10 Steps to Mastering Technical SEO for Better Website Performance

For event venue owners, family entertainment centers, and indoor play centers, your website is often the first impression your potential customers will see. Optimizing it isn't just about ensuring it looks beautiful—it's about making sure it performs effectively behind the scenes. That's where technical SEO steps in. Technical SEO focuses on improving the infrastructure of your website to help search engines and visitors alike find and interact with your content efficiently.

If you're ready to decrease your bounce rate, improve your website’s ranking, and provide a better user experience, this guide can show you how.

Let's begin!

Sorry, but What is Technical SEO Again?

Technical SEO deals with ensuring your website is optimized for search engine crawling, indexing, and usability. While traditional SEO focuses on content and keywords, technical SEO hones in on the foundation of your site, addressing aspects like site speed, navigation structure, and security. By improving these factors, you'll create a stronger online presence that supports your business goals.

Below, we’ll cover the critical technical SEO strategies every business owner should focus on.

1. Optimize Your Website’s Structure

Your website's structure isn’t just for looks—it directly impacts how easily users and search engines can find desired information. A logically organized site helps decrease bounce rates and improves your search engine rankings. You can do this by:

• Using a clear and logical menu hierarchy to keep information easy to find. For example, organize your website into categories like "Upcoming Events," "Attractions," "Our Packages," "Gallery," and "Contact Us" pages. You'll also want to give each of your facility's main attractions their own pages to be listed in your main menu (or an active submenu listed beneath your "Our Attractions" page).
• Optimize your pages for on-page SEO (like meta tags, headers, and image alt text). This is especially important for ranking pages for your key attractions and services. This can help you gain an edge in your search rankings based on the unique features of your facility.
• Include relevant internal links that guide users to related content. This increases visitors' time within your website, as well as the likelihood they'll perform a desired action (signups, purchases, etc.).

A well-structured website not only enhances user experience but also plays a crucial role in improving search engine visibility, ultimately driving more traffic to your business.

2. Enhance Your Website's Crawlability

Search engine spiders, or "bots," need the ability to crawl your site effectively. If they encounter barriers such as broken links or duplicate content, they’ll struggle to index your site properly. You can optimize your website's crawlability by:

• Using tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or Semrush to audit crawl errors.
• Fix broken links and duplicate content (more on those later).
• Test your site speed and address lagging areas (we’ll cover this too in more detail).

These tools simplify finding issues, helping you focus only on what matters most for your website. Dealing with them will help your website get indexed more quickly, in turn leading to a faster ranking within search algorithms.

3. Boost Indexability

While crawlability ensures bots can access your site, indexability ensures your pages appear in search results. Without optimizing indexability, even a well-designed page may go unnoticed. Here are ways to optimize your site for indexability:

• Maintain high-quality, unique content across all pages.
• Minimize 404 errors by redirecting broken pages where necessary.
• Update your sitemap regularly to reflect your latest content (more on this soon).
• Use “noindex” tags sparingly for pages you don’t want indexed, like thank-you pages.

Always prioritize indexability to ensure your most valuable pages are front-and-center in the search results, where potential customers are likely looking.

4. Accelerate Your Page Speed

Quick page-loading times can be the difference between whether or not a visitor stays on your page upon landing. A fast-loading page enhances user experience, decreases bounce rates, and improves search rankings. Even a delay of one second can cost you a significant amount of traffic. Therefore, follow these tips to increase your page-loading speed:

• Optimize images by compressing large files without sacrificing quality. You can use tools to accomplish this, but usually starting with a high-quality image and adjusting it accordingly would suffice.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce loading time by delivering content from servers closer to users.
• Cache files locally for returning visitors. This can help with slow response times and reduce network traffic.
• Minify CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to reduce file sizes, which improves site speed and overall performance.
• Reduce redirects to cut out unnecessary load times (more on this shortly).

Typically, the average page load time on desktops are around 2.5 seconds, while on mobile they average out to 8.6 seconds. According to webfx.com, sites that have a loading speed of 3 seconds have a bounce rate of 9%, but have a startling increase of 38% bounce rate for sites with a loading speed of 5 seconds. Therefore, try shooting for an ideal loading time of two seconds or less—achieve this, and customers are far less likely to click away!

5. Ensure Mobile Friendliness

It is clear that optimizing websites for mobile is critical for any website's success. With over 63% of Google's traffic coming from mobile devices in the US, every business should ensure that their websites adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes. Luckily, content-management systems such as WordPress and Wix enable you to view your site through a mobile view while editing. From this perspective, you can condense navigation menus, images and text to fit mobile screens perfectly. There are also tools out there such as Google Chrome's Mobile Simulator, which tests how responsive your website is in mobile view.

