You know, SEO is a complex channel.
There are many tentacles of it, all of which fall under the 3 pillars – on-page, off-page and technical.
As the channel is so vast, if you’re unable to have all pillars of SEO covered, which one should you stick with?
Which pillar is an absolute must for your website?
If you only have the budget for one of the pillars, which would it be?
Technical.
Go with technical.
Let me give you 3 reasons why I say this…
Firstly, technical optimisation is the core of SEO.
Your ability to have your pages found is the first thing that matters in SEO – to SEOs.
This is why the starting point of SEO tends to be an audit, an analysis, a crawl of your site.
This is the starting point because it gives SEOs an insight into how search engines are crawling your site.
Crawlability is the singular most important thing in SEO.
Simply put, if your site is not being crawled, nothing else you do – SEO-wise (and beyond, actually) – will matter.
You could have the best, most appropriate pages, targeting keywords with pristine content.
If the pages are not being crawled, they’re not going to matter.
Why?
Because they won’t be discoverable.
Discoverability is why search engines crawl sites.
If they’re not able to crawl yours, they’re not able to discover your pages.
As a result, they’re not able to index and rank your pages.
When they’re not able to do this, well, you’re not able to receive traffic from search.
So, for this reason alone, you’ll want to ensure you have technical SEO in place, even if it’s the only pillar you can invest in at the start of your organic search journey.
The second reason why you’d want to invest in technical SEO if it’s the only pillar you have the budget for is that technical will keep your site in good health.
The reality of SEO is that, in the beginning, the channel is led by issues.
In order to identify site issues, they have to have happened first, right?
If you have an internal 404, the link have to be broken before it’s picked up as an issue.
So, issues happen first, and then the solution comes afterwards.
The trick is to ensure you’re able to spot and address the issues quickly.
This is what technical SEO can do for you when you invest in it early.
In the vast majority of cases, SEO isn’t invested in, until a singular issue compound to the point where it affects the site’s traffic.
It’s then that SEO is brought in to fix the issue – thinking the issue is the traffic loss, or ranking drop.
It’s actually an issue that was a thing long before it affected organic visibility.
It’s an issue that needn’t affect your rankings at all.
It’s an issue that can be combated by having a good site health in place, and maintained, at all times.
How do you achieve this?
You ensure that technical SEO is an always-on pillar.
Tech SEO is led by issues – in the beginning. This should be the case for a very short period of time.
What you would want to do is ensure you have a streamlined process in place to ensure SEOs are proactive and can anticipate upcoming issues.
This isn’t always the case with brands.
Why?
Because the conventional thinking of SEO is to turn the channel on to fix issues, and then to turn it off.
This is a major flaw in the way a business thinks about SEO.
The issue to them is only identified when rankings are affected.
Rankings is not the starting point of organic traffic. You have steps before rankings. But this is as early as many businesses can spot a problem with their tech SEO.
Having tech SEO in place, allows you to have an improved foresight to your site’s ranking ability.
Now, the third reason why I say you should go with technical SEO if it is the only pillar you have the budget for is this…
Technical requires an SEO. It’s a must!
The other two pillars – on-page and off-page – can be operated by non-SEOs.
You see, this is why a site is able to get by without SEO in the very beginning.
Both of these pillars require content.
As long as you have Creative, you’re able to make and publish content.
And as long as it’s open to being crawled, your content will gain search visibility.
Now, it may not necessarily perform the best in the SERPs, but you can reasonably expect your site to have visibility even if you’re yet to invest in SEO.
This is, afterall, what typically happens with a site.
A site is launched, it gains visibility and then afterwards, SEO’s brought in to generate more traffic, right?
With the two pillars, you can get by without an SEO.
But with technical, you absolutely need an SEO. It’s where the specialty of the channel lies, and it absolutely requires the specialty.
So, if you look at SEO as a whole and are quite overwhelmed of the journey and how much there is to SEO, break down the pillars.
On-page and off-page, specifically, can be on the side for – the time being.
Technical is the pillar you’ll want to activate.
Technical is the pillar you’ll want to have ‘always-on’.
Technical is the one pillar of SEO you’ll want to invest in.