Technical SEO basics
The behind-the-scenes factors that affect how Google finds and ranks your site — explained in plain English for non-technical business owners.
Technical SEO covers the parts of your website's health that affect how search engines can access and understand it — things that happen "under the hood," not in the content you write.
You don't need to be a developer to understand technical SEO. This guide explains the key concepts and what we handle for you.
Quick summary
Technical SEO is about making sure Google can find, access, read, and index your site without obstacles. Key areas include: your site being indexed, fast load times, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security, and a clean URL structure. Most of this is set up once and maintained — it's our job, not yours.
Why technical SEO matters
Great content and perfect page titles won't help if Google can't access your site properly. Technical issues act like roadblocks — they prevent Google from seeing your work.
Common technical problems include:
- Pages that aren't indexed (Google doesn't know they exist)
- Slow load times (Google penalizes slow sites)
- A site that isn't mobile-friendly
- Broken links leading to dead ends
- Duplicate content confusing Google about which page to rank
- Missing or broken sitemaps
Key technical SEO factors
Crawlability
Google's bots need to be able to crawl (visit) your pages. Obstacles include:
- A misconfigured robots.txt file that accidentally blocks Google
- Pages that require a login to access
- Broken links leading to error pages (404s)
- Site architecture that buries pages too deep — if a page is 6 clicks away from your homepage, Google may rarely visit it
Indexability
Once Google crawls a page, it decides whether to index it. Issues that prevent indexing:
- A "noindex" tag on pages that should be indexed (a common accidental mistake)
- Duplicate content — two pages with very similar or identical content confuse Google about which to show
- Very thin content (too little text) — Google may skip pages it considers low-quality
Site speed
Page speed is a direct ranking factor. Slow sites provide a poor user experience, and Google knows it.
See the dedicated guide: Site speed & SEO.
Mobile-friendliness
Google uses mobile-first indexing — it primarily uses the mobile version of your site to determine rankings. If your site isn't mobile-friendly, your rankings suffer.
See: Mobile-friendliness & SEO.
HTTPS and security
Your site should load over HTTPS (shown as a padlock in the browser). Google gives a slight ranking boost to HTTPS sites, and non-HTTPS sites show a "Not secure" warning to visitors — which significantly reduces trust.
See: What is SSL & HTTPS?.
Structured data (schema markup)
Structured data is code added to your site that gives Google extra information about your content — like marking up a recipe, a business address, an FAQ, or product details. This can earn you rich results — enhanced search listings with star ratings, images, or FAQs displayed directly in results.
This is a more advanced topic that we handle during site builds.
Sitemaps
A sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your site. Submitting it to Google Search Console helps Google discover your content faster.
Canonical tags
A canonical tag is code that tells Google which version of a page is the "main" one — useful when similar content exists at multiple URLs. This prevents duplicate content issues.
What we handle for you
Most technical SEO is set up during the initial build of your site and maintained as part of ongoing care. We take care of:
- Sitemap creation and submission
- Robots.txt configuration
- HTTPS setup and renewal
- Redirects when URLs change
- Fixing crawl errors and broken links
- Site speed optimization
- Structured data markup
If you're curious about the technical health of your site, we can run a full audit and walk you through the findings.
Common questions
Related guides
- How search engines work
- Sitemaps & robots.txt explained
- Mobile-friendliness & SEO
- Site speed & SEO
- SEO-friendly URLs
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