Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the foundation under all your other efforts. You can write the best copy and build strong links, but if search engines can't easily reach, read and store your pages, that work stays largely invisible. So it isn't about what is on your page, but about how your website is built and how it behaves.

Where on-page SEO focuses on the content and structure of individual pages, technical SEO looks at the site as a whole: server settings, load times, internal linking, code and the instructions you give to crawlers.

What does it include?

Technical SEO is a broad field. The most important building blocks are:

• Accessibility for crawlers: a correctly configured robots.txt file and an up-to-date sitemap.
• Indexing: making sure the right pages get into the index and unnecessary pages don't.
• Speed and user experience: load times and the Core Web Vitals, especially on mobile.
• Security: a fully working HTTPS connection.
• Clear signals: canonical tags, hreflang for multilingual sites and correct redirects.
• Structured data: extra context in a form that machines can easily interpret.

Why this matters for small businesses too

Many business owners think technical SEO is only for large online stores. Yet small sites often run into the same problems. Take a bakery in Manchester that has its website rebuilt. After the launch, it turns out the old product pages weren't redirected, the new site has accidentally been set to "noindex", and the photos are so heavy that the page loads slowly on a smartphone. Each of those mistakes can make the bakery harder to find, even though the content itself is fine.

The tricky thing is that such problems stay invisible to the owner. The site looks perfect in the browser, so nobody suspects anything is wrong. Only weeks later does someone notice that orders through the website are dropping. That is why technical SEO is largely about prevention: checking before and after every change, rather than hunting for the cause of a drop afterwards.

Technical SEO and AI search

AI tools such as ChatGPT Search, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews get much of their information from the open web. Their crawlers, just like Google's, need a site that is accessible, fast and well structured. Pages that rely heavily on JavaScript to display content can be harder for some AI crawlers to read. Your robots.txt matters too: if you block certain bots, your content can't serve as a source. A healthy technical foundation therefore increases your chances of appearing in traditional results and in answers from AI search engines.

How to get started

1. Connect your site to Google Search Console and check the reports on indexing and page experience.
2. Check that your most important pages are accessible and indexed.
3. Test the speed on mobile and tackle the biggest causes of slowdown, such as images.
4. Track down broken links and missing redirects.
5. Repeat this after every major change to your website.

Want to know where your site falls short technically? A thorough technical SEO analysis lists the issues, ranked by impact, so you know where to step in first.