In the realm of search engine optimization, two critical components play a role in driving organic traffic and improving a website’s visibility: technical SEO and content SEO. While both approaches impact a website’s performance and aim to increase its ranking on search engine result pages, they focus on different aspects of optimization.

As you determine where to focus your SEO efforts, it’s important that you fully understand content SEO vs technical SEO and why having high-quality content on your website is essential if you want to reach your target audience and boost your business’s online presence.

Content SEO vs Technical SEO: The Basics  

On one hand, SEO involves everything you see on the page when you open a blog or webpage. There are headers, words on the page, links, author and bio information, calls-to-action, images, videos, navigation bars, and other on-page elements.

However, SEO also involves elements you can’t see. How fast a website loads, what safety measures are implemented, and how easy a website is to crawl for search engine bots all impact SEO rankings.

Always remember that search engines like Google offer a service to their users. To provide web users with the best experience, search engines utilize algorithms that put high-quality, authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant content first. When people enter a search query, they want a seamless experience and to ultimately be directed to a website that meets their needs.

At the end of the day, your goal is to generate high-ranking content that draws in new visitors and helps you meet your business objectives. For this, you need to tackle both technical and content SEO.

Understanding Technical SEO: Tackling Web Performance and Crawlability

To ensure visual and written content performs well, your website needs a strong foundation. Technical SEO concentrates on the performance-based aspects of your website. When working on your website’s technical SEO, your goal should be catering to users and search engine bots.

Primary Technical SEO Elements

Search engines prioritize websites that perform well to ensure they send web users to a quality site. The primary technical SEO elements that focus on user experience include:

• Website speed: Technical SEO ensures your website is optimized for speed, reducing loading times and providing a smooth browsing experience. There are many factors that impact website speed, including image size and format, browser caching, and code minification. It’s also essential to regularly review and update software and plugins that impact speed and overall website performance.
• Mobile friendliness: Approximately 55% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. To follow technical SEO best practices, it’s essential that your site is responsive and adapts well to different screen sizes.
• Navigation: Users need to be able to easily find relevant information. Clear navigation and well-organized pages enhance the user experience by helping them locate content quickly. Call-to-action buttons, search bars, the top nav bar, utility menus, and other on-page navigational menus and elements all contribute to technical SEO.
• Security: Search engines favor websites that keep users’ data secure. One element search engines look for is that a website uses HTTPS. To enable this, the website owner must obtain an SSL certificate and install it on the web server. You should also be proactive in addressing potential security vulnerabilities to avoid de-ranking your content.

Secondary Technical SEO Elements

Additionally, search engines need to be able to understand your content effectively. For this reason, technical SEO also covers elements such as:

• Crawling and indexing: Search engine bots crawl websites to discover and index web pages. As part of your technical SEO strategy, ensure there are no barriers that get in the way. Do this by eliminating crawl errors, improving XML sitemaps, and managing robots.txt files.
• Schema makeup: Schema is a form of structured data that provides search engines with additional information about your website’s content using a standardized vocabulary. Not all websites use schema, but those that do can rank for rich results on the SERP.
• Website structure: Your website’s structure not only provides users with a more seamless experience but also helps search engine bots understand how different pages on your website relate to each other. Bots aim to understand the hierarchy of your website to properly index and categorize them.
• Canonicalization: Canonical tags inform search engines about the preferred version of duplicate content. This ensures search engine bots understand which version to index, preventing potential duplicate content issues.

Understanding Content SEO: Generating Useful and High-Ranking Content

Once you’ve built a strong technical SEO foundation, with a plan for continued maintenance, content SEO can truly take its place as king. When it comes to technical SEO vs content SEO, compelling and genuinely valuable content should be the engine of your SEO efforts.

New marketing trends and platforms come and go, but organic traffic driven by content remains a timeless and affordable method for igniting serious business growth. While it can be tempting to rely on quick-burn methods, such as Google ads, for your marketing efforts, SEO blogs are a long-term investment that reap rewards for years in the future.

Content-centric SEO revolves around watching trends, performing keyword research, and regularly writing and optimizing valuable content that ranks high on search engines and attracts web visitors. The most critical elements of an SEO content plan include:

• SEO strategy: Content marketing takes time, and you need to ensure your SEO efforts are helping you reach your business goals. The first step is always to identify your target audience, the type of content you need to produce, and a general plan of attack.
• Expert keyword research: Keyword research involves identifying the keywords and search terms that web users are typing to find content related to your website. You need to understand search volume, competition, and user intent to target the right keywords in your content.
• Content creation: Blogs, web pages, and landing pages are the most common types of content used to bring in SEO web traffic. It’s essential to write content that places users first, meaning that it is genuinely informative and written well. Your content should not just target a primary keyword but be unique, provide value, and encourage users to spend more time on your site.
• On-page optimization: There are various on-page elements that provide users and search engines with further information about your content. Don’t forget to optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headings, and image alt attributes.
• User experience: How you present content is often just as vital as the meaning of the words on the page. You must provide users with a seamless experience to keep them on the page. You can achieve this by adding visuals, optimizing page layout, and improving readability.
• Linking strategy: There are three types of links SEO content involves: inbound links, outbound links, and backlinks. Inbound links point to other pages on your site. Outbound links direct users to external sites. Backlinks are links in other articles or web pages that link back to content on your site.

Leave Content SEO vs Technical SEO to the Experts at BKA Content  

There are many steps to creating and executing a solid SEO strategy, which includes understanding content SEO vs technical SEO. At any stage, BKA Content can create stellar content for your company that will bring in a constant stream of qualified leads to your new site. We help clients create high-quality blogs and continue to track and optimize them over time to support your marketing goals. Get started now to watch your SEO results grow.