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We continue the series of publications dedicated to our “Research on Medical Topics” in St. Petersburg. In previous articles, we reviewed the objectives of the study and criteria for selecting multidisciplinary medical clinics.
In previous materials, we discussed what website content should be to effectively rank and attract traffic. Content is the outer shell of the site - high-quality, expert and accessible to visitors. Technical optimization, in turn, is its core.
Despite the high costs of content, lack of proper technical optimization can make accessing this content significantly more difficult.
Key aspects of technical optimization are:
· correct indexing;
· page loading speed;
· response time;
· server responses.
A lot of errors and redirects may indicate low quality of the site.
The graph shows the distribution of 301 redirects on various sites and their deviations from the average for all sites and sites with low results.
The graph shows that the number of redirects for sites with high and low ratings differs slightly.
404 Not Found is the server response if no page was found at the requested URL. We checked the internal link structure of all sites for such errors.
Highly ranked sites strive to minimize the number of 404 errors. Only three of them have a slightly above average number of errors, but no more than 20.
The average number of 404 errors across all sites is 125, and on sites with low results it is more than 160.
A small number of 404 errors is not critical, since sites are not static: pages appear and disappear. However, lack of regular monitoring can lead to the following consequences:
In such cases, it is recommended to set up a 301 redirect from the deleted page to the new one.
If you don't already regularly monitor your site for broken links, it's worth adding this to your work plan.
Another important criterion is page loading speed. If site pages load slowly, users may not wait to fully load and leave. Moreover, sites with slow loading speeds may have lower rankings in search results.
The download speed is determined by two indicators:
1. Server response speed - how long it takes the server to generate a response to a user request.
2. Loading speed of all page data - fonts, images, scripts and other elements.
Google evaluates website speed using a number of factors, including Core Web Vitals. One such factor is TTFB (Time To First Byte), which measures the time between a site's request and the start of receiving the first byte of the response from the server. This metric is not primary, but is important for the overall perception of speed.
Also important metrics are First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which measure the time it takes to render page content.
Optimizing these indicators requires working to reduce server response time and reduce the number of scripts, images and fonts.
In statistics, we combine two indicators - server response speed and page content loading speed.
The average page load time in our sample was about 1.18 seconds. High-scoring sites load faster at around 0.71 seconds, while low-scoring sites load at around 1.32 seconds, which is slightly above average.
Sites with poor technical optimization often have duplicate pages, which affects the quality of the site. There are two approaches to eliminating duplicate content:
The presence of duplicates blurs the relevance of pages and reduces their value. We found that no duplicates were found on most of the TOP10 sites. The only exception is a site where several duplicates were found.
On average, about 74 duplicates were found across all sample sites, and 97 at low-scoring sites.
One of the most common problems is unoptimized images. This may be due to inappropriate image sizes or excessive quality, which causes pages to become heavier and slower to load.
The most effective image formats are JPG, PNG, WEBP and AVIF. These formats provide optimal compression without loss of quality. Despite WEBP's popularity, its usage on medical clinic websites is only about 5%.
Websites that use modern image formats have an advantage in loading speed on mobile devices. However, the use of these formats has not yet become widespread.
The average occupancy rate of ALT meta tags on websites is 55.5%. Among the sites with high results, clinics stand out that have worked these tags on almost all images.
The Technical Optimization score added some confusion to the overall rankings, but in general it can be said that sites with strong content often struggle with loading speed issues, while sites with minimal content development can score highly on technical aspects.
When carrying out technical optimization, it is important to pay attention to the following factors:
Thus, for successful technical promotion, it is important to maintain page loading speed, minimize duplicates, work with errors and regularly check the site for broken links.
If you have any questions about technical optimization, you can contact the SEO studio "SEO COMPUTER" for any question by email info@seo.computer.
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