If you are anything like us at Digital Treasury, you’re constantly looking for ways to improve your technical SEO game. And with the waves of changes that hit the SEO metrics in 2021, you want to know if the strategies you’ve been using will still be as effective in 2023, right?
In that case, you’d be pleased to learn the content of this article. Here, we have summarized all the steps you need to maintain and up your technical SEO in 2023 into a 7-point ultimate checklist. Have a look!
Then, once you're done, check out our 5 day SEO challenge!
Spoiler alert: There won't be a whole lot of changes to what you already do. If your technical SEO practices are positive and solid, you only need a little guidance. Either way, this list contains all you need!
The first thing you should optimize in 2023 is your website structure. Why?
The core of technical SEO issues lies in how easily search engine bots can crawl and index your website. However, even with a poorly-structured site, your audience might still read your posts and even buy from the links. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same thing for Google.
Unless your website architecture is top-notch, crawlers will hardly find your web pages. Ultimately, that would lead to crawling and indexing issues. So, what should you do?
In 2023, revisit your website architecture.We’ll advise you to stick to a flat structure that is suitable for your audience as well as search engine bots. And as part of your restructuring efforts, take a look at your URL component. Ensure that it is SEO-friendly – in other words, paginate your URLs.
Note: If you'd redesign your website or restructure its content, always redirect your old URLs to the new ones. Else, search engine bots will experience broken links, which might affect your site user experience.
Pro tip: If your website architecture is already excellent, still perform audits to fix crawling and indexing issues before they spiral out of control.
Related reading: How Often Should You Redesign Your Website?
If you are particularly worried about your website's indexing, you should check your robots.txt file first. Aside from being a critical technical SEO component, it is the first thing search engine bots check on your website.
For those reasons, the robots.txt file is a big deal – and it will continue to be so even in 2023. But you might want to find it first and check the pages with the "disallowed" tags. That would be the key to resolving the majority of your crawlability headaches.
Note: you can find the robots.txt file using Google Search Console. And if you don’t want search engine bots to crawl a particular page on your website, specify such with the “disallow” tag.
We understand that creating sitemaps might be a bit of work for you. However, if you are bent on improving your technical SEO game in 2023, you need these elements. In particular, your website needs HTML and XML sitemaps. Why?
Much like architecture and pagination, sitemaps are crucial to your website’s visibility to search engines and humans. Visibility aside, these elements are also essential to your site’s indexing.
In essence, create as many sitemaps as required by your website. About that, we'll advise you to have one for each content format on your site. For example, create a sitemap for categories like your PDFs, images, and videos.
You probably know this point already and might have even put in considerable work to improve the speed of your website. Regardless, you can still do better – continue improving your site’s speed even in 2023. Here is why:
Though loading speed has long been a ranking factor for SERPs, it's more crucial since the June 2020 page experience update. In essence, you can never slack on your site’s loading speed - even beyond 2023.
But, say your website loading speed is beyond 10 secs – what then? What can you do?
This guide can help: How To Speed Up Your Website & Why It’s Important!
Quality links, be it internal or external, are key contributing factors of SEO. When done right, they can improve your website’s user experience. However, if you need the links for technical SEO, we'll suggest that you check your internal links in 2023.
In essence, if you want a particular page on your website to index and rank, you need to bulk it up with internal links. Also, ensure that the sources are from authority sites with significant crawlability.
Most importantly, check all your internal links to find broken and dead weights. Once you find the mishaps, fix them on the spot.
Google Core Web Vitals is a big umbrella that captures your website's loading speed, visibility, and responsiveness. So, they are a big deal. Besides, these "vitals" are now crucial to ranking your site on SERPs – since May 2021. And trust us, they will grow in importance even in 2023.
So, what should you do?
Like you optimized and updated your website architecture, you’d also do the same for the Google Core Web Vitals. And fortunately, there is a standard you can aim for using Page Insights. Check it out:
Overall, ensure that your website passes the Google Core Web Vitals test!
Suggested reading: First Input Delay (FID): What Is It? How Can You Reduce It?
Another critical component of the Google Core Web Vitals is security. Your website should be as secure as possible. That is the only way you can ensure the safety of your users’ data, their trust, and continued visits.
In that case, you should upgrade from HTTP to HTTPS. The latter is a secure version, and it comes with an SSL certification. But beyond the SSL certificate, HTTPS is also one of the ranking factors on SERPs.
Bottom line: if you have not upgraded your URL, you should do so in 2023. Use HTTPS and maintain a single site version to avoid confusion.
In 2023, stick to the technical SEO strategies that focus on your website user experience. And throughout the process, remember to treat Google Core Web Vitals kindly – always!
