EXPERT ARTICLE
Staying ahead of search
with technical SEO
Sarah Suhail
Sr. Director, SEO & Managed Services
Dealer Inspire
The most challenging aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) is also the reason why my team of passionate, competitive SEO experts love what they do: it’s always changing.
In 2023 alone, Google implemented nine major algorithm updates (on top of countless ongoing minor updates). And in March of 2024, the search giant rolled out the big one: a core algorithm update that ruthlessly punished low-quality, spammy content — negatively impacting SEO rankings for businesses across industries, including many dealer websites.
But not our customers. Dealers with our Dealer Inspire websites and SEO Services were impacted positively by Google’s core update (+7.5% organic sessions QoQ on avg.), since they were able to leapfrog over local competitors who were pushed down the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) by the algorithm’s new focus on content quality.
That’s because since the beginning, when Dealer Inspire started out as an SEO agency, our guiding light has always been to deliver future-proof SEO value to our customers. Over the last decade, that meant focusing on creating relevant, helpful, high-quality content for users — not short-term “tricks” to juice search engines — because we knew Google’s guiding light as a business would be to continually evolve their algorithm to reward the best user experience. In fact, that philosophy is what led to us building our own websites: how else could we ensure the best user experience?
Our approach to SEO kept our clients one step ahead of the competition for this year’s core update — but there’s no time to sit back and relax. To stay ahead of the next updates, we tested putting more emphasis on technical SEO before the March 2024 algorithm update even went into effect. Instead of primarily focusing on creating new content, we began dedicating a larger portion of our team’s time on the technical maintenance of each client’s website — ensuring that the various changes made to the site (and Google’s algorithm) throughout the course of each month were working to amplify each client’s SEO authority.
Both strategy mixes delivered strong results through the core algorithm update due to our future-proof approach to content quality — but it became clear that a more concerted monthly focus on technical SEO was significantly amplifying the performance of that content — so we’ve now rolled out that new approach across the majority of our customer base to drive more shoppers to their websites, more efficiently. Woot!
Cool! But what is technical SEO?
Good question.
Where and how you show up in the SERP isn’t just dependent on visible factors like your inventory or the content published on your site. Today, it’s just as much about what you can’t see that determines your website’s overall ranking in the search results.
Just like your car needs regular maintenance to maintain optimal performance, so does your website. Technical SEO involves work that takes place under the hood of your site, fine-tuning its performance and user experience (UX) to ensure everything runs smoothly.
The result of this ongoing work? A website that’s easier for search engines to locate, crawl, and index new and existing content. The easier you make it on the robots to learn about your website, the easier it is for them to promote it in the search results as answers to questions asked by real human beings. And today, this is something that you just can’t overlook.
Dealer Inspire websites were of course built with technical SEO in mind from the very beginning — which has given us an advantage to more easily maintain them. But again, just like the highest quality new car rolling out of the factory — it then needs ongoing expert maintenance for the wear-and-tear (content, scripts, and tools added to the website) and environmental conditions (constantly changing algorithms). We’ve always included technical SEO as a key element of our SEO strategy, but our increased focus and frequency on ongoing technical maintenance is maximizing our websites’ SEO horsepower, if you will.
Why is technical SEO so important today?
Technical optimization has always been part of a holistic SEO strategy, but the focus on content often overshadowed its importance. With the advent of generative AI, however, search dynamics are shifting, making technical optimization more crucial than ever.
As Google, Microsoft, and others integrate generative AI into their search results, they aggregate information from multiple sites to provide comprehensive answers to users’ questions. To be included in these results, your website must contain relevant content and be easily crawlable (found) by AI through optimal structure and maintenance.
As AI-driven search becomes more prevalent, robust technical SEO is essential for maintaining visibility and competitiveness in the evolving search landscape.
So, what does technical SEO look like for your website? Let’s pop the hood and take a look!
Top five focus areas of technical SEO
Keeping your website in good technical health means optimizing core performance, usability, and crawlability to maximize your site’s visibility and effectiveness. Here are the top areas we focus on at Dealer Inspire for our own SEO clients.
1 Site architecture
A well-organized site is easy to navigate for both humans and robots. Pages should have clear intent and connect logically through internal links, with the homepage linking to the most important pages. This not only improves user experience but also helps search engines understand your site structure, further enhancing your ranking potential.
2 Structured data
Structured data helps search engines better understand the content on your site. By using schemas and other markup languages, you can provide additional context to your content, improving the way it is displayed in search results and increasing the chances of earning rich snippets, which can boost your click-through rates.
3 URL structure
Clean, descriptive URLs help search engines understand the content of your pages. Avoid using long strings of numbers or irrelevant characters. Instead, use keywords that accurately reflect the page’s content. This improves both user experience and search engine indexing.
4 Increasing crawl budget
Your crawl budget is the number of pages search engines crawl on your site within a given timeframe. By fixing broken links, reducing excess redirects, and eliminating duplicate content, you can increase your crawl budget. This means more of your site gets indexed, improving your chances of ranking for a wider array of keywords.
5 Core web vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that measure the user experience of your site (desktop and mobile), focusing on loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability. Ensuring your site meets these standards helps improve both user satisfaction and search engine rankings, as these metrics are part of Google’s ranking criteria.
Stay ahead of search with Dealer Inspire
From Panda and Penguin to BERT and E-E-A-T (and every core algorithm update in between), the in-house SEO specialists at Dealer Inspire continuously monitor algorithm changes and adjust strategies to bring more visibility to your dealership in search. Drop us a line and let’s connect!
1DI SEO Customers avg. organic sessions compared to previous quarter, Q2 2024
