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SEO 17 min read May 12, 2023

Technical SEO 2023: Optimizing for Voice Search, AI, and Beyond

Technical SEO 2023: Optimizing for Voice Search, AI, and Beyond
Kateryna Hordiienko
Kateryna Hordiienko
Research Editor at Serpstat

The technical optimization of online platforms is significant because it improves the tech points of your web resource to increase its visibility in search systems. Technical SEO aims to create a site to easier comprehend for crawling and analysis in search engines. Use special technical SEO trends to attract the audience's attention to your platform and improve its range in search mechanisms. 

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Why should you optimize your site technically?

In the 1990s, the first search engines appeared, such as Yahoo and AltaVista. And then, the owners of web platforms began to use various tricks to improve the ranking of their websites in search engines and take a leading position. Stuffing pages with keywords or buying links artificially boosted rankings, but it was considered a “black hat” SEO practice.

With the advent of Google, the game's rules have changed significantly. And this was facilitated by algorithms that provided users with more useful and relevant results. Google developed rapidly and began punishing sites that used the "black" SEO. 

Smartphones appeared in the late 2000s, and site owners had to adapt to new user behavior. People began to use their gadgets more often to surf the Internet, leading to the development of local SEO and the emergence of virtual assistants with voice search. Companies have continued to optimize website architecture with geo-location, small screen optimization, faster page loading, and easier navigation. 

In the early 2020s, the SEO evolution was filled with new trends and technologies. Keywords are still important, but they are not the only focus of SEO. Search engines process and rank web page structured data using machine learning and artificial intelligence. There are new algorithms that understand the essence of search queries and give users more personalized results.The new era of SEO is user experience, qualitative content, and relevancy. All this is aimed at providing a more valuable result. 

Lyndon NA
Internet business consultant (SEM
(SEO/PPC)
CM & SMM, with UX, CRO & ORM)

SEO tools may audit you, but if you have to "do the work", you should practice doing it.

What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?

Damian Schmidt
Author, Growth Hacking Advisor

An ideal technically optimized website should be accessible, responsive design, mobile-first indexing, secure, fast loading times, and SEO-friendly. 

Let's look at all these points in more detail to understand how technical SEO impacts website speed, adaptation, content, accessibility, etc.

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Site audit

Beyond detection, Serpstat provides actionable insights on resolving duplicated content issues.

Additionally, Serpstat's audit feature comprehensively evaluates your website's performance. It identifies technical SEO issues such as broken links, crawling errors, and XML sitemap problems. By flagging these concerns, Serpstat helps you identify specific areas for improvement. For instance, if your website has broken internal links that hinder user navigation, Serpstat's audit will highlight these issues, enabling you to take corrective actions.

Keyur Shah
SEO Analyst & Content Creator

A technically optimized web platform should be indexable and error-free.

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Voice Search and AI

Many people want to save time, so they prefer multitasking. It is easier for them to call an intelligent voice assistant and get the necessary information while doing other important things. It's easier and faster than entering a query into the search bar. But SEO voice search optimization is quite difficult because the spoken language has more nuances and features. 

Voice recognition became popular only when artificial intelligence and various intelligent assistants (Alexa, Siri, etc.) appeared. Voice search identifies and distinguishes users' voices by assessing their accent, voice frequency, and other parameters. Voice recognition works with automatic speech recognition (ASR) programs.

Why do users like voice search, is it being actively implemented in virtual platforms and affects SEO?

The point of voice search is to give you the most accurate answer. But how to get it? There is a certain indicator for this—a scheme. This is structured data schema markup, and its purpose is to make your site's text intelligible for search mechanisms. These schemes strongly influence voice search, used in Cortana, Alexa, and Siri.

To ensure your website is voice-search-friendly, consider the following tips.

