Technical SEO Agency Manchester

Technical SEO lays the foundation for better search engine visibility and rankings. If your website isn’t technically sound, it will negatively impact its usability and speed, making it less crawlable and less user-friendly, meaning search engines are less likely to rank your site highly. Technical SEO is a key contributing factor for SEO that helps with ranking, ultimately driving traffic and revenue.

We’re forensic with our audits, crawling every nook and cranny of your website. If there’s a technical error, we’ll find it. Common things we look at, though, include:

• Sitemaps
• Crawling and indexing
• Mobile optimisation
• Structured data
• Google Core Web Vitals
• Site speed and loading time
• Site structure
• Broken pages and links
• SSL certificates
• Image optimisation
• Internal and external links
• Canonical URLs

In short, no. Meta keyword tags were once used by search engines to understand the content of a webpage and determine how relevant it is to those search queries. Now, however, search engines are sophisticated enough to understand the content of a webpage using natural language processing and machine learning. As such, meta keywords tags are no longer used as ranking factors and most search engines ignore them entirely. In fact, because it is easy to stuff the keywords tag with irrelevant keywords, it can even harm your SEO and get you penalised by search engines.You know where we’re going with this… don’t use them.

Our Technical SEO team prefer Shopify (you can ask them for the dets why when you reach out) but, objectively speaking, there are advantages and disadvantages to all 3:

• Shopify: Shopify is a popular and user-friendly platform that is easy to set up and manage. It offers a wide range of features and apps to help you build and customise your online store. However, it is less customisable and more expensive than other platforms in the long run
• Magento: Magento is a powerful open-source platform that is ideal for large and complex ecommerce websites. It offers a high degree of flexibility and scalability, but it can be more challenging to set up and manage than Shopify
• WordPress: WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) that can be used to build an ecommerce website. It offers a wide range of plugins and themes to help you customise your online store. However, it may not be as user-friendly or feature-rich as Shopify or Magento

If your team doesn’t have a strong technical knowledge or limited resource and time, then Shopify or WordPress is probably best for you. If you have a team of developers and are looking to build a complex ecommerce website, Magento is the one.

Yes, you can hide certain pages on your website from search engines by using the robots.txt file or by adding a “noindex” meta tag to the specific pages you want to hide. This can be useful for pages that are not meant for public viewing or that may contain sensitive information. By hiding these pages from search engines, you can control which pages are indexed and displayed in search engine results.

Yes, having readable file names is important for SEO. Search engines like Google use file names to understand what the content of a webpage is about. By having descriptive and relevant file names, you can increase the chances of your content being discovered by users who are searching for relevant information. Additionally, using keywords in your file names can also help improve your SEO ranking. So, while having readable file names may seem like a small detail, it can have a big impact on your overall Technical SEO strategy.

If your site has been hit with a Google penalty, your Technical SEO agency should take immediate action to identify the cause of the penalty and rectify the issue. First, you should review Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to see if you have violated any of their rules. Common reasons for penalties include thin or duplicate content, keyword stuffing, low-quality backlinks and user-generated spam. Once you have identified the issue, make the necessary changes to your site and then submit a reconsideration request to Google. It may take some time for your site to recover from a penalty, but by following the guidelines and making necessary improvements, you can regain your site’s rankings.

To get your website indexed by Google, you need to create a sitemap.xml file for your site and submit it to Google through their Search Console. This will help Google’s crawlers understand the structure of your website and index it more efficiently. Additionally, creating high-quality, relevant content on your website and obtaining backlinks from reputable sites can also help improve your website’s chances of being indexed by Google. Regularly updating your content and ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly and optimised for speed can also increase the likelihood of your site being indexed by Google.

Yes, Technical SEO can still be effective on JavaScript-heavy websites, but it may require some additional considerations and strategies. While JavaScript can sometimes pose challenges for search engines to crawl and index website content, there are ways for your Technical SEO agency to optimise your website’s Technical structure to ensure that search engines can effectively understand and rank the site’s content. This may involve implementing server-side rendering, using XML sitemaps, optimising website speed and ensuring that important content is accessible to search engines. By addressing these Technical aspects, JavaScript-heavy websites can still benefit from Technical SEO practices and improve their search engine rankings.

