Strengthen your foundations with technical SEO and user experience – with Iva Jovanovic

So, my key takeaway is that technical SEO and user experience aren't now optional and they haven't been for a while. They're the baseline for optimizing websites and without them, your content has no chance of surfacing in AI-driven search results or even traditional search results. If call us, can't access your website or interpret inefficiently your audience won't as well and you won't show up even for that. So, always focus on making sure your website is technically set and optimized for the user as well. [Music] Hi, I'm Yvonne Ivich and this is SEO in 2026. If I watch your number one SEO tip for 2026. My number one tip is technical SEO and user experience will remain the foundation for websites even when optimizing for AI and chatbots. Okay, so even for optimizing for AI chatbots, so why is that? Why do AI chatbots like user experience as well? Well, to start off, a credibility has been the topic of SEO for years and years and years and I think it's now gaining even more importance because of the way the chatbots crawl websites. They crawl a bit differently so we're used to Googlebot, mostly Googlebot, there are other such engines as well. But we're used to Googlebot adapting to what the websites are being served and adapting to pruning them. But chatbots are not exactly the same. For instance, there's been a lot of studies and research done that confirmed that a lot of the chatbots do not crawl JavaScript. So, a lot of the websites that have been using JavaScript that Googlebot has been able to crawl are not now going to be so accessible to chatbots. You know, GPT bot, cloud bot, perplexity even, they don't crawl JavaScript. Aside from that, the bots crawl websites a little more simpler, I believe, and it's really important to structure a website properly for that so that the chatbots can really access your link and to make sure all the links are there, you know, to avoid having 404s and redirect, just having pure structure of the website, pure links and, you know, making sure the link juice is going on. So, it's a bit frustrating, certainly for web developers who have used JavaScript thinking that Google can crawl sites now. It's not a problem at all. Let's use this. We'll be able to do more things with our web pages. But then AI comes along and decides, no, it's not going to support that necessarily. I mean, even before a website that have been that use JavaScript, we're not rendered as much. A long time ago, when using JavaScript, it was considered that you can hide links and, you know, do spammy stuff like that. Later on, we developed like Google bot developed a way to make sure your JavaScript is crawl properly and Martin's split has talked about it so many times. But yeah, it's kind of frustrating that the developers, especially in a lot of SaaS business that I've seen are used to using JavaScript, you know, in the frameworks like React and VOO to create their websites. And now the way that the bots will render it is a bit different. So, it's going to be a bit difficult for developers and SEOs to find common ground in that. Is it worthwhile hanging on for bots to actually understand JavaScript and or complex technologies or do we actually have to make our websites a little bit more simple for these kind of bots to understand what's going on. I don't think you have to make them simple and per se. You just have to structure properly. You know, you can use a recite rendering for to optimize the JavaScript rendering. Maybe it's worth hanging on, but who knows where, you know, how it will develop and when will develop be developed. So it really it depends. But it's all about setting priorities properly. So, you know, if your website is built fully in JavaScript in all the frameworks for like us, us to or anything. Then yeah, maybe you don't want to compromise that. But for other types of businesses or websites that don't choose JavaScript that much. For example, small businesses or, you know, what e-commerce shops as well. Maybe it might be worth like having a chat with the developers how to make it better for bots to crawl it. Now in relation to technical SEO success and user experience, good user experience. You also highlight that page experience and performance is also key for AI search engines. So does this mean that something like a core web vitals is also key for AI search engines? I believe so. I mean, we've talked about over the years about core web vitals. It started off with just page speed experience and lighthouse then moved on to core web vitals and we've gotten a new metric even in the recent years. So core web vitals are always going to be important. And Googlebot is now crawling for both AI overviews, Gemini and regular search results. So Googlebot has always taken account the core web vitals. I am yet to read upon a bit how other bots had they use core web vitals and how to do it. But I do believe they will because having bad loading speed and waiting for the website load even for bots is going to take a while. It's going to use a lot of resources and especially for talking about ethical uses of AI. So I don't know. I do believe that it will be important as well, even for a reviews and chat bots. Is there anything different that bots for AI search engines is looking for in terms of web page performance? I'm on the thing not sure. I don't think so, maybe, but then again, it's still rolling out. We've just recently got GPT-5 when we're recording this. And you know, it's something that to be explored. Maybe it has it has some different things that it does. Maybe it doesn't. Cloud is also evolving and there are a lot of bots rising, you know, all of the chat bots happening every day. You know, somebody always develops a new tool for that. So it remains to be seen in my opinion. I would love to give like certain like this is how it is. It's it. But it's not territory that I've personally had dived into so