Technical SEO is considered a crucial component if you’re looking to establish a strong online presence. It boosts your site’s security, ensures your content is optimized for Google, and ensures your site loads quickly for users.

Technical SEO does a few essential things: it boosts your site’s security, ensures your content is optimised for Google, and loads quickly for users.

So what is technical SEO, exactly, and why is it such a big deal in digital marketing these days? 

Let’s dig into the details.

Why is it important to consider technical SEO?

Having your technology set up correctly is essential for search engines to understand your site and to trust it enough to rank it. And it’s not just about visibility: technical SEO enhances speed, security, and mobile responsiveness, providing a superior user experience and improved ranking.

Today, overlooking technical SEO can cost you organic traffic and conversions.

In a Statista survey, 13.5% of SEO professionals said that technical SEO was the second most challenging part of the job.

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Key objectives of technical SEO

Let’s examine the primary objectives of technical SEO in more detail.

Improving crawlability

Search engines depend on bots to find and index web pages. If a site is hard to use, people might miss important content.

Effective technical SEO enables search engine crawlers to access and understand a website’s structure, thereby improving indexing and leading to higher rankings.

Improving indexation

Following technical SEO practices ensures that search engines find and index your pages efficiently. To make this happen, create a simple website layout, fine-tune the robots.txt file, and use XML sitemaps. This helps search engine bots find the most important pages and skip duplicates or low-value content.

Boosting user experience (UX)

A super-fast website reduces frustration and keeps users engaged. A one-second delay can also cause people to leave, resulting in higher bounce rates. An e-commerce site with a super-fast page speed enables shoppers to browse and buy efficiently. This helps increase conversion rates.

According to a Statista survey, only 26% of users tend to wait more than five seconds for a website to load on a mobile device.

Key components of technical SEO

Below are the essential aspects of technical SEO and how they contribute to a well-optimised website.

1. Site speed and performance

Site speed will no longer be a ranking factor. By 2025, it will be a make-or-break metric. If pages don’t load fast enough, users will leave for competitors.

Pro Tip: Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse help identify performance bottlenecks by analysing factors like load speed, interactivity, and stability. They offer tips on problems like large images, blocked scripts, and slow code. These help you speed up your site and improve the user experience.

2. Mobile-friendliness

Mobile-first indexing means that your web pages must be fully compatible with mobile devices. Keeping users engaged is essential to maintaining responsive designs and faster mobile page speeds if your site is to be visible in search.

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3. HTTPS and security

Search engines favour secure sites. If you want people to trust you and have search engines value your site, you need an SSL certificate. Updating an SSL certificate is crucial for maintaining security, protecting user data, and establishing trust. When SSL certificates expire, they can cause browser warnings and security issues, which can detract from search rankings.

Action step: Update your SSL certificates regularly and conduct a brief security audit to identify any issues.

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4. Schema markup and structured data

Rich snippets show your structured data when your site uses it correctly. Search engines boost your visibility when you organise your content well.

For example, to increase click-through rates, add schema markup for FAQs, events, or review pages.

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5. Canonicalization

Keep search engines away from duplicate content issues using canonical tags to give them the correct page version. 

Search engines may treat duplicate content without canonical tags as separate pages, leading to keyword cannibalisation and diluted rankings. This can result in lower visibility, indexing issues, and confusion over which version to rank.

Tip: Run Ahrefs Site Audit to analyse your website’s content, and it will flag duplicate pages under the Content Quality report.

Technical SEO vs on-page SEO

 

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Let’s discuss the difference between technical and on-page SEO:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is primarily concerned with optimizing key elements such as crawlability, speed, and site structure. The goal is to improve both search engine visibility and user experience. 

It improves the code and structure of a website, making it more manageable for indexing and faster. Technical SEO enhances crawlability, improving search engines’ recognition and overall user experience.

On-page SEO

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To improve visibility, on-page SEO encompasses optimising your content—keywords, meta titles, meta descriptions, and other page elements. The premise is fairly simple: users will come once you make your page more relevant to them (more user-friendly, keyword-friendly, and search-friendly). 

