This is our third article in our New Era in Search series.
- Read Part 1: “Why SEO is Not Dead, Just Evolving About Google’s New AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the New Era in Search”
- Read Part 2: “Why it’s still essential to be seen as a ‘Subject Matter Expert’ for SEO“
Technical SEO and its role in search
Technical SEO – optimising your site for speed, accessibility, and efficient crawling – is more critical than ever to ensure search engines prioritise a website in search results. Here’s why you should consider prioritising Technical SEO for your website:
Site Speed
Faster sites not only improve user experience but also increase the likelihood of being indexed by Google and other search engines. As we covered in our first article, with Google now dedicating a significant portion of its resources to powering AI functions, the “crawl budget” it assigns to websites has become more limited. This means every technical element that causes friction—slow-loading scripts, complex page structures, unnecessary redirects, or large, unoptimised images—is a strike against you. Your website must be lean, fast, and built for purpose to ensure your most valuable content is not just discoverable, but also easily and economically digestible for AI systems. Given the high demand on Google’s resources, slow-loading sites may be ignored in favour of faster loading ones.
Efficient Structure and Navigation
Clear, well-organised site architecture helps search engines navigate your content quickly and accurately. Structured data, for example, makes it easier for search engines to understand the relevance of each page. If your content is the textbook, structured data (like Schema.org markup) is the syllabus. It provides a clear, machine-readable outline of your content’s key concepts, entities, and relationships. For AI Overviews, structured data is not just a hint; it’s a direct, unambiguous instruction.
By implementing robust structured data, you are explicitly defining:
- Medical information: Clearly marking up medical conditions, treatments, procedures, and practitioners. For a healthcare business, this is paramount for accuracy and trust
- Organisational details: Defining your clinic’s location, opening hours, contact information, and accepted insurance
- Content types: Differentiating between a blog post, a research paper, a news article, or a physician’s profile
In the age of AI, websites without comprehensive structured data are asking machine web crawlers to guess. Websites with precise markup are providing verifiable facts, dramatically increasing their chances of being featured accurately and authoritatively in AI-generated results. This moves structured data from a “nice-to-have” for rich snippets to an essential component.
High-Quality, Relevant Content
Websites with basic or generic content are likely to be de-prioritised in favour of those that provide unique, experience-based insights. When combined with technical SEO, the quality of your content strengthens a site’s standing in search. We cover more about this in our article Why it’s still essential to be seen as a ‘Subject Matter Expert’ for SEO.
SEO Strategy at Splice Marketing
Need a technical SEO expert to help navigate the changing landscape of SEO and improve your organic search traffic? At Splice, we’re here to do the heavy lifting, to keep your healthcare business visible and trusted. We specialise in:
- SEO audits: Initial comprehensive website audits to identify strengths, weaknesses, and optimisation opportunities
- Technical optimisation: Fine-tuning aspects like load speed, implementing structured data, ensuring mobile compatibility, and maintaining secure protocols
- Local SEO: Helping you appear in local searches, which is vital for service-based businesses
- Content planning and optimisation: We plan, create, refine, and adapt your content to stay relevant in an ever-evolving search landscape
- Reporting and reevaluation: We regularly report on how our SEO activity impacts a website and its search rankings, conduct reevaluation audits, and realign our strategy when required
Book a free consultation to see how we can help you grow in the new era of search.
