Search engine optimization has come a long way since its early days. The practice has become much more complex, and there are now different types of SEO strategies that businesses can pursue.
In this blog post, we’re going to take a look at the difference between technical SEO and traditional SEO. From there, your business can decide which type of campaign is right for you. Let’s get started!
What is Traditional SEO?
When people think of SEO, they most likely think of a traditional SEO campaign. It focuses on tasks such as content creation and optimization, keywords, and link building. Traditional SEO focuses on increasing organic search results and traffic back to a website through quality SEO efforts. Here are a few examples of efforts that are important to conduct in a traditional SEO campaign:
Creating Quality Content
Your business website should always prioritize having information on their website that is consistent, relevant, and valuable. Without having one of these three factors, your content can suffer in having quality content. If your business has inconsistent information throughout the website, it could lead to users and search engines not trusting your website. If your business doesn’t have up-to-date information, it could lead to users visiting leaving your website for other competitors.
It’s important to create valuable content that makes sense for your business and creates an effective purpose for them. Whether it’s through longer-form content pieces (such as ultimate guides), or shorter-form pieces such as blog posts, find the right medium for building effective content.
Conducting Keyword Research
Your business can write and build quality content to add throughout your website. However, adding keywords into your content helps make the content more effective and optimized. It helps search engines understand and read your content as well as help users find your business website better.
In order to find the right keywords to add to your website and content, your business needs to conduct keyword research. When you conduct keyword research, your business should look at each keyword’s:
- User intent
- Traffic volume
- Keyword difficulty
- Addition of local factors
- How competing websites are using the keyword
If you were to add a keyword that didn’t have the right intent, your website or piece of content might not make sense or rank well over time.
Link Building Strategy
As well as adding keywords within your content, adding links and building an effective link building strategy is very beneficial to a traditional SEO campaign. Whether they be internal or external links, adding links within your content can be beneficial for a reasons:
- Having high quality external links helps build your website’s authority.
- Including internal links throughout your website helps improve user experience.
- Having internal links in all of your pieces of content helps keep users on your website for longer.
While it’s important to add links, be sure to review what links aren’t necessary on your website that might need to be fixed or removed. Having unnecessary and spammy links can decrease the value of your website.
Visual Elements
While content is a huge factor to the success of an optimized website, it’s important to add visual aspects as well. Visual elements such as images and video can help create a better design factor as well of a uniqueness to it.
When you add images and video elements, it’s also important to optimize them with keywords and update their meta descriptions and alt descriptions. This then helps search engines better identify and understand these different elements. Overall, having them can bring in more traffic and help improve user experience.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on the code and the metadata in order to optimize a website’s visibility and performance. Technical SEO includes optimizing backend areas of your site including website design, coding, etc. Performing technical SEO tasks further helps search engines crawl and index your website more efficiently. Here are a few examples of some of the technical SEO tasks that can be done:
Metadata
Having metadata information is very important from a backend technical SEO perspective. Be sure to build out your metadata information such as having meta titles, title tags, and meta descriptions on your pages. Adding these elements helps your pages be indexed and eventually rank on SERPs (search engine result pages). Meta titles are the first thing users will see on SERPs while the meta description helps give them a preview on what the page is about.
Having Organized Site Structure
Having an organized and well-designed site structure is extremely important in the success of a technical SEO campaign. Implementing this helps search engines, such as Google, crawl and index your site pages properly. It also affects backend factors such as URL structures, categories, and breadcrumb navigation on your site.
Finding Duplicate Content
While we’ve mentioned in a traditional SEO campaign, creating content is extremely important for a business website. However, sometimes there can be too much content which results in duplicate content.
From a technical SEO point of view, it’s important to go through all duplicate content and consolidate or redirect it to be more uniformed and direct. Having multiple pieces of content can be confusing for users and search engines in knowing which one is the most relevant. You can run audit tools to find traces of duplicate content to fix and redirect.
Having Fast Site Speed
Having fast site speed is extremely important for any website. Did you know that 1 in 4 individuals would abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load? With this in mind, it’s important to optimize your website to be as fast as it can be.
There are many ways to go about improving your website’s site speed. You can start by visiting Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see what factors may be affecting your site from being fast. This can help your business start to fix common technical SEO issues your business website might have.
Mobile Capabilities
More individuals and users tend to search for information on their mobile devices. With this in mind, it’s important for your business website to be optimized and capable on mobile devices. Whether you’re focusing on navigational factors, user experience, design elements, or how your content is presented, it’s very important to have a mobile friendly website.
What’s the Difference Between Technical SEO and Traditional SEO?
One of the key differences between technical and traditional SEO is the focus of each type of campaign. Traditional SEO campaigns tend to focus on content, keywords, and link building, while technical SEO campaigns focus on the code and metadata.
Another key difference is that technical SEO often requires more time and effort to execute than traditional SEO. This is because there are more details to take into account when optimizing a website’s code and metadata.
Another major difference between the two types of campaigns is the skill set required to execute each type of campaign. Traditional SEO campaigns can be executed by most marketing professionals with a basic understanding of keyword research and content creation.
Technical SEO campaigns, on the other hand, require a more technical skill set in order to be executed properly. This includes things like understanding how to read and edit code, as well as using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
Building Your SEO Campaign with Boostability
So, which type of campaign is right for your business? It’s important to note that both types of campaigns can be effective, so it really just comes down to what your specific goals are. Whichever route you decide to go down, make sure that you have a clear plan in place before you start executing any type of optimization strategy.
If you’re looking for some help setting up your SEO digital marketing plan, learn more about Boostability’s white label SEO partner program! Partner with our team to expand your product offering and marketing strategies to help save valuable time and money today.
