resources, then it's best to look for teams external to your organization, maybe in a marketing agency or a web development agency that has SEO expertise, to take a look at the problems and then team should solve your technical SEO problems, because for technical SEO problems a marketer, such as an SEO, and a developer should team up to fix the problems.
Speaker 3:If only one person is doing the fixes, they might probably miss things that the other person can pick up. So when you have identified the people who will do it, then they can run an audit, a technical SEO audit. They will check your mobile website. They will check all of your website for broken links. They will check your mobile web speed and also the desktop web speed.
Speaker 3:Sometimes, as I said earlier, desktop sites are working very well, but when you go to the mobile version it is loading slowly because, remember, in most parts of the world desktop speeds, internet speeds, are a lot higher than what the mobile can get In some areas it's quite good, but in a lot of the areas it's not. In that audit we will do the speed optimization audits for the desktop versions and as well as for mobile versions. Then, when the audit is finished, then hopefully that team can come to you, to the managers of that business, and they can show them. Okay, these are all the stuff Maybe it's in a Google sheet that need fixing, and then they can one by one go there and fix it up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the website say we're talking about a small business here and the business owner they can certainly see okay, my website's not loading very quickly. It doesn't look great when I check it out on my iPhone or whatever. I've noticed I have a lot of broken links. But to identify the problems, how bad the problems are, to fix them and to make sure that the problems have been fixed and performance has been improved that is, I mean it's called technical SEO for a reason. Right, it's pretty technical process, requires SEO knowledge and, as you said, it's good for an SEO analyst and a dev to work together, because the SEO analysts will probably be able to identify technical SEO issues, but then let the dev maybe have to rewrite some code to fix them or something like that. So it's really something that's, unless you have a lot of technical knowledge, it's best to hire experts that have a lot of experience fixing these sort of issues, like we do a J marketing. It's difficult to do it effectively yourself, really.
Speaker 3:Totally, and I would add to that that in some fixes I would also add a designer in it, because, for example, you tested your mobile website and it doesn't look good at all on the mobile screen. It looks fine on the desktop, but then the developer and the SEO person cannot give you a very good design for the mobile side. You will need a professional designer or a UX person to design design for the mobile side that is highly converting and also loads fast, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly, so it does take a full team.
Speaker 3:So just like we have at JM.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So can you share like an example from your career where you noticed that a business had a technical SEO problem and because of that, their website wasn't performing very well in terms of like getting the leads and conversions, and how you were able to contribute to fixing that?
Speaker 3:Yes. So the access not only to the web page but also to your bottom line can be the sizes of the images that load on the pages. For example, in one of the cases a web page was shown to me that was getting the highest traffic for their business. So what we identified is some of the images on it were very small in dimensions, but in the back end in the code, they were very, very big images. And I say big it means file size.
Speaker 3:For example, a small image in dimensions can be a few kbs, right, kilobytes yeah, but in the back end it could be loading a very big version of it but not showing it. It could be in megabytes. So when your page is loading on a device, it could be any device mobile, tablet or mobile, your machine, your server will send all that payload file payload, which includes images to your device. So one of the quick fixes for that in that case was to optimize their images and instantly, in a matter of few hours, that web page started getting better page metrics, like people were staying on it more and they started getting more conversions for whatever goal they had for that page.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a common situation that I've seen as well, where people will have just massive images on their web pages that take forever to load and that kills their technical SEO for that page and their conversion rate. And, as like you said, sometimes it can be a little bit hard to detect at first because the massive image is loading like in the back end, not in the front end. So you have to know what to look for.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not obvious for a website visitor to see that there is an image that is loading and it is very big in file size. So you will need to go to a person who can see your code, maybe put that from some process and then see what files are, of what size. It. Does that page even needs that big image or big JavaScript file or any other files that are included in the code that are not even visible on the front end.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so the issues we've talked about so far are like pretty well known technical SEO issues. Can you think of any like sort of underrated or often overlooked technical SEO issues that could also hurt conversion rates?