A mobile-friendly website ensures every visitor enjoys a smooth browsing experience, no matter the device. With so many visits coming from personal devices, always optimize your website with a mobile-first mindset!

6. Implement Structured Data

Structured data is data that has a standardized format for efficient access by software and humans alike. The purpose of this is to enable better communication between your site and search engines by providing additional context about your content. This can result in search engines having an easier time understanding the content of your webpages, and in turn leading to quicker and more informative search rankings.

Use this approach to implement structured data on your website:

• Use Schema.org to select the appropriate schema markup type that best fits your content. Schema markup is code added to a webpage that helps search engines better understand the content on a page by providing additional information about its context and meaning.
• Utilize Google's Structured Data Markup Helper to visually highlight elements on your page and assign them relevant Schema properties. The markup helper will also generate the structured data code in JSON-LD format, which is the preferred method. 
• Add code to HTML by pasting the generated JSON-LD code into the <head> section of your webpage. 
• Next, validate the markup using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to test your implementation and identify any errors in the structured data.

This step helps make your website more informative and appealing—both to users and search engines alike. It is a little bit of a learning curve for sure, but very worthwhile in the end.

7. Create an XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap serves as a roadmap for search engines, directing bots to every important page on your website. This will help search engines prioritize the most relevant pages on your site to be ranked. To create your sitemap you can utilize tools such as Semrush, Screaming Frog, or Google XML Sitemap Generator. Be sure to regularly update your sitemap as you publish new content!

This step ensures that your most critical pages are discoverable without the risk of being overlooked.

8. Avoid Duplicate Content

Duplicate content refers to when the same or similar content appears on multiple pages or websites. This can happen by accidentally copying pages, technical issues with your website's structure, or intentional plagiarism where content is directly copied from another source without proper attribution. Duplicate content can confuse search engines and users, thus diluting your ranking power.

Here's how you can avoid duplicate content:

• Use tools like Semrush or Google Search Console to identify duplicate pages.
• Implement canonical tags to indicate which version of a page to prioritize.
• Consistently link internally to the preferred version of a page.

Efforts to reduce duplicate content will boost your site's credibility and improve your SEO performance drastically! As you add content to your website, whether that be blogs or new pages, be sure to check for duplicated content regularly.

9. Fix Broken Links

Nothing frustrates a website visitor (or search engine) more than encountering a broken link. These dead ends reduce user trust and disrupt crawling. Here's how to address (and prevent) these issues:

• Find broken links using Google Analytics, Search Console, Semrush, or Screaming Frog.
• Redirect these links to relevant, updated pages, or create new pages from scratch.
• Monitor your most frequently linked pages to ensure they remain functional.

A site with effective, functional links is one that users—and search engines—will trust.

10. Prioritize HTTPS for Security

Search engines (and users) value secure websites. The purpose of an HTTPS is to encrypt websites to protect sensitive information when a user's browser communicates with a website. HTTPS not only protects customer data, but serves as a ranking signal to Google. If an HTTPS is not secured, any information you send to it, be it passwords, credit card details, or personal data, can be intercepted and read by hackers. This in turn leaves sensitive information vulnerable to theft or misuse.

When your site isn't HTTPS-secured, often you'll see a red "site not secured" message to the immediate left of your URL. This could frighten away any visitors to your page, raising bounce rates and preventing signups and purchases.

With that in mind, here are some ways to optimize your site for HTTPS:

• Install an SSL certificate to encrypt your site.
• Make sure your new HTTPS URLs are updated in your sitemaps and search console.
• Enable HSTS to redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
• Use Cloudflare's Automatic HTTPS Rewrites.

With an HTTPS-secured website, you’ll create a layer of trust that converts visitors into paying customers.

Conclusion

Trust me, technical SEO may feel overwhelming at first, but focusing on these foundational elements will significantly improve your website’s performance and rankings. By optimizing your site's structure, speed, and security, you'll not only attract more visitors, but also create a seamless user experience that keeps them coming back.

Implementing these strategies, and watch your search engine rankings—and your business—thrive!

Need help implementing your SEO strategy?

You're in luck! Party Center Software now offers SEO services to rank your FEC higher in search results. Follow this link to learn more, or schedule a free demo booking to see if this option is right for you!