Generally speaking, JavaScript negatively impacts SEO. You need to consider:

• Crawlability: Search engines rely on web crawlers to index and understand the content of a website. JavaScript can make it more difficult for crawlers to access and understand the content, which can negatively impact SEO
• Renderability: Search engines are becoming better at rendering JavaScript, but there can still be issues with how JavaScript is executed and how it affects the content that is visible to the user. This can cause discrepancies between the content that is visible to the user and the content that is indexed by the search engine, which can negatively impact SEO
• Site structure: JavaScript can be used to create dynamic and complex website structures, which can make it more difficult for search engines to understand the structure of the website and how the content is organised
• Speed: JavaScript can slow down the loading time of a website, which can negatively impact SEO. Search engines take page loading time into account when ranking websites

That said,JavaScript can be used to create dynamic and engaging content that can help to improve user engagement and increase the likelihood of a website ranking well.

Measuring the impact of Technical SEO involves looking at various key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, page load speed, crawlability, indexability and user experience metrics. Analysing these KPIs can help determine the effectiveness of your Technical SEO efforts in improving search engine rankings and overall website performance. Additionally, tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can provide valuable data on organic search traffic, keyword rankings and website errors, which can further help in measuring the impact of Technical SEO.

Technical SEO involves optimising the Technical aspects of your website to improve its visibility in search engines. This includes factors such as website speed, mobile-friendliness, indexability, crawlability and site architecture. By ensuring that your website is technically sound, search engines can better crawl and index your site, leading to improved rankings and visibility in search results. Technical SEO is essential foundation work for ensuring that your website is accessible and user-friendly, which ultimately helps drive organic traffic and improve your overall SEO performance.

We know you want the definitive answer to this question, but any half-decent Technical SEO agency should be honest here and not promise any specific time-frames for SEO results. We’ve seen positive results from our Technical SEO agency almost immediately in some cases, in others it’s taken a few months for the full impact to really have an effect. Results from Technical SEO can vary depending on the specific changes that have been made to the website. Some changes, such as fixing broken links or improving site speed, can show results relatively quickly within a few weeks. However, more complex changes, such as restructuring site architecture or optimising meta tags, may take longer to see noticeable improvements. It is important to regularly monitor and evaluate the impact of your Technical SEO efforts to ensure that they are achieving the desired results.

You tell us. A Technical SEO agency should be working alongside your business to support and improve your organic traffic and conversions, if they’re doing a good job. They should be bringing you more organic customers and lining your pockets with shiny gold coins. Whether you think a Technical SEO agency is worth it depends on if you want to improve your bottomline. (Any answer other than ‘yes’ is a big ole pork pie).

Yes, Technical SEO is extremely important for ecommerce websites. This aspect of SEO focuses on optimising the Technical components of a website to improve its search engine ranking and overall user experience. With ecommerce websites, Technical SEO plays a crucial role in ensuring that your category and product pages are properly indexed, site speed is optimised for fast loading times, mobile-friendliness is prioritised and site architecture is structured in a way that is easy for search engine crawlers to navigate and good for user experience.Implementing proper Technical SEO best practices enables ecommerce websites to attract more organic traffic, improve conversion rates and ultimately, increase sales and revenue.

Rich snippets are a type of search result listing that includes additional information beyond the standard title, URL and meta description. These additional details can include star ratings, reviews, pricing information and more, providing users with a more comprehensive preview of the content on a webpage. Rich snippets can help improve click-through rates and drive more targeted traffic to a website by providing users with a better understanding of what they can expect to find on a particular page. Implementing structured data markup on a website can help search engines better understand the content and display rich snippets in the search results.

Some of the most common Technical SEO issues we see are issues with website speed, mobile friendliness, indexing and crawling, broken links, duplicate content and missing meta tags. These issues can negatively impact a website’s search engine rankings and overall visibility. It is important for your Technical SEO agency to regularly monitor and address these Technical issues to ensure your website is optimised for search engines.

HTML5 brings several key benefits over its predecessor, HTML. One of the main advantages is its enhanced multimedia support, allowing for easier integration of videos, audio and animations without the need for third-party plugins. HTML5 also offers improved semantics, making it easier for search engines to understand and index website content. Additionally, HTML5 provides better compatibility with mobile devices, offering a responsive design that adapts to different screen sizes.

