Technical SEO
The practice of optimising a website's infrastructure so search engines can crawl, render, and index it effectively. Covers site speed, crawlability, structured data, and security. Everything else is built on this.
Why It Matters
Technical SEO is the foundation that everything else relies on. You can have the best content in the world and the strongest backlink profile, but if Google can't properly crawl and index your site, none of it matters. Technical SEO ensures the pipes work.
It covers a wide range: site architecture, URL structure, page speed, mobile optimisation, schema markup, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, canonical tags, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, and more. Most technical SEO issues are invisible to users but directly impact how search engines process your site.
In Practice
Start with a technical audit. Use Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs Site Audit to crawl your site and identify issues. Prioritise by impact: crawl errors, broken redirects, missing canonical tags, slow pages, and mobile issues.
Set up monitoring. Technical SEO isn't a one-time fix - new issues emerge with every site update, CMS upgrade, or developer deployment. Schedule regular crawls and set up alerts for critical changes.
Work with developers, not against them. Technical SEO requires changes to code, server configuration, and infrastructure. Build a relationship with your dev team and speak their language. An SEO recommendation that developers understand and can implement is worth more than a perfect recommendation that gets ignored.
Related Terms
Glossary
Crawling
How search engine bots discover and download your pages - the first step to ranking.
Glossary
Indexing
Adding a crawled page to Google's database so it can appear in search results.
Glossary
Core Web Vitals
Google's page experience metrics - loading speed, visual stability, and interactivity.
Glossary
Schema Markup
Structured data that helps search engines understand your content and enables rich results.
Glossary
Page Speed
How fast your pages load - a confirmed ranking factor that affects conversions too.
Glossary
JavaScript SEO
Optimising JS-heavy sites so search engines can actually see and index the content.
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