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Technical SEO and page speed optimisation

I love optimizing websites for search engines and always make this part of the package I offer, when it's relevant. There are multiple facets to this story and one is about content itself, which I do not manage but I can teach you how to do that such that search engines like it. My part of the work is the technical optimizations and site speed and I make sure it's 100% top notch.

There are a lot of SEO (search engine optimization) gurus that you can consult to produce extensive reports for you, oftentimes containing a lot of mystical advices that don’t serve a clear function but they claim it pleases the almighty black box of Google a bit better… A lot of that is reminiscent of fortune tellers that read tea leaves. There’s so many stories going around that are based on an older version of Google, when they were easier to trick. And when there were shortcuts to a high search engine position.

That time passed a while ago. Google (I don’t like focusing too much on one single search engine but sadly it still is what it is… we focus on Google. But let’s not forget Bing, and the good guys like DuckDuckGo and Qwant indeed) - but Google favors websites that humans like: user friendly, fast loading, useful/informative/not too noisy, non-deceptive. Visitors via mobile internet connections receive a different ordering made with different criteria (lower bandwidth sites and more mobile friendly). And there’s the thing of localized and personalized results of course.

Search Engine Optimization encompasses a vast universe of measures and behaviors to be taken into consideration. And the competition is ruthless. Do you want to be in the top 3 results of Google? Guess what… there’s 1000s of others in your same league that want the same thing. When you’re running a commercial business and depend on online sales, your revenue follows a function of exponential decay proportionate to your position in search engines: being on the 2nd spot reduces your sales by a factor N compared to the 1st spot. The 3rd spot reduces sales by the same factor N compared to the 2nd spot. And so on…

rule of thumb:
When V = your visit count, Vmax is the nr. of visits you would have if you were at position 1:
V = Vmax × N^(1 − position)
And the value of factor N is between 1.5 and 2 and depends on the industry you’re in

Once you get to the SECOND page of the search results, you’re basically nonexistent and you’ll have to either spend a fortune each month on advertisements or just close your business. The internet is simultaneously a stepping stone for small entrepreneurs to bootstrap their business easily and at the same time ruthlessly competitive and fatal.

I’ve worked for countless online businesses, small to medium size, operating in diverse industries. And have always helped them accomplish a satisfactory search engine presence.

Page speed and Lighthouse

Speed is the part people feel first when arriving at a website. Every 100ms extra on your initial page load will be visible in your bounce rates (% of visitors immediately leaving your page before browsing around) and will affect your search position badly (Google measures if someone came back right after going to a certain search result and learns from this).

Speed is dependent on where the site is hosted, the time needed on the server to prepare the site, the amount of code, the number of round trips in network requests between client’s device and the backend. The heaviness of the code itself in the browser’s runtime. Using heavy frameworks like React will always result in worse performance compared to Svelte or HTMX. Images need to always be served in modern formats (AVIF, WEBP…) and properly sized (this is something the backend must do automatically and not bother the content maintainers with).

Regardless of framework or CMS used, existing sites can usually be made a lot faster without a rebuild, and I start by measuring via Lighthouse / Google pagespeed stats. I can lift even the sluggishest sites up to a score of at least 80+ and this makes a HUGE difference.

Technical SEO

There’s a number of rules your site must abide by. Title tags’ structure, properly formatted HTML, one canonical address per page, redirects for everything that moves URL path to prevent dead links, sitemaps, structured data that validates, hreflang when a site speaks two languages, and nothing indexed that shouldn’t be… Mostly it’s a checklist. And one that needs re-checking periodically, for which I also implement tools that take away the stress of having to remember that by yourself. For my own site for example I built a small tool that reads Search Console and PageSpeed every week and turns what it finds into a todo list, with a message when something changes. It’s the same loop I run for clients: measure, fix, measure again.

Strategy

Which search queries do you want to be found for, and which pages answer them? Usually fewer, better pages than you’d think. A Dutch business wants Dutch pages for Dutch searches and English for the rest. A local business wants local signals, a Google Business Profile and reviews. There’s dirty strategies like generating a page for every city, to target localized search. There’s some successes with those kinds of strategies still but it’s getting more and more penalized as the internet progresses. Backlinks still do matter a lot. Having a few meaningful ones can help you, as long as you’re not link farming on low value sites.

‘Disclaimer’

I cannot promise a certain search position. Rankings depend on your competition and on what you have to say, and the latter is your own responsibility. What I can promise is that the technical side won’t hold you back from any goal you have.

Technologies

Working together

I work from Zaandam, next to Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. Tell me what you want to build, what already exists and where you are getting stuck. How I work.

Email me at m [at] hacktis.ch.