Why Topical Authority Matters More Than Keywords in 2025
In 2025, topical authority is more important than keywords for SEO success. Learn how to build authority and improve rankings.
When it comes to improving your website’s search engine rankings, there’s more to SEO than just creating great content and building backlinks. One of the most critical components, often overlooked, is Technical SEO. While content focuses on delivering value to your audience and backlinks help establish authority, technical SEO ensures that search engines can crawl, index, and rank your website efficiently.
At its core, technical SEO is about optimizing your website’s infrastructure to make it easy for search engines to understand and evaluate your site. It covers everything from site speed to mobile-friendliness and structured data, and it plays a pivotal role in improving your site’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
In this article, we’ll dive deep into the key elements of technical SEO, explain why they’re so important, and offer actionable tips you can use to improve your website’s performance.
Site speed is one of the most important factors for both user experience and search engine rankings. Research shows that users expect a page to load in 2 seconds or less, and they are likely to leave a site if it takes longer. Google, too, considers site speed a ranking factor, with faster websites getting a competitive edge in search results.
How to Improve Site Speed:
Optimize Images: Large image files can slow down your site. Compress images to reduce their size without sacrificing quality.
Minimize HTTP Requests: Reduce the number of elements on your page to minimize the number of requests made to the server.
Enable Browser Caching: This stores parts of your site on a user’s device so they don’t have to reload it every time they visit.
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): CDNs store copies of your site on servers around the world, helping your pages load faster for global audiences.
With the increasing number of mobile users worldwide, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is essential. Google’s mobile-first indexing means it primarily uses the mobile version of a site for ranking and indexing. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you could be missing out on a huge amount of organic traffic.
How to Improve Mobile SEO:
Responsive Design: Use a responsive web design that adapts your site’s layout to different screen sizes and devices.
Optimize for Touch: Ensure that buttons and navigation elements are easily tappable on mobile devices.
Test on Mobile: Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check how your site performs on mobile and address any issues that arise.
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate is a security feature that encrypts data transferred between a user’s browser and your website. Google has made it clear that HTTPS is a ranking signal, meaning secure sites have an advantage over those that are not encrypted.
How to Implement SSL:
Obtain an SSL Certificate: Most hosting providers offer SSL certificates, often for free or at a minimal cost.
Redirect HTTP to HTTPS: Once you have an SSL certificate, make sure all traffic to your website is redirected to the secure HTTPS version.
Check for Mixed Content: Ensure that all elements (images, scripts, etc.) on your website are loaded over HTTPS to avoid mixed content warnings.
Structured data (or schema markup) helps search engines understand the context of your content. It’s a type of code added to your website’s pages that provides additional information about your content, like business hours, reviews, product prices, and more. This helps search engines deliver rich snippets in search results, which can increase click-through rates (CTR).
How to Implement Structured Data:
Use Schema.org Markup: Follow the guidelines on Schema.org to structure your data in a way that search engines can easily understand.
Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool: Test your markup to ensure it’s working correctly and is error-free.
Monitor Performance: Use Google Search Console to track how your structured data is being utilized in search results.
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website that you want search engines to crawl and index. It acts as a roadmap, helping search engines understand your site structure and ensuring that important pages are not overlooked.
How to Optimize Your XML Sitemap:
Ensure Your Sitemap is Updated: As you add new content or make changes to your site, ensure your XML sitemap is updated.
Submit to Google Search Console: After generating your sitemap, submit it to Google Search Console to make it easier for Google to discover your pages.
Remove Low-Quality Pages: If there are pages you don’t want indexed (such as duplicate content or irrelevant pages), exclude them from your sitemap.
Once you’ve covered the basics, there are a few advanced techniques that can take your technical SEO to the next level:
Crawl budget refers to the number of pages a search engine’s crawler will visit on your site in a given time frame. By optimizing crawl budget, you can ensure that Googlebot spends its time on your most important pages.
How to Optimize Crawl Budget:
Block Duplicate Content: Use robots.txt to prevent Googlebot from crawling duplicate pages.
Consolidate Low-Value Pages: If you have pages with little value (like thin content or duplicate pages), remove them or redirect them to more important pages.
Fix Crawl Errors: Regularly check Google Search Console for crawl errors and fix them promptly.
Redirects are used to send users and search engines from one URL to another. Properly handling redirects is crucial for maintaining the SEO value of your site, especially when you change URLs or move pages around.
How to Use Redirects Properly:
301 Redirects: This is a permanent redirect, indicating that the page has been moved. It passes most of the SEO value to the new page.
302 Redirects: A temporary redirect, typically used when a page is temporarily unavailable. This does not pass SEO value in the same way 301 redirects do.
Avoid Redirect Chains: Too many redirects can slow down your site and dilute SEO value. Always aim for direct redirects.
Broken links, or 404 errors, occur when a user tries to visit a page that no longer exists. These can harm your user experience and negatively impact SEO.
How to Fix Broken Links:
Use a Link Checker Tool: Tools like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs can help identify broken links on your site.
Redirect or Remove Dead Pages: When you find broken links, either fix the link, redirect the URL, or remove the link entirely.
Monitor Regularly: Perform routine audits to keep your site free of broken links.
While content and backlinks are essential to any SEO strategy, technical SEO is what ensures your website is functioning correctly behind the scenes. From site speed to mobile-friendliness, every technical aspect of your site plays a crucial role in how Google and other search engines evaluate and rank your site.
By addressing the key technical SEO elements discussed in this article, you’ll be able to improve your website’s performance, boost rankings, and provide a better user experience. Remember, technical SEO is an ongoing process. Regular monitoring, updates, and optimizations will help keep your website competitive and prepared for any changes in search engine algorithms.
If you haven’t already, consider conducting a technical SEO audit of your website and addressing any issues you find. The sooner you tackle technical SEO, the sooner you’ll see improvements in your site’s performance and overall search engine rankings.
Ready to take your site to the next level? Our team of SEO experts is here to help you optimize your website’s technical foundation for maximum growth.
In 2025, topical authority is more important than keywords for SEO success. Learn how to build authority and improve rankings.
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