much. But I am reading upon it from a reading maybe. OK, I mean, I can understand why is AI search engines would treat web pages negatively if they took a long time to load and it took them a long time to retrieve the information that they were looking for. But user experience in terms of what an actual user does on the web page. Why would an bot for an AI search engine have issues with that? Well, that is not necessarily for the bots. I put that in my tip because it is important to taking a take account into accounts for optimizing websites. I believe that certain amount of user experience does go into it from the bot side. But most importantly, now that we are losing clicks at what's at the losing clicks because of the arrow views. User experience needs to happen. It needed to happen for a while now. It's something that should have been a priority forever. But now I think, you know, because we're going to get so much less clicks on the website. So a lot less users are going to be coming to the website. You really need to keep them there. And plus in my opinion, the website loading speed is a part of the user experience. So I'm coming back to the core web battles that will be brought into up to take care of for bots in that way. So I kind of believe user experience in a way will also impact how the chat bots crawl. But it mainly refers to how users will interact with it as well. So it's, you know, it's on both sides. Okay. And in terms of page loading, are there any key elements that you'd like to highlight that typical websites have to improve on? I've worked with a lot of websites in different industries. And from what I've seen, most of them don't have problems rendering the largest piece of content, usually the hero part of a website. Because that's where all the heavy copywriting, heavy video game, heavy image game goes into because it's the first thing you see, first thing the user sees and it's important. Whenever I do an audit website, that is always what shows up for me that is having trouble loading another segment as well as the time to interactivity. So, you know, even if that have optimized the website, they're going to have content loading fast and maybe even taking care of that largest content. But when the time to interactive takes a while as well. So those are kind of out of the metrics. It's two kind of most important ones and the most common ones I've seen people neglect because it's not easy, especially like if we're talking about workers websites that use builders, like element or a Vada, whatever. It's not that easy to optimize that heavy content part. So I get it, but it really should be optimized and you really need to like focus on the time it takes for user to interact with the website. So the website is that want to sell fast when I, you know, have users click on buy buy. They really need to make it to make sure that they can click buy immediately and stuff like that. So those two metrics would be my like my go to as well. And I always look out for them when I'm doing audits for my clients. And we'll put for a search engines care about mobile at first. And so having your website looking good on mobile devices. Now I'm not sure I don't I don't believe that is except for Googlebot because it has the Google smartphone bot. Other ones I don't think they're doing that. But I've always said don't neglect mobile because users are there. So it comes back to the user experience part that kind of influences everything. And even if the bots do not crawl via mobile, you really should keep that mobile friendly. And something else you highlight is structured data and schema. So what structure data and schema tends to be key? So structure data, there hasn't been a proof that does is used for chatbots. But my opinion is it helps. So adding schema and having a data on your website will help. It helped when before with the Googlebot crawling, it's going to help now because it's a part of code that gives an abbreviation of what your website is. I have myself implemented coded schema personally. It's very useful because I've seen how the code looks and it's a digest of what you want to highlight on your website. So instead of like focusing on things like LLams.txt that really have no purpose as of now. Adding schema is such a low hanging thing to do. It doesn't take a lot of energy or time, but it is helpful. And currently there's debate in the S.U. world. I see my LinkedIn popping up and people trying to see if it works people demanding proof if structure data is a part of chatbots. Nobody has anything X, but I honestly believe that that should remain a part of the technical s's strategy because it doesn't hurt beats. It is really nice to have like abbreviation to serve to the bots. And something else that you like to focus on is having clean code for your website. So obviously there are many websites with using a CMS like WordPress. If you use a decent modern trusted theme, is that generally enough to ensure that your code's relatively efficient or should you be tweaking things and trying to improve things apart from that? So it really depends on what you're using. I have always been an advocate of like I prefer WordPress for when I'm doing websites and when I'm building a website as well. And I myself have built websites using the builders. I always advocate for using a custom code WordPress. Because WordPress is really nice to use when you custom code it, when you make it tailored to yourself and not be limited by a builder. With custom themed WordPress, you can manage a clean code at a website. I've seen it, I've helped build it and it's really nice even from like the back end user when adding like blogs or pages side and from a developer side. If we're talking about using builders, it's difficult to do that. It's not impossible. I've seen some examples. It really depends on how you're bigger website is, what your website includes, what you want to have after those colorful elements, flyers and all that. It