In a recent episode of Google’s Search Off The Record podcast, the Search Relations team highlighted the importance of mastering basic technical SEO before pursuing advanced strategies. Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and John Mueller emphasised the need to address fundamental issues like site crawlability, indexing, and page rendering for improved search results performance.
Technical SEO: Laying the groundwork
Technical SEO, unlike content creation or promotion, focuses on optimising a website’s architecture and infrastructure to aid search engine crawling and indexing. Illyes, through his social media posts, underscores the frequent oversight of these critical basics by even large site owners. He stresses the importance of ensuring a website is user-friendly and accessible before getting captivated by the latest SEO trends. Splitt agrees, suggesting starting with the homepage, as search engines often see it as the most crucial page.
Quality over quantity in content
The podcast also delved into misconceptions surrounding traffic and content quality. Mueller warns against equating high traffic with high-quality content, advising a focus on user engagement and satisfaction instead. He illustrated this with an example of a site ranking well for generic keywords but failing to provide value, leading to irrelevant traffic loss.
Focusing on valuable content
Creating high-quality content, according to Illyes, is simpler than it seems. The key lies in developing content that helps users achieve their goals, whether answering questions, solving problems, or providing engaging stories. This approach, he suggests, is more beneficial than just producing a large volume of content.
Key takeaways
The discussion underscores two main points: the necessity of mastering technical SEO basics and the importance of content quality and user engagement over mere traffic numbers. By focusing on these areas, websites can significantly enhance their SEO performance.
