Understanding Technical SEO: The Foundation of Organic Search
It’s all too common for people to think that SEO is only about keywords, content, and backlinks. Most conversations about ‘search’ are a confused soup of conflicting advice and misunderstood concepts from basic blog posts. A few years ago, I realised that almost everyone gets this wrong. I’ve had countless conversations with experienced marketers who talk about SEO but seem to miss the mark on technical SEO.
The reality is that technical SEO is the foundation of your entire website’s search ability. And by the looks of things, most marketers and small business owners either don’t know that or can’t tell if something is broken. But search engines are greedy - they want sites to be easy to crawl, index, render, and rank. Because if it isn’t, it won’t show up in search engine results pages (SERPs).
They won’t find you or your brand even if they want to. There’s a layer of confusion about what technical SEO really means for different websites. It covers everything from sitemaps and how they’re structured to site speed and mobile-friendliness.
This means technical SEO can look drastically different for two websites in the same industry but at different levels of growth or sophistication. What might be a simple fix for one site could be more complex for a much larger one. With the constant changes happening in tech and search, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by technical SEO topics. That’s why most people ignore their site’s technical health until an emergency occurs.
Then we have to step in and fix it on top of sorting out their strategy. But we keep doing it because it can arguably be incredibly rewarding as well as vital to success on search engines.
Essential Tools for Technical SEO Audits
Some people think you can just get away with a quick Google search or by looking at your competitors’ websites. I Imagine others go for the heavy hitters, using tools like ahrefs or semrush, but if you don’t know how to wield those beasts, you may as well be swinging a club in a crystal shop. SEO audits are not just about scanning through your website or running it through a single tool.
There’s a lot more to it than that. It’s about the combination of tools and how you use them. It’s also the interpretation of what you find.
That’s why it’s so important to have an understanding of how each tool works and what it is capable of. I don’t think there’s one tool that can more or less do everything or provide all the information you need. At least not yet.
Maybe in another year or two, we’ll have AI-dominated SEO where you can ask your AI to run an audit on your website, and it will give you all the information you need and automate everything for you as well. So, what do you really need. Something that will help you get a high-level overview of your website. Something that will give you more details about page-level issues.
Something that will help you keep track of the technical SEO errors over time. That’s pretty much it. Having a tool that integrates with your Google Search Console (GSC) data or your Google Analytics (GA4) data is also helpful because it helps you cross-reference issues and see if those errors are impacting your rankings or traffic. At the end of the day, technical SEO audits are not about blindly running scans and checking off fixes like a robot.
It’s about looking at what’s really happening behind the scenes and identifying opportunities for improvement. The best part is that once you figure out which tools work best for your workflows, everything becomes much easier to spot and fix.
Common Technical SEO Issues and How to Fix Them
Many people think technical SEO is all about keywords, page titles, and making sure a site has sitemaps. They get stuck in the basics and miss the more nuanced elements that could see their site leap up search rankings. On top of that, when things don’t seem to be working out, they often don’t know what to look for or even how to fix it.
For example, broken links seem like a tiny problem - but over time those links compound and can cause issues with bots crawling your site or, worse, with users bouncing because they’re not finding what they want. Broken links can hardly ever also impact your site’s authority (in terms of backlinks) as well as usability (for internal links).
Some fixes. Sort of. Well, if you have a small site you can do it manually, but there are also tools like Semrush that let you run regular checks and spot any broken or dead links so you can address them before they snowball into a bigger issue.
Then there’s the issue of duplicate content - which is fairly common among e-commerce sites especially. It’s mostly because their products might look similar on paper but have minor differences in size or colour or price point and the content on these pages tend to overlap. You can avoid this by writing unique product descriptions (which is a good move anyway), using noindex tags, canonical tags, and if you want to be super thorough 301 redirects. And then there’s thin content - where there simply isn’t enough useful information about your product or service on your page for search engines to find it valuable for readers.
You can use audit tools here too (like Screaming Frog) to spot the thin pages and add rich content that will fill them out. Finally there’s one last thing - slow loading speeds. More or less.
It seems like this isn’t just bad from an seo perspective but is bad for users too. A single delay in loading times can see your audience dropping off because most users expect seamless performance from websites today - especially because they’re likely visiting from their phones or devices now too. In fact, Google itself recommends load times under 2 seconds so it’s worth cleaning up any excess elements that might be slowing down load times (high res images are usually one culprit).