Technical SEO best practices involve optimising your website for search engine crawlers to easily navigate and index your content. This includes improving site speed, optimising URL structure, using proper header tags, creating a sitemap and ensuring mobile-friendliness. Additionally, implementing schema markup and fixing any crawl errors can also help improve your website’s visibility in search engine results. By following these Technical SEO best practices, you can ensure that your website is easily found and indexed by search engines, ultimately leading to increased organic traffic.

Make you more money. And make your competition cry.

A “clean” URL is a URL that is easy to read and understand. It typically includes keywords related to the content of the page and is free of any unnecessary parameters or special characters. Clean URLs are important for both search engine optimisation and user experience, as they help search engines better understand the content of the page and make it easier for users to remember and share the URL. Having clean URLs can also improve the overall structure of a website and make it more user-friendly.

A pain in our backside. A Google Algorithm update is essentially a change or update that Google makes to its search algorithm, which determines how websites are ranked in search engine results. These updates can have a significant impact on website rankings, as Google is constantly refining its algorithm to provide users with the most relevant and high-quality search results (allegedly). Any half-decent Technical SEO agency should be staying informed about these updates to ensure their clients’ websites remain optimised and maintain a strong presence in search engine results.

Something you hope never to have. A Google penalty is a punitive action taken by Google against a website that violates their search engine’s webmaster guidelines. These penalties can result in a decrease in the website’s search engine rankings, a loss of organic traffic and even removal from the search engine’s index altogether. Google penalties can be issued for various reasons, such as engaging in black-hat SEO tactics, having low-quality or spammy content, or participating in link schemes. Your Technical SEO agency should always adhere to Google’s guidelines to avoid being penalised and to maintain a strong online presence.

If there’s one team at Dark Horse that loves a tool, it’s our Technical team. They use all the obvious (we’re talking ScreamingFrog, Google Analytics, Search Console, SEMrush), as well as some tech-specific ones like Waterfaller, PageSpeed Insights, webpagetest, fetch and render, Builtwith and more. 

We’ve done our fair share of website migrations – and fixed even more websites’ SEO after a migration has gone wrong. We see the same errors time and time again, including: 

• Broken links and lost traffic: If you change the URL structure of your site, make sure that redirects are set up so users and search engines are directed to the correct new page
• Lost data: Website migrations can sometimes result in data loss, including customer information, product listings, or blog posts. Our best advice: backup all data before the migration and thoroughly test the new website to ensure that all data has been transferred correctly
• Lost backlinks: Backlinks are an important part of SEO and a website’s link profile. If handled incorrectly, a migration can cause backlinks – and the associated link juice – to be lost. Make sure you track backlinks and set up redirects to preserve them
• Lost rankings: A website’s search engine rankings can drop or be lost after a migration. It’s important to optimise the site for search engines, set up redirects correctly and fix all technical errors to preserve the website’s existing search engine ranking
• Slow load time: If the new ite isn’t optimised for performance, it may load slowly, which will negatively impact user experience and SEO

Lack of testing: Testing is everything. If we were handling your migration, we’d  thoroughly test the new website before, during and after the migration to ensure that it works correctly.

Our full SEO services might include Technical SEO, Content and Digital PR, but if you just need our technical expertise, then we’re happy to just help with that. We can support site migrations, technical audits and technical fixes, coordinating with your internal team. Chat to our team to see how we can help.

Okay, we’ll keep this simple. An XML sitemap is a file that lists all of the URLs on a website, when they were last updated and how frequently they change. It helps search engines discover and crawl all of the pages on a website, including those that are not easily discoverable by following links.

XML sitemaps are important for SEO as they provide search engines with a clear and comprehensive understanding of the structure and content of a website. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index the pages of a website, which can help to improve the website’s visibility in search results.

404 isn’t just a bus route. In the digital world, 404 errors are HTTP status codes that indicate that a webpage cannot be found, either because a page has been removed or moved, a URL has been typed incorrectly, or a link on another website is broken.