On-page SEO should strive to position your website page(s) as high as possible in search rankings and optimise user experience. Still, one will not happen without the other. 

In a 2023 survey conducted on Statista, 16.7% of SEO professionals stated that the overall content strategy was the most effective tactic in on-page SEO.

Here’s a table showcasing the key differences between Technical SEO and on-page SEO (Both work together to provide a smooth and the best user and search engine experience):

Feature	Technical SEO	On-Page SEO
Focus	Website infrastructure and backend optimisation	Content and on-page elements optimisation
Purpose	Improves crawlability, indexing, and site performance	Enhances content relevance and user engagement
Key Elements	Site speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, XML sitemaps, security (HTTPS)	Keywords, meta tags, headers, internal linking, multimedia optimisation
Impact	Helps search engines understand and rank the site efficiently	Makes content more appealing and relevant for users and search engines
Tools Used	Google PageSpeed Insights, Screaming Frog, Ahrefs Site Audit, Google Search Console	Yoast SEO, Surfer SEO, Google Keyword Planner, and On-page analysers

The Ultimate Guide to prepping for technical SEO: Prepping Your Site

Preparing your site for technical SEO means ensuring search engines can crawl, index, and rank your great content. The aims of optimizing a site for technical SEO are the same: better visibility, a better user experience, and improved performance. Here are the main steps to prep your site for technical SEO and search success.

Step 1: Audit your website

First, performing a full audit will help you spot and fix issues that could negatively impact your site’s performance. Use powerful tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to:

Identify broken links 

Broken links lead visitors to dead ends instead of valuable content. When users encounter a broken link, it disrupts navigation, creates frustration, and may cause them to leave your site, resulting in increased bounce rates.

From an SEO perspective, broken links waste crawl budget—search engines spend time crawling nonexistent pages instead of indexing important content, which can hurt rankings.

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Check metadata

The search engine will be confused if there is missing or duplicate metadata. Have unique and on-point meta titles and descriptions for each page.

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Resolve crawl errors

Review your crawl reports and fix all server errors.

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Analyze website architecture

Your site architecture should have a logical hierarchy that allows for quick browsing and crawling.

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Step 2: Optimize Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are related to key metrics that can directly impact Google’s rankings and user experience.  

Loading speed (Largest Contentful Paint – LCP)

Optimize your images. This involves compressing file sizes, determining the best format to use (JPEG, PNG, or WebP), and adding alt texts for both SEO and accessibility. Choose a good value hosting option or a Content Delivery Network (CDN) solution to provide the fastest load times from a given location. Proper optimization reduces bandwidth, provides for a good user experience, and assists search engines in recognizing what is content.

Visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift – CLS)

Give dimensions to media elements such as images and videos so that layout shifts don’t occur during page loading.

Here’s how to address Core Web Vitals:

• Use CDNs: Utilize multiple servers to minimize content latency.
• Minify Code: Compressing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files speeds up resource delivery.
• Enable lazy loading: Load images and videos only when they are in the user’s viewport, reducing initial load times.

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Step 3: Ensure mobile optimization

Since a lot of website visitors are mobile users, optimizing your website for smart devices is a must.

These are the factors you can consider covering:

• Performance testing: Identify and resolve issues using a mobile-friendly test. This lets you see whether users can view your website on a smart device and how fast it loads on smaller screens. 
• Responsive design. Utilize CSS frameworks or modern design practices for a seamless experience across various devices.
• Frameworks: Ensure you utilize viable frameworks, such as Laravel, to deliver a fast, responsive, and scalable mobile user experience effectively. Work with an experienced Laravel web development services company to allow for complete management.

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Step 4: Protect your website

The importance of protecting your website cannot be overstated; it significantly impacts your search engine visibility and helps establish trust between your users and your domain.

