Technical SEO is the foundation of your website that stops all your great looking content from collapsing. While most people looking at SEO for businesses focus on content, keywords and backlinks, technical SEO can have just as big an impact on some websites, without spending loads of time creating new stuff. What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the foundation of your website that stops all your great looking content from collapsing.
While most people looking at SEO for businesses focus on content, keywords and backlinks, technical SEO can have just as big an impact on some websites, without spending loads of time creating new stuff.
If your website’s content is the final production you see on the stage, technical SEO is everything going on in the background that you don’t see but is needed to make everything work.
The old cliche is that technical SEO is like the foundations of a house.
Without all the technical elements (the foundations) making your website crawlable, indexable, fast, user friendly and secure, all the great decorations (content) would fall down.
Technical SEO makes sure:
Although it’s often overlooked, without technical SEO in the background, all the great content and DA90+ backlinks in the world won’t make your website as visible as it could be.
Technical SEO is a specialist skill that business owners, and most marketing managers, don’t get.
Unlike content (which everyone thinks they can do, especially with AI) technical SEO needs particular knowledge of coding, website architecture, data analysis and working out how changes are impacted by search engine algorithms.
Technical SEO also isn’t an “instant” thing.
Again, with content you can publish a blog, a guide, or a social media post, and there it is for you to see straight away.
Changing something for technical SEO purposes usually isn’t obvious, and doesn’t give you instant results.
Having said that, it’s still a hugely important part of SEO, something Google evangelist John Mueller has continually repeated, even in the face of AI overviews and LLMs like ChatGPT.
He’s said:
“I think a lot of the technical SEO stuff definitely continues to make sense. I think a lot of that continues to make sense also with regards to all of the AI things that are happening, all of the different kind of
large language models that are trying to train off of the internet like they need that foundation of technical SEO.”
So, where do you start with technical SEO?
If a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound? Who knows. But if search engines can’t find, crawl and index your site, then definitely no-one is going to find your content.
Google uses the mobile version of your website for indexing and ranking pages (known as “mobile first indexing”)
So, to rank, you should develop a website that’s designed around mobile first.
Core web vitals assess your site’s loading speed, interactivity and stability, which form part of Google’s page experience update. This is a ranking factor that rewards a better page experience, of which speed is a big part.
Users don’t trust unsecure websites (why would they) and neither does Google. Having an SSL certificate and a HTTPS version of your site can directly impact how well your entire site ranks.
Call it structured data, call it schema markup, whatever the term, search engines like Google use it to understand elements of your page (FAQs, services, local business info) and serve them in SERPs as featured snippets or enhanced search results like Google Business Profile listings and map packs.
XML sitemaps help search engines find and prioritise pages by listing all the pages of your website, including page structure and metadata.
You can submit up to date sitemaps in Google Search Console.
As I’ve mentioned, technical SEO needs some knowledge of HTML and coding, along with understanding site structure, so even the best intentioned business owners or marketing managers can create problems when they dive in without fully knowing what they’re doing.
We often see clients come up against challenges before coming to us, especially around areas like:
Compressing image files can be time consuming. And managing third party scripts, or minifying code, requires technical knowledge most people don’t have.
There are schema markup tools that can help with this, but again, if you don’t fully know what type of schema you need to create, or where to put it in a web page, you could cause technical issues that hurt your SERP positions.
Would you know how to build a site hierarchy for search? How to write URL structures that make it easy for search engines to find, crawl and index pages? Or how to internally link pages with the right anchor text to improve crawlability and rankings without appearing spammy?
These are all issues technical SEO experts can help to resolve.
Internal linking is the secret weapon of technical SEO. It helps search engines discover pages and understand the importance of them. Think of internal linking as street signs pointing tourists towards locations. The anchor text, targets and position of internal links is vital for search engines to get around the website.
There are all kinds of reasons your site might experience crawl errors. Broken links. Robots.txt errors. Redirect loops. 5xx errors. Duplicate content. DNS errors. 404 errors.
Would you have the time to investigate all this and resolve it?
A really basic technical SEO audit doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You could potentially do it yourself if you had some technical knowledge and a smaller website. As well as having the right tools.
Here’s what a simple technical SEO audit looks like:
Use a tool like Screaming Frog to identify any technical issues that need resolving. These could be broken links, missing alt text in images, or duplicate content.
Use Google Search Console to check if your pages are being indexed. And the reason they might not be. You can find this information using Indexing > Pages in the left hand panel.
Again, you can check this in Google Search Console by following Indexing > Sitemaps
Google Search Console can be used again here.
Follow Experience > Core Web Vitals
PageSpeed Insights show you how quickly your pages load
If you wanted to dive a little deeper into your technical SEO audit, or you have a large – more complex – website, then these steps could be worth thinking about:
This involves creating static HTML versions of dynamic content first (before a user sees it) to make it easier for search engines to crawl. You can also check that structured data and sitemaps are correct to help search engines quickly understand your pages.
This involves using tools like Screaming Frog to understand how bots interact with your site and what’s being found. Are 404 (not found) errors appearing? Or which pages are being crawled the most?
If you’ve put schema and structured data on pages, your audit should include whether this has been added correctly, or if errors are showing. You can use Google’s schema markup validator to test and identify errors based on a URL or specific schema code:
You’ll need some specific SEO tools to complete a technical SEO audit (some free, some not) but each tools serves a specific function to help you understand how each technical aspect of your website is performing.
This is the best tool for crawling your website (like a search engine) and uncovering any structural issues like broken links, 404 errors or duplicate content, among other things.
The great thing about GSC is it’s free and gives you a tonne of information about your technical SEO.
See what pages are and aren’t being indexed, check your core web vitals and even see if your site has been hit with a manual penalty that could impact your SERP visibility.
There are loads of SEO tools that help with a technical SEO audit but we find AHrefs particularly useful for getting insights into the backlinks you have pointing to your site, and also which are pointing at your competitors.
Get detailed information about how your website performs and how quickly pages load on desktop and mobile.
Make sure your schema and structured data is set up correctly and doesn’t include any errors that could confuse search engines.
As you can tell, there’s a lot of information to pull out of a technical audit, even a basic one. And with all that information, it can be hard to know where to start when it comes to making fixes.
We’d always recommend focusing on the fixes that give you the biggest return for the least amount of effort, and you can do that by prioritising fixes like this:
Anything stopping your pages being crawled or indexed (especially product or service pages) needs to be tackled as the most urgent task.
Look at issues impacting site speed (large content files) or problems using or navigating your website on mobile (non responsive pages built for desktop only).
Make sure you have an SSL certificate for your website and are working from HTTPS.
If you have any errors coming from schema markup on your pages, these need to be fixed. Correct schema and structured data give you a better chance of appearing in rich snippets and advanced search features.
Think your website’s technical SEO could be holding you back? Or you’re not seeing the return you want from organic search? Let us take a look and see where our SEO agency can make the biggest difference to your business.
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