Optimizing Site Speed for Better Search Rankings
You know what grinds my gears. When people talk about site speed as if it's this one-and-done checkbox you tick, and then poof, your website is a lean, mean, Google-loving machine. I get it; images take up space and scripts get hefty.
Makes Me Think Of but the 'slap on a plugin' approach is a band-aid for a bullet wound. Website speed isn’t just about reducing file sizes or buying an expensive plugin – it's about the entire structure of your website, how it’s hosted, and the way your content loads. For example, I see so many websites with beautiful high-res photos but none of them are compressed or served in next-gen formats like WebP. There’s also this thing where scripts from five different plugins are loading before anything else appears on the page.
The user – me or you – stares at a blank white screen for seconds on end. Then there’s hosting. It’s one of those factors that most people ignore until they see their bounce rate spiking and their rankings tanking. And yet, so many website owners would rather keep plugging away at their WordPress dashboard than reach out to their host to see if better options exist.
Optimising site speed can seem like opening Pandora’s box. Not everyone knows how to set up caching properly or use a CDN to distribute content efficiently. Not all hosting providers support server-level caching either. Some websites are riddled with third-party scripts for analytics, ads, and social sharing buttons that slow things down even further.
More or less. There is rarely no silver bullet here. It seems like there’s no denying that site speed is an integral part of modern seo and that google has made it abundantly clear how much it values quick-loading sites.
Even if speed wasn’t an explicit ranking factor, users would still leave slow sites before ever converting or engaging with your business further. Making small changes can make a massive difference in time-to-first-byte and overall load times but you can only go so far before you need to start thinking about holistic change including where your website lives online and how it delivers content to users around the world.
The Importance of Mobile Optimization in Technical SEO
Most people think making their site mobile-friendly is just about having a responsive design or changing button sizes. But in my experience, mobile optimisation is far more than how a website looks on a smaller screen. If you want your site to rank well with Google and reach mobile users, you need to consider the entire mobile experience from load speed to user intent. And the number of people visiting your website from their phones is growing every year.
Mobile search now accounts for over half of all searches on Google. So technical SEO needs to focus on optimising your website for the different ways people behave when browsing and searching on their phones. You have to make sure all elements of your web pages are visible and readable.
You also need to create content that is simple and easy for readers to digest. I know this can get a little complex with so many moving parts involved in optimisation - from improving page speeds, loading core content first, preloading resources, using compression techniques, leveraging browser caching, improving server response time, using content delivery networks and streamlining code through minification. But the simple truth is arguably - if your website is not easy to use on a mobile device, most users will drop off.
Having an easy-to-read design is vital but it should also be easy to navigate. That means forms should be simplified, fonts should be larger for mobile devices and pop-ups should be eliminated completely or at least kept at a minimum with a clear close button. While creating the perfect mobile website experience can be tricky, it’s definitely worth it when you see that search traffic start rolling in.
Structured Data: Enhancing Visibility in Search Results
I don’t know about you, but what people often get wrong with structured data is thinking it’s just another technical SEO box to tick. A one-and-done item you do before moving on to more exciting things. Or that Google will pick it up no matter what.
The way I see it, it’s a strange assumption, when you think about how important structured data is - especially in the modern internet landscape. That couldn’t be further from the truth though, which seems odd considering how little information there seems to be about properly implementing structured data online. It’s an ongoing process that needs regular upkeep and modification.
I like to think of it as a living document, rather than a stone monument. And if you’re anything like me, you appreciate how much it can more or less influence search visibility. Structured data basically allows website crawlers to better understand the content of your website by providing extra context in the form of metadata. There are so many options out there (which can seem overwhelming at first) - but some examples include elements for products, reviews, videos, articles and even breadcrumbs.
I won’t lie and say it’s easy or clear-cut - we all know how often Google updates itself (or appears to update itself). And maintaining this little corner of your technical SEO efforts can seem daunting at first - but is presumably very necessary as Google keeps changing its requirements for rich snippets and other fancy result types every few years or so. So yeah - definitely not a one-and-done scenario here. If you're looking for an answer that doesn’t need constant maintenance, then maybe skip structured data altogether (which isn’t what I would recommend at all).
But if you're looking for a way to enhance your visibility in search results for the long-term (even with a bit of effort), then don’t be afraid of structured data and embrace it instead.