To secure your site:

• Switch to HTTPS: Encrypt data (i.e., make data private) and protect user privacy with an SSL certificate.
• Regular updates: To protect from vulnerabilities, update plugins, themes, and core systems.
• Review security logs; you can use tools like Wordfence to help detect and remediate any possible threat.

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Step 5: Establish a strong internal linking structure

Internal linking enhances users’ experiences while ensuring search engines have a clear understanding of the user journey. 

Some key principles to consider

• Logical structure: Having a logical structure is organising related pages in such a way that makes navigation and finding relevant information natural.
• Keyword optimisation: Anchor text should describe the content you link to and the pages you’re trying to optimise. Instead of “click here” as the anchor text, use “read our guide on optimising website speed” when linking to an article about website performance. This helps users and search engines understand the content of the linked page.
• Hierarchy emphasis: Link to these pages often to highlight priority pages.

This internal linking strategy will allow your pages to be crawled properly, ensure good link equity distribution, and improve navigation, all of which are positive signals for SEO.

Technical SEO problems and how to fix them

There are many obstacles associated with technical SEO, including limited visibility, insufficient site performance, and other challenges. If these problems are not resolved, they can impact every avenue of a site. First, we will review common technical SEO challenges and discuss practical solutions to address these issues.

Keeping up to speed with algorithm updates

By staying up to speed, you will ensure your search engine optimisation is on top of continually updating ranking factors daily. Google regularly updates its algorithms, changing the ranking factors that determine how its search results are ranked and displayed in the index fields of searches. 

For example, with the Google Web Vitals update, one of the main focuses was on user experience and page speed, which required businesses to improve their performance or risk seeing their page ranking and possibly traffic metrics drop. If you don’t keep up, you’ll likely suffer lost rankings, traffic loss, and reduced visibility.

Crawling errors

Crawling errors prevent search engines from indexing essential pages, making them invisible in search results. Common causes include broken links, poor internal linking, or misconfigurations in robots.txt. Google Search Console provides reports on crawl issues, helping web admins fix problems before they harm rankings.

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Technical debt

When businesses delay, technical SEO updates, outdated code, slow load times, and inefficient site structures accumulate, causing long-term performance issues. Just to illustrate, sites working with old JavaScript frameworks probably won’t index and render well. This is why auditing items and resolving issues are important before they make an otherwise cheap issue expensive.

Resource availability

Sometimes, smaller organisations lack budget and knowledge, and cannot focus their time and attention on fixing technical SEO items, thus creating another open issue. Another thing to keep in mind is that slow speeds can harm your SEO and conversion audit.

Monitor crawl reports

If you know about crawl errors and they are reported in Google Search Console, you will want to use tools like that to identify your crawling issues soon. 

Another option is using the ​Crawl Stats Report​ found in Google Search Console. It shows you how often Googlebot crawled your site and how many requests it made, showing you crawl issues. It showed you crawl requests over time, how long it took for a response, and server availability. 

With this information, you can view the slow-loading pages or check if Google has removed crawling or experienced a sudden drop.

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Regular maintenance

It’s essential to update your plugin, theme, and server-side infrastructure regularly to prevent security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and unnecessary technical debt. Running outdated versions of software can lead to slow loading times, compatibility issues, and even security breaches that harm your SEO.

Partner with professionals

When you partner with a team with experience managing Android app development services and web solutions, you can confidently know that they will help you take on your SEO challenges and help you take the same care of your apps and your websites.

Wrap up

Technical SEO is not just technical; in 2025, it will be the foundation for a successful digital marketing strategy. Investing in the proper tools, methodologies, and expertise to guarantee that those who matter see their websites and provide an unparalleled user experience.

Optimizing site speed, implementing security protocols, and implementing every other technical SEO measure would help a site stand out in the highly crowded online space. Technical SEO will always have a role in future-proofing your online presence. As digital product owners, we can proactively manage the various elements.
P.S. Need help managing the technical side of your website? Book a call now with our experts. (We’ve helped many clients, including Remote, Miro, and Matomo).