Mastering Technical SEO: Everything You Need to Know
There are a lot of types of SEO, amongst them is technical SEO, which forms the foundation that allows your site to be crawled, indexed, and ranked effectively. We’ll walk you through everything you need to know to master technical SEO, from the basics to advanced strategies, with real-world examples and a practical technical SEO checklist to help you get started. What Is Technical SEO? Let’s start with the definition. What is technical SEO? Technical SEO refers to the process of optimising the technical aspects of your website to improve its visibility and performance in search engines. It’s not about content or keywords but rather how well search engines can access, crawl, interpret, and index your website. At its core, technical SEO ensures your site is fast, mobile-friendly, secure, and easy for search engines to understand. How Technical SEO Works Technical SEO works behind the scenes to ensure your website is properly set up for search engines to discover, crawl, understand, and rank your content effectively. By doing this, you ensure that whatever quality content you put out will undoubtedly be shown to your intended audience. While your users focus on the look, feel, and content of your site, search engines are more concerned with structure, speed, and signals. Here’s how technical SEO works step by step, and what it actually looks like in practice. 1. Discovery: Search Engines Find Your Site How it works: Before your site can show up in search results, it has to be found. Search engines use links and sitemaps to discover new content. What technical SEO looks like here: Example: If you publish a new blog post about “local SEO“, but don’t add it to your sitemap or link to it from any existing page, Google may not discover it at all, which also means your intended audience won’t be able to see it either. 2. Crawling: Bots Explore Your Website How it works: Once discovered, bots (like Googlebot) crawl your website by following internal links from page to page. What technical SEO looks like here: Example: If your website has too many unnecessary redirects or very slow-loading scripts, bots may crawl fewer pages, and that could mean some don’t get seen at all. 3. Indexing: Content Gets Stored How it works: After crawling a page, Google decides whether to index it, that is, store and display it in search results. What technical SEO looks like here: Example: If you have multiple product pages for the same T-shirt in different colours, canonical tags help Google index just one version instead of treating them all as separate (and possibly duplicate) pages. 4. Understanding: Search Engines Interpret the Page How it works: Once a page is indexed, Google needs to understand what it’s about and how it fits into the wider context of the web. What technical SEO looks like here: Example: A recipe page that uses structured data (Recipe schema) can appear in rich results with star ratings, cooking time, and ingredients, helping Google understand the page instantly. 5. Ranking: Results Are Shown Based on Value How it works: Once understood, pages compete to rank for relevant search queries. When doing SEO, the ideal position to be on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is from position 1 to 10. The higher the position (position 1 – 3), the more people see your content and are more likely to click and view. Technical SEO helps your page meet performance and quality standards. What technical SEO looks like here: Example: If your site loads quickly on mobile, has stable layouts, and doesn’t frustrate users with pop-ups, Google sees this as a positive user experience, and is more likely to rank your pages higher. The Technical SEO Checklist Now that you have a firmer grasp on what technical SEO is and what it looks like in action, let’s break down the core elements of technical SEO into a checklist you can use to audit and improve your website. 1. Ensure Your Site is Crawlable The first step of all steps when it comes to technical SEO is to make sure your website is easy for search engines to crawl. You can do this by doing the following: Example: If your product page isn’t included in your sitemap and has no internal links, search engines might not discover it. 2. Make Sure Your Site is Indexable To make it possible for search engines to store your content, you have to: 3. Optimise for Speed and Performance Having a slow loading page or post can have a detrimental impact on your viewership since people don’t like waiting. According to a study conducted by Google, if visitors have to wait for more than 3 seconds, they’ll leave immediately. So it’s best to optimise your content for speed and performance. You can: Example: A site that loads in 1.5 seconds is more likely to retain users and rank higher than one that takes 5 seconds. 4. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly There’s no denying the hold our phones have on us: the entire world in the palm of your hand. According to industry analysis, the number of smartphone users is approximately 7.12 billion. That’s a lot. So it goes without saying that if you want to reach more users, you have to optimise your content for mobile. You can either cooperate with your develop and design teams to come out with appropriate optimisation for your content or you can choose website templates that allow for a mobile version. 5. Secure Your Site with HTTPS Make sure your site’s security is good. This not only lets your visitors know that your site is a trusted site that cares about its users’ online privacy but also signals to search engines that your website is secure and credible. 6. Fix Crawl Errors Sometimes there are bugs in pages on your website that prevent a search engine bot from crawling. In order to avoid these issues, it’s best if you do the following: 7. Optimise
