On Your Mark, Get Set.......RANK!

Welcome to Week #1 Of The Fast & The Optimized

Before any race car hits the track, the pit crew runs through their essential checks. Your technical SEO team should be doing the same, but this time you'll have a better understanding of what they're actually doing when they say "we're working on your technical SEO."

🔧 Week - The Starting Grid 🔍 Site Indexing Status - Check if your pages are showing up in Google.​ Use tools like Google Search Console to verify how many of your pages are indexed and spot any that are missing or excluded. 🕷️ Crawl Efficiency - See how easily search engines can access your site.​ Analyze crawl reports to find blocked pages, redirect loops, or slow-loading resources that may waste crawl budget. My favorite tool for this is Screaming Frog. 📱 Mobile Usability - Make sure your site works perfectly on mobile.​ Test for font sizing, tap targets, responsive layout, and mobile compatibility by simply clicking around using your mobile phone. Bonus if you have access to a droid and iphone - as these two browsing experiences can be quite different! ⚡ Core Web Vitals - Measure your site’s performance and user experience.​ Focus on Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) to improve load speed and stability. By simply using Page Speed Test, you will see these metrics in the report. 🔐 Security Protocols - Verify your site is secure for users and search engines.​ Ensure your site uses HTTPS, and has a valid SSL certificate. These settings will be found in your website hosting. Be sure to choose a website hosting company that has SSL certificate options and allows your site to be configured using https. I send all of my clients to WPEngine. Not only are these options built in standard, their helpful team will talk you through any of these questions, if they arise.

Rookie Mistakes In The Wild

Meet PCI Race Radios, an e-commerce store that sells Radio Communications Systems for Off Road Enthusiasts. Before working with us their technical SEO wasn't addressed. Their sales were stuck in neutral until we popped the hood and showed their marketing team that:

• 40% of their products weren't even being indexed in Google shopping
• Homepage took 8.3 seconds to load (that's an eternity!)
• Shop pages had no content for search engines to index

After Fixing These Technical Issues:

Your First Week Checklist

Before diving into the deep end next week, run these basic diagnostics:

1. Google Search Console Setup
   • ✓ Is your site verified?
   • ✓ Any manual actions present?
   • ✓ Check the Coverage report for major issues
2. Quick Performance Check
   • ✓ Run a speed test (PageSpeed Insights)
   • ✓ Mobile-friendly test
   • ✓ Check SSL certificate status
3. Basic Crawling
   • ✓ Can Google access your robots.txt?
   • ✓ Is your sitemap submitted?
   • ✓ Any obvious 404 errors?

What's In The Toolkit:

Technical SEO tools your team should be using - all free versions will work just fine!

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Here's the reality check - content might be king, but technical SEO is the engine that powers your performance. Without it, you're just a beautiful car that can't make it off the starting line.

Homework

Before next week's deep dive into site architecture:

1. Run a basic site audit using Google Search Console
2. List all technical issues you find
3. Categorize them by priority
4. Document your current page speed scores

Keep your engines running!

Next week: We're diving deep into site architecture and crawlability. Get ready to build your SEO engine from the ground up! 🏎️

Amber Your Trusted SEO Sidekick