Your site should be 404-free to:

• Provide a good user experience: When a user encounters a 404 error, they won’t be able to access the content they were looking for. Frustrating, don’t you think? Yeah, we’d leave the site too
• Help the site rank higher: If a search engine comes across a lot of 404 errors on your site, it assumes it’s poorly maintained and won’t meet the user’s expectation, lowering its ranking
• Pass on link equity: When a link points to a 404 error, it doesn’t pass any link equity to the destination website. Your site basically isn’t getting any SEO benefit from that link
• Track traffic accurately: 404 errors can skew website analytics data. If a large number of 404 errors are generated, it can make it difficult to accurately measure website traffic and user engagement

To avoid 404 errors, regularly check for broken links on your website and fix any that are found. It’s also good practice to create a custom 404 page that provides users with alternative options for finding the content they were looking for, such as a search bar or a sitemap.

A 301 redirect is a type of HTTP status code that indicates that a webpage has permanently moved to a new URL. When a user or a search engine crawler requests the original URL, the web server will automatically redirect them to the new URL. They are really useful for:

• Preserving link equity: When a webpage is moved to a new URL, any backlinks pointing to the original URL will no longer work. A 301 redirect ensures that any link equity from those backlinks is passed on to the new URL
• Maintaining website traffic: If a webpage is moved to a new URL without a redirect, any users or search engines that request the original URL will receive a 404 error. A 301 redirect ensures that users and search engines are automatically directed to the new URL, so they can still access the content they were looking for
• Improving user experience: A 301 redirect ensures that users will be able to find the content they were looking for, even if the URL has changed
• Fixing broken links: A 301 redirect can be used to fix broken links on a website. If a link on a website is broken and points to a non-existent page, a 301 redirect can be used to redirect users and search engines to the correct page
• Updating URLs: A 301 redirect can be used to update URLs, for example, if a website is migrated to a new domain, all the URLs can be redirected to the new domain
• Maintaining rankings: A 301 redirect ensures that the new URL will be indexed by search engines. This is important to maintain the website’s visibility in search results, and to avoid losing any link equity that the original URL had

Note, though, that 301 redirects are permanent, meaning that the redirect will remain in place indefinitely, and isn’t intended to be changed.

Obviously, you want your site to be indexed by Google so it can start ranking. If that’s not the case, your site is likely experiencing one or more of these issues (our Technical SEO team can help you get to the bottom of it):

• Blocked by robots.txt: The robots.txt file is a file that tells search engine crawlers which pages or sections of your website should not be crawled. If your robots.txt file is blocking Google’s crawler, then your site won’t be indexed
• Not submitted to Google: If you haven’t submitted your website to Google, it won’t be indexed. You can submit your website to Google by adding it to the Google Search Console
• Low-quality content: If your website has low-quality or duplicate content, Google won’t index it. Why? Because Google’s algorithms are designed to prioritise high-quality content, making websites with low-quality content less valuable
• Technical issues: Broken links, 404 errors, and poor website structure prevent Google from crawling and indexing a site
• Limited backlinks: Websites with few backlinks may not be indexed, as they’re seen as less authoritative
• New website: It can take time for Google to index a new website, even if it has been submitted to Google Search Console
• Penalties: If your website has been penalised by Google for breaking the search engine’s guidelines, it may not be indexed
• No-index meta tag: A no-index meta tag is a line of code that tells search engines not to index a webpage. If a website has this tag on its pages, it will not be indexed by Google

Check all of the above. Still not sure where the problem is. We can help.

Internal linking is the process of linking one page of a website to another page within the same website. We can’t stress this enough: internal. linking. is. crucial. for. SEO.

• Navigation: Internal links help users and search engines navigate through a website, by linking to other relevant pages within the website
• Indexation: Internal links help search engines discover, crawl and index new pages, making it more likely to appear in search results
• Relevance: Internal links help search engines understand the relevance and importance of different pages on a website.
• Anchor text: The anchor text in an internal link provides context about the linked-to page, helping search engines understand the content of the page and how it should be indexed
• Spread link equity: Linking to important pages within a website passes on link equity to those pages, helping them to rank better in search results
• User experience: Internal links improve user experience by making it easier for users to navigate through a website, and find the information they are looking for