SEO isn’t just about creating content and acquiring backlinks. Technical issues can also build up over time, impacting how well a website is crawled, indexed, fast, usable, and searchable. Having a specific time and resources allocated for technical SEO maintenance ensures that your website remains healthy and aids in maintaining long-term organic growth.

Introduction

There’s a tendency for SEO strategies to be heavily keyword-driven, content calendar-driven, link-building, and ranking-driven. These activities are crucial, but can be undermined by issues with the site itself.

Websites are continually evolving. Websites evolve, new pages are published, old URLs are removed, plugins and platforms are updated, redirects are placed, and the website structure changes. Every change can lead to technical problems which may not be noticeable to users but can impact the way search engines access and understand a website.

Why maintaining technical SEO is a continuous task in the SEO roadmap, and not a one-off project.

What is technical SEO debt?

Technical SEO debt happens when there are unaddressed technicalities on your website that build up. Like technical debt in software, it’s not always obvious that the small problems are big problems, which is why it’s important to keep an eye on them.

Examples include: broken links, outdated redirects, duplicate pages, incorrect canonical tags, crawl issues, slow-loading resources, and poorly structured internal links.

As long as these issues are left unsolved, website maintenance becomes more complex.

New SEO Work is no substitute for technical maintenance.

New content does not necessarily resolve current technical issues. Even if a business writes dozens of articles that are optimized for search engines, the pages that are significant to the business can be hard to get to if the website isn’t well organized.

Likewise, a good backlink profile won’t help with poor pages or indexing issues.

So, a well-balanced SEO roadmap should contain both growth activities and website maintenance. This enables teams to have a clearer view of how they’re growing and helps maintain the technical underpinnings for this growth.

Technical issues can build up rapidly.

• A lot of times, website changes occur sooner than SEO teams can expect. The templates can be updated by the developer, the marketing team can create landing pages, and the content team can edit the URL.
• These changes can lead to stale redirects, orphaned pages, duplicate content, inconsistent meta tags, or unnecessary URL variations over time.
• These issues can be uncovered through regular technical audits, before they become bigger issues. It is easier to correct the smaller issue(s) than trying to clean up years of technical issues at once.
• The principle of budgeting allows maintenance to be consistent. The key to budgeting is maintenance consistency.
• If technical SEO doesn’t have resources dedicated to it, then your immediate marketing projects are likely to be prioritized. Technical fixes will keep appearing in the back of the queue as they’re less noticeable than publishing a new article or running a campaign.
• If a designated budget or a dedicated amount of time is allocated for technical maintenance, it will help to establish accountability. You can have regular audits, mark the issues as priorities, and solve the problems before they impact bigger SEO projects.
• The exact amount of money will vary based on the website size, platform, complexity, and the requirements of the business.

Identify issues by impact and prioritize them.

Not all technical problems are urgent. When it comes to SEO problems, it’s possible to classify them based on their potential impact.

It may be worth prioritizing issues that impact pages that are important, crawling, indexing, website accessibility, security, or user experience. Any smaller problems can be sorted out during regular maintenance.

This is because teams can’t spend too much time on a minor issue at the expense of a more significant technical challenge that may still be outstanding.

As mentioned above, build technical SEO into the roadmap.

Technical SEO should not be considered an emergency job that only comes up when rankings fall. Can be included in the monthly or quarterly SEO planning.

Common examples of elements that could be covered in a roadmap are crawl reviews, broken link checks, indexation monitoring, redirect audits, Core Web Vitals reviews, sitemap checks, and internal link analysis.

These are activities that, as they become regular, help businesses keep their website in good health while still making a good investment in content and organic growth.

Conclusion

Creating fresh content and keywords is not enough to be a part of a successful SEO campaign. Websites need regular technical care to ensure that search engines crawl, comprehend, and add crucial pages quickly.

By considering technical SEO debt as a proactive task, businesses can proactively solve problems, focus on meaningful changes, and preserve the core of their organic search strategy. Rather than having technical issues become an expensive roadblock, companies can plan for maintenance from the start of their SEO journey.

FAQs

1. What is Technical SEO Debt?

Technical SEO debt is the sum of unaddressed technical problems that can proliferate over the years and hurt a website’s crawling, indexing, performance, and user experience.

2. Why do you need a budget for technical SEO?

Consistent funding or resources provide a dedicated resource to address technical challenges if they are not met first, being delayed by content and marketing priorities.

3. How many times a year should a site be technically SEO’d?

The frequency of monitoring will vary based on the size of the website and how frequently it is updated; however, regular monitoring once a month and more in-depth monitoring every few months can help identify issues early.

4. What are the technical SEO problems that need to be taken care of?

Generally, any problem that impacts crawling, indexing, key URLs, website performance, accessibility, security, or user experience should be carefully addressed.

5. Is Technical SEO good for organic search efforts?

Technical SEO can provide better access and understanding for search engines, which can lay a solid foundation for content and other SEO efforts.