Do technical factors matter?

It's one of the longest-running debates in the industry. In my opinion, because everyone is right.

Signals and ranking factors are the reason why everyone is right.

There's a big difference between a brand new site and an established one. There are different stages that sites can be at.

If you have a site that is new, it's going to have fewer signals.

Less authority, trust, etc.

So lots of people have seen that new sites can rank, but lots of us have also seen that they do this easier with a better technical setup.

That's because tech factors are some of the quickest factors to establish. It also means, with fewer signals from elsewhere a newer site sort of relies on these factors alongside basic content ones to rank.

Larger more established websites can get away with a lot more because they have more signals and backlinks, etc. It's one big reason that building on an expired or auction domain can significantly reduce the time it takes to scale websites.

Smaller sites can't get away with as much because they're so often relying on those factors even when they don't know it.

In one of my niches, the speed and performance averages for the best-performing websites are terrible.

So it made things easy for me, even with ads integrated, it was easy to beat those scores.

So I've been competing on technical factors and on-page optimization when there is an absence of other signals. No links, new domain, etc.

So I am and always have been a big believer that technical factors do matter, but they are even more important for new websites. To get them from A-Z.

I've seen it help big sites too.

This was an emphatic win in the space of around 10 days for an already big website when I performed a technical audit and the recommendations were implemented.

Technical factors are fast to work, but it does work even faster on big sites because they get crawled more often. That being the case doesn't mean that technical fixes on big sites always bring those results because sometimes it's not what's holding them back. Sometimes those fixes seem to bring no immediate result at all on an established website.

.. And also it depends on the technical issues that a site has.

So that's why there's a lot of debate.

So should you take technical factors seriously?

UH-HUH.

It doesn't matter what stage your site is at. It's not worth leaving it to chance when so many of these problems are easy to fix.

• Crawl depth
• Hosting performance
• CLS
• Redirects
• Code errors
• Unoptimized robots.txt

Well, these are some of the big ones that most sites have issues with. In most cases, those problems can be fixed in an hour or so.

These factors are always important, but smaller sites do rely on them being done better to rank sooner, which can affect the long-term success of the website too.

Undoubtedly, there are more important factors which is why bigger sites often get away with not having some of the technical factors optimized. So no argument from me there.

Just know that taking it seriously from the beginning means you'll probably never need to have a more comprehensive technical audit from someone like me. If you've never taken it seriously? You're scaling with technical debt and that's why the problems listed above are the ones I find so often. It's because tools don't find most of those. If you take it seriously in the beginning? It's never an issue down the road.

So no matter what way you look at it, or no matter where you're at with traffic and revenue?

Technical factors do matter to different degrees.