1.Understand Natural Language: Voice searches are often longer and more conversational than text-based queries. Optimize your content to align with how people speak naturally. Focus on long-tail keywords and include question-based phrases that users will likely voice search.
2.Mobile Optimization: Given that voice searches are predominantly conducted on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial. Optimize your site for quick loading, smooth navigation, and responsive design to provide an optimal user experience.
3.Structured Data Markup: Implement structured data markup using schema.org to help search engines better understand your website's content. This markup provides additional context to your content and improves the chances of it being featured in voice search results.
4.Featured Snippets: Voice assistants often pull information from featured snippets or "position zero" in search engine results. Create concise, well-structured content that answers common questions related to your industry. This increases the likelihood of your content being selected as a featured snippet and reads aloud by voice assistants.
5.Local SEO Optimization: Voice searches frequently include location-based queries like "near me." Optimize your website for local SEO by including relevant keywords, updating your Google Business Profile listing, and ensuring accurate contact information and business hours are readily available.

Modern chatbots have evolved to include voice recognition capabilities to provide more seamless and intuitive user experiences. By leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms, chatbots can analyze and interpret the spoken language to understand user intent and respond accordingly.

To recognize voice requests effectively, chatbots utilize a combination of techniques: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Contextual Understanding, Machine Learning, and Training.

This advancement in voice recognition has opened up new possibilities for chatbot applications, ranging from customer support to voice-based shopping experiences.

SEO best practices for website speed optimization and performance

Every year, new algorithms and innovations affect the SEO performance of your pages. The web admins follow the novelties closely, but sometimes they can be disappointed. For example, they discovered that Core Web Vitals couldn’t show them all interaction factors with platform visitors.

Is Core Web Vitals useful for agencies, start-ups, or enterprise resources where hundreds of sites need to be managed? Maybe yes. Because Core Web Vitals seems like a hoop for them: jump in there, and the website will quickly become influential and in demand in the search systems. All its points and factors show the level of page range in search mechanisms. But it is just a report. To get the perfect data, you need to make an effort.

Learning SEO best practices allows achieving your primary goal — to increase the number of customers. American studies have shown that growing the number of customers by 5% will allow you to increase your profit by 25-95%. Monitor the market situation in your direction of the virtual platform to plan a new set of actions to increase conversion.

What are some ways to identify Technical SEO issues on a website?

Technical issues are quite different from the usual components of optimization that you know: analytics, keyword research, etc. Finding simple technical issues can directly affect your platform's position in search engines.

Montse Cano
International SEO + Digital Strategy Expert

Apart from using tools, check the code, click around the site, and look at it to see if there are any CLS/accessibility issues. See on the search mechanisms if the home page (and what other pages) comes up, check HTTPs redirects, etc.

Here are some ways to identify technical SEO issues:

How to prioritize Technical SEO in 2023?

The resource is the greatest importance of technical SEO because, without funds, many websites cannot afford to make changes. Even if updates are implemented, it happens very slowly. If your company lacks resources, then it is important to prioritize tasks.

Our expert defines a technical SEO checklist to follow:

Himanshu Suri
Marketer, Founder of
@readersfusion

  • Migrate to HTTPS.
  • Find any crawl errors.
  • Optimize XML sitemap (page experience).
  • Fix broken links.
  • Remove any duplicate or weak content.
  • Look if your URLs have a clean structure.

Tools and technologies don't always require huge expenses (Google Search Console is a great example).

It is worth remembering the time that works for you. Some companies delayed the implementation of the site's SEO best practices, which lasted about 12 or even 24 months. Comprehend that technical SEO is marketing that must be implemented and work for your profit. Monitor your virtual platform according to the technical SEO checklist regularly to keep it effective and profitable. Otherwise, your site may fail in search system rankings.

Conclusion

To ensure user satisfaction, handling the technical side of things properly is essential. This involves testing and fine-tuning various aspects of your website, such as responsiveness, loading speed, map, indexing, site security, content, and structure optimization. Fortunately, there are services available that can greatly simplify the technical aspects of SEO, allowing you to handle them on your own.

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