Technical SEO
Why it matters
Brilliant content on a page that cannot be crawled earns nothing. Business buyers research quietly, often for months, before they contact anyone. A site that does not appear in that research is not in the room.
Technical faults are also easy to cause by accident. A website rebuild, a new plugin or an AI-generated template can switch off indexing for a whole section, or point every page at the homepage as its canonical version, and nobody notices until traffic falls.
How to apply it
- Run a free crawl and check Google Search Console for pages that are not indexed, and the reason given.
- Check that each canonical tag points at the page it sits on, unless a duplicate really exists.
- Keep important pages within a few clicks of the homepage, linked through internal links.
- Compress images, cut unused code and remove redirect chains to improve page speed.
- Repeat the check monthly. Crawl errors creep back as a site changes.
What it is
Search engines send automated programs, called crawlers, to follow links and read pages. Technical SEO is everything that decides whether those crawlers can reach a page, read it correctly and keep it in their index. It sits underneath content and links. The content is the shop. Technical SEO is whether the front door opens.
The main parts are crawlability (can a crawler get to the page, which is partly controlled by a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap), indexability (is the page allowed into the index, which canonical tags and noindex settings control), speed and page experience (Google measures this with Core Web Vitals: loading, responsiveness and visual stability), mobile layout, HTTPS, and structured data.
Common mistakes
- Fixing speed scores while key pages are blocked from the index.
- Leaving a staging site's "do not index" setting switched on after launch.
