You’ve heard of SEO. You know it has to do with how you rank in search engines, but you’re looking for more information to get a better understanding of it all.
First, you should know that there are subcategories of SEO. They include technical, content, on-page, off-page, and local. While all of these are important, we want to focus on two essential subcategories: content SEO and technical.
They are the two largest subcategories, and they matter more when it comes to the confirmed factors Google looks at on how they rank websites. While there are a few similarities, we’re going to break down the differences between content SEO and technical SEO.
Content SEO vs Technical SEO
While these subcategories both contribute to your overall SEO strategies, they are drastically different at the core. We break down the key differences below:
Definition
Content SEO is any kind of content you create and publish on your website, typically including product descriptions, blogs, articles, videos, and infographics.
Technical SEO is making improvements to mostly the back end of a website, like improving site speed, making your website mobile friendly, creating a user friendly site structure, etc.
Optimizing Your Website
In order to properly optimize your site for content SEO, you’ll need to focus on keyword strategy, site structure, and copywriting. Without using keywords that have high search volume (and ideally low competition), no one will be able to find your website. One of the best ways to target these keywords is by writing informative, easy-to-read content.
The main categories of technical SEO include site speed, crawling difficulty, and understandability of your site to search engines. You’ll want to run speed tests on your website frequently to ensure it opens as quickly as possible. One of the most important factors is if search engine bots can crawl your website, because if they can’t, all the other work is in vain. After you ensure search engine bots can crawl your site, you want to make it easy for them to crawl.
Best Practices
When it comes to doing the work to improve content SEO and technical SEO, you’ll execute them differently.
How to Execute Content SEO
Keywords. Since keywords are the backbone of content SEO, you’ll need to conduct keyword research. You can find keywords through a free keyword tool, like keyworktool.io, and once you’ve decided which ones you should target, you’ll start implementing them across your website. The essential areas where you need keywords include:
- URLs
- Image alt text
- Blog posts
- Product descriptions
- Page titles
- Meta descriptions
- Headlines (H1, H2, etc.)
- Any web copy
- Anchor text
Written content. Once you have your target keywords, you can start writing articles and blog posts. Search engines reward websites that consistently produce quality content, so you will want to post on a regular basis. While you do want to incorporate a couple of keywords per blog, you want to write with “people first, search engines second” in mind since search engines prioritize user experience over everything else.
How to Execute Technical SEO
While almost anyone can add content to their website, not everyone may be able to execute technical SEO best practices. You may need help from a web developer.
Site Speed. The most common way to optimize technical SEO is to improve site speed. If your website is slow, people will click off of it before it loads. Core Web Vitals is a free tool with Google Search Console that measures how quickly your website loads. Once you run the report, it will come back with suggestions of how to improve site speed. Some examples may be compressing images, caching data, and limiting redirect links.
Structured Data. While people can infer the context of what’s on your webpage, search engines can’t. That’s why implementing structured data like schema markup helps search engines understand the context of words and media on web pages.
Sitemaps. If you have a large website with many URLs, you should use an XML sitemap. It helps the crawlers find relevant URLS to crawl and rank
Indexing. As we’ve discussed, search engines use bots to crawl websites and determine where pages rank against competitors. It’s important to know you can actually control which pages are crawled through robot.txt code. This enables you to tell crawlers to not index certain pages and not follow certain links by adding specific code snippets.
Useful Tools
Everyone who implements SEO runs audits on their website through tools. When your website is ran through the tool, it provides a list of where improvements can be made. Although we’ve shared the differences of content SEO vs technical SEO, the tools to improve your site can be used for both. Here are our top recommendations:
Assistance with Content SEO vs Technical SEO
As you’ve learned, the world of SEO is extensive. With the right knowledge, tools, and skills, you can start improving your website to reach the rankings you want.
Some people may want to take on their website’s optimization themselves, but others feel overwhelmed at the prospect of adding even more work to their plate. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all yourself!
After learning about content SEO vs technical SEO, you’ve decided you’d like to get help tackling one or both types of SEO for your website. Contact our SEO experts today to discuss how we can start optimizing your website!
