What Is Technical SEO?

Think of technical SEO as the backstage engine of your website. If your content is the performance, technical SEO ensures everything works behind the scenes so search engines can understand, crawl and index your pages properly.

It affects:

• How Google accesses your website
• How fast your pages load
• Whether your site works on mobile
• How duplicate content is handled
• How your pages are structured
• Whether your content is enhanced through structured data
• How internal links connect your pages

These elements influence both visibility and user experience.

Where Should You Begin?

1. Improve Your Page Speed

A slow website harms rankings and user experience. Page performance is a measurable technical factor, and research on browser timing data shows how loading behaviour affects usability. This is highlighted through studies on performance metrics:

Simple fixes include:

• Compressing images
• Removing unnecessary scripts
• Using lazy loading
• Choosing a fast hosting provider

2. Make Mobile Performance a Priority

Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means your mobile layout is the primary version evaluated. If it is difficult to navigate on a phone, it impacts visibility. Research examining mobile usability shows how poor layouts, spacing and responsiveness affect engagement. You can see this in studies of mobile usability:

3. Ensure Google Can Crawl Your Site

Crawlability is essential. If Google cannot access your content, it cannot rank it. A clean crawl path allows search engines to discover, evaluate and index pages efficiently.

Recent research explains how modern crawlers process structures, links and access patterns. This is illustrated in work focusing on crawl behaviour:

Check for:

• Broken links
• Redirect loops
• Blocked pages
• Orphan pages with no internal links

4. Add Schema Markup (Structured Data)

Schema markup helps search engines understand your content more precisely. It contributes to rich results, FAQs, reviews, product displays and clearer context.

Modern studies show how semantic markup improves machine interpretation and information processing. See findings on structured data reasoning:

Start with simple schema types:

• FAQ
• Product
• Review
• Local business

You can validate your markup using Google’s Rich Results Test.

Internal Linking: A Technical Strategy Many Overlook

Internal links help:

• Distribute authority
• Improve crawl efficiency
• Reduce orphan pages
• Signal which pages are most important
• Guide users through your site

Every new page should link to relevant content and should receive links from existing pages.

Fix Index Bloat Before It Harms Rankings

Index bloat occurs when unnecessary or low-value pages appear in Google’s index. This includes:

• Thin pages
• Duplicate content
• Tag archives
• Test URLs
• Old product pages

Use canonical tags, noindex tags and redirects to streamline your structure. A cleaner index helps Google focus on the pages that matter most.

Final Words

Technical SEO does not have to feel overwhelming. You do not need to write code or become deeply technical to keep your site healthy. By focusing on the fundamentals - speed, mobile performance, crawlability, schema, internal links and index cleanup - you eliminate the majority of issues that prevent pages from ranking.

If you want actionable, jargon-free insights into your site’s structure, an AI-powered audit can reveal the technical issues worth fixing and the ones you can safely ignore.

Sources

• Aria, M., et al. (2024). Modern Web Crawling Patterns and Indexing Efficiency. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12175 
• W3C. (2024). Navigation Timing: Performance Metrics for Web Pages. https://w3c.github.io/navigation-timing/
• Cai, Y., et al. (2016). Mobile User Experience and Performance Factors. ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2858036.2858590 
• Shen, J., et al. (2021). Semantic Reasoning for Structured Data on the Web. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.00061