Speaker 3:Yes, it has to do with speed, but it's a. It's a very overlooked part again and it's the server you are hosting your website on. A lot of the business owners and people working there do not realize that the issue is not with their website. The code is fine, their image sizes are fine, their website design is fine, but the hardware that is hosting your pages is very bad Like. It's not enough, it's not adequate. That hardware would mean the memory in that hardware is just like a computer you have at your home, just at a much bigger level. The processors are bigger, but it's again a machine that has the sources that your website consumes. So if your website has it requires higher resources than what your web server can provide, then no matter how optimized your website is, it will not perform well. So one of the most overlooked part by business owners and people working for businesses that are not technical make this mistake that they are hosting their websites on a very, very low cost web host that doesn't give them the hardware resources to load their pages fast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, that's really good point. Yeah, if you're, you know, have like just a little personal website and you just want to get a cheap web host so your friends and family can take a look at it, whatever, that's fine. But if you're trying to run a serious e-commerce business and use a cheap web host, so your site takes forever to load and also a cheap web host might not like be as reliable, so your site might have like more downtime than it should. Yeah, that could be a serious problem.
Speaker 3:And then downtime can also kill your conversions right.
Speaker 3:People are landing on your pages, maybe one hour a day, they cannot. They try to land on your page but your page was not there because your web server was down. So again, the convergence take a day. And also I have on the other end of the spectrum, I have also seen people using super expensive servers for their very, very small websites that do not require that kind of a server. Like they are paying hundreds of dollars for a machine that is loading, as you said, very small blog that is meant for a few hundred people a month. So again, that's the other end of the spectrum where people are overpaying for their hardware.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just like with the other technical SEO related issues we were talking about. To identify the issue in the first place and also fix it properly, it's best to hire a team of experts, like we have at J Marketing, because if you're trying to do things yourself, you probably won't even be able to identify all the various issues, much less fix them.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and we have come across clients that have come to us when their website is hacked and that's again another part of technical SEO. It could be directly related to it. It can kill your conversions Because when people are landing on your page maybe you I regularly come across websites. When I go to them from the search engine, I am taken to another spam website. What happened there? It is some kind of malware or virus that has infected your web host, or your part of your web host where your website is residing, and it's killing your conversions. And what's even worse is that search engines are tagging you that you are also a bad website, so you should not even be in their index so they can ban you from their index. If you are running ads, they will ban your website from their ads platform. So it's a business killer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely Well, even if your website is not being redirected, it's like you said if the bots that we were talking about earlier identify that you know your website has been hacked a lot of times, they'll just totally remove you from your results. Also, if your website is not being redirected, I know sometimes, you know, when I'm browsing, instead of like being redirected to a spam site, I'll get like a warning page from my browser saying this page has been reported as being hacked. Do you still want to continue?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, totally. So that will kill your business. Yeah, again, and this happens because a lot of us business owners and people working there they assume that they know what's happening behind the scenes of their websites and web roles, but when these things happen, that's when they realize they don't know the whole situation. So it's better that your technical aspects, technical SEO and technical matters related to technical SEO are managed by a team that has the experience and the skills to give you what's best for your website, and it will keep your website safe and probably not, you know, affect your business negatively.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it's like technical SEO. It's sort of at the intersection between, you know, seo and on page conversion rate. So it's really worth, you know, investing in a team of professionals because it will help your business out in multiple ways. So to that end, at Jmarketing, we offer a comprehensive $995 digital marketing audit. This includes every aspect of your marketing, including a technical SEO audit of your website to identify issues. We will also provide recommendations as far as how we can fix these issues and all other issues in a digital marketing setup for you. So go ahead and visit our website and go to the digital marketing audit page and sign up, and we will be able to perform that audit promptly and give you some valuable insights. Yep. So thanks for coming on the podcast today, mayor. I know I learned a lot of interesting stuff and I hope our listeners did too. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.