is more difficult, my opinion to maintain a clean code on a builder website, but it's not impossible. But again, WordPress is wide used. It's open source. You can use the code to build out your own website according to your need and keep the code clean. Years ago I came across my first website that had a lot of, I'm not gonna say bad code, but a lot of necessary code. It was a big chunk of everything, a lot of plugins even being used. Aspliters, plugins, the footer fails, if you turn like one element, like a review plugin, the whole website break, it's difficult to maintain those websites. And it's not nice even like for a Googlebot or where the other bot to see that in your website. And I've worked on our project when we took that kind of website, clean it up. And it really, it was years ago, it really demonstrated the results as in like it was called more, the color, you know, it was being ranked more even like it showed up in such results before that there wasn't many keywords ranking. After that, it wasn't like, it didn't immediately go to the first page, of course, but it started showing something, meaning it was easier for the Googlebot to go through it. So I'm really, really advocating always the custom coded website that has clean code or if you're before using a builder, cleaning up a bit will help you boost both your website performance, your user experience, the way your website is indexed and crawled everything. Interesting, okay, but using a theme builder like turn the thing to the best ones, maybe element or something like that. It's still not going to be as efficient as building your own custom theme. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a element or is really nice in a way because it lets you build out your website by yourself. It gives people who are not tech savvy, who are not developers. It's like wizzy wig wordpress, isn't it? Yeah, it's a drag and drop thing. Like you have the elements and you can like, okay, I want an image here, I want a text here, I want a slider here. You can even add some add-ons to it to make it, if you're missing like an effect or whatever. You can build it out the way you want it visually. And what you see is what you get. So what you see when you build it out is what you get when the users come to it. The problematic part comes to it for a mobile optimization. So that's where you need to be a bit tech savvy and be keeping it clean. It's updated all the time. So every update brings something new or retracts something old. So you really have to be in it to keep it updated, to keep it well performing. And honestly, all of those are much more easier if you call the website. And even like if you have a custom code website, you don't have to be a developer to maintain it. Like you can hire a person to build it out, show you the ropes, how to keep everything. And maintain it yourself. And then if a problem pops up, you can maybe contact the developer. But usually like if it's built up properly, you can go by with the developer for a while. And this is very important because a lot of small businesses don't have the budget to like pay the developer. You can just do a one time payment for them to build out a website. And especially like a local business doesn't have that many pages like an enterprise website would or an e-commerce shop would. So you know, it's a worthy investment for any type of business, any size of a business. And you also advocate using a cleaner and efficient website structure. So we're advising that you're talking about crawlable links on your site and also the URL structure. Yeah, so you know, you need to keep your navigation like menu, footer, very clean, very properly organized, you know, structured in tears. You know, people have been talking about putting the links in tears. So having like the most important links right on and then moving on to like a second, you know, there's a lot of. There's a lot of talk about this for years and years. There's a lot of infographics diagrams showing like you have a homepage, then you have it, you know, dive down into the first year, the second year, the third year. So really keeping it all that clean, keeping it in the proper higher key and proper structure so that a when I use the visits, they can easily navigate. When I Google bought that what I'm having a gate by scrolling can easily find those links and easily figure out what those links are because a lot of times you're going to see the interlinkes being linked on click here learn more see this. That's not good. Like you need to click on what it is like get this service, get to side them. If we're talking about menu, keep it like if you have a lot of pages, you can keep it organized by like having a drop down menu like services and then list out or categories then list out. Stop like that. So like keep it really organized. I'm very organizing my life and I like to keep the websites I work and organize as well and that that kind of like point really speaks to me because you want you want your table organized you want your life organized why not have your website organized. Even what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today. So my key takeaway is a technical SEO and user experience aren't now optional and they haven't been for a while they're the baseline for optimizing websites and without them your content has no chance of surfacing in AI driven search results or even traditional search results. If call us can't access your website or interpret inefficiently your audience want as well and you won't show up even for that so always focus on making sure your website is technically sets and optimized for the user as well. Eva your knowledge is an SEO specialist and conference organizer find out more over at either hyphen your vanovich calm. Eva thanks so much for being part of SEO in 2026. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. I've been your host David Bain get your copy of SEO in 2026 the book over at SEO in 2026.com.