What Is Technical SEO?

Have you heard the phrase “You’ve got to be in it to win it”?  

A similar kind of thinking applies to the process of getting your site recognized by search engines, and in turn, real live human readers.  

If your site isn’t being crawled or indexed, it won’t show up in search engine results. 

At its most basic level, technical search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of ensuring your website can be seen, crawled, and ranked by search engines. 

Why does technical SEO matter? In a nutshell, it’s key to improving both your rankings and site user experience. Let’s dive a little deeper now… 

Key Takeaways

• Technical, on-page, and off-page SEO are all important. Technical SEO acts as the “foundation”, letting your site be crawled and indexed. 

• Search engines use web spiders to crawl and index your site, making it vital to structure your site properly so they can do so. 

• To keep your technical SEO on point, optimize your crawl budget, use HTTPS, remove duplicate content, improve Core Web Vitals, use structured data, and perform regular technical SEO audits. 

• Implementing a technical SEO audit schedule ensures ongoing optimization and site maintenance. 

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Technical SEO and Why Is It Important?
• How Site Indexing and Crawling Work
• Technical SEO Best Practices
  • 1. Optimize Your Crawl Budget
  • 2. Use HTTPS
  • 3. Find And Remove Duplicate Content
  • 4. Optimize For Core Web Vitals
  • 5. Use Structured Data
  • 6. Build A Technical SEO Audit Schedule
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Technical SEO and Why Is It Important?

There are three main subcategories of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

Here’s a primer on the differences between the three: 

• Technical SEO: Ensures the technical foundation is solid. Involves auditing and optimizing things like site speed, mobile friendliness, secure connections (HTTPS), XML sitemaps, robots.txt, , structured data, and core web vitals. 

• On-page SEO: Delivers high-quality content and user experience. Involves keyword research, content creation and optimization, metadata, image optimization, URL structure, and more. 

• Off-page SEO: Builds authority and credibility through external validation and promotion. Involves backlinks, social media, online reviews, influencer outreach, brand mentions, and more. 

It may help to think of organic search marketing as producing a play, where: 

• Technical SEO is equivalent to the “backstage” steps you take to ensure the play is viewable in the first place (lighting, sound, etc.). 

• On-page SEO is equivalent to creating and performing the play’s content, doing so in a way that’s relevant and helpful to the target audience. 

• Off-page SEO is equivalent to managing audience reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations, media coverage, and more. 

Only when the three main types of SEO work together does your site stand the best chance of doing what it’s supposed to: provide key information to your target audience. Without technical SEO as the foundation, that isn’t possible. 

How Site Indexing and Crawling Work

To understand technical SEO, you need to know how search engines like Google crawl and index websites. When you publish content, search engines use automated programs called “web spiders” to crawl your site. They retrieve the content from individual pages and follow links within the content to discover more pages.  

This is called “crawling.”  

Once a page is crawled by the web spiders, the page content is analyzed, and the information is stored in a large database. This is called indexing. 

A page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) only when it is crawled, indexed, and deemed relevant to a specific search query. 

Here’s how that relates to technical SEO: It is absolutely vital to structure your site in such a way that makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index your pages and therefore get your site’s content seen by the right sets of eyes.  

Pro Tip to Get You There: One legitimate SEO hack that can help get you there is making use of something called the robots.txt file. 

Technical SEO Best Practices

We’ve covered the “what” of technical SEO. Now let’s cover the “how” with the following list of technical SEO best practices.  

Each of these tech SEO best practices serves as a critical component of technical SEO that must be performed so that sites can show up in the SERPs and users can have the best experience on websites: 

1. Optimize your crawl budget 

2. Use HTTPS 

3. Find and remove duplicate content 

4. Optimize for core web vitals 

5. Use structured data 

6. Build a technical SEO audit schedule 

Let’s discuss some of what goes into each of these now, one by one. 

1. Optimize Your Crawl Budget

Search engine web spiders operate within a crawl budget, or the number of pages a search engine will crawl on your site within a given timeframe.  

If search engines spend too much of the crawl budget on low-value pages, important and impactful content might not get crawled and indexed. And this could hurt your rankings, not to mention your revenue-generating potential. 

This is where optimizing your crawl budget is helpful. To do that, you can: 

• Remove unnecessary pages  

• Remove or noindex low-value content 

• Optimize the robots.txt file 

• Improve internal linking, making priority pages easily accessible 

• Use URL parameters effectively 

2. Use HTTPS

HTTPS, or HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, is a secure version of HTTP that encrypts data exchanged between the user’s browser and your server. 

Not only does it offer security benefits, but it also can also offer SEO benefits. This is because most search engines including Google use HTTPS as a ranking signal.  

If your site doesn’t have HTTPS, that could have a variety of potential adverse effects, from lower search rankings to trust and credibility issues, to referral data loss, and more.  

Source: https://https.cio.gov/faq/ 

3. Find And Remove Duplicate Content

Duplicate content might not seem like a big deal, but think of it this way. If you were a web spider, and you crawled two versions of the same page, how would you make sense of them? Which would you deem most relevant? The answer might not be so cut-and-dry. 

Duplicate content can confuse search engines, leading to lower rankings as they struggle to determine which version of a page to index. What’s more, duplicate content can be confusing to users too. 

This is why it’s important to identify duplicate content on your site using tools like Siteliner, Copyscape, or Google Search Console. Then,  

• Implement canonical tags to tell search engines which page is the preferred version 

• Use 301 redirects to redirect the duplicate version of the page to the preferred page 

• Add a noindex tag to less important duplicate pages that must remain accessible 

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/301-redirects 

4. Optimize For Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are what they sound like: markers that measure crucial aspects of user experience and how “healthy” a site is in relation to them.  

Core Web Vitals are used by search engines as a ranking factor, meaning they’re crucial to get right. To optimize for core web vitals, focus on these metrics: 

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, strive to have LCP occur within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load. 

• Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Measures responsiveness. To provide a good user experience, strive to have an INP of less than 200 milliseconds. 

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, strive to have a CLS score of less than 0.1. 

Source: https://web.dev/articles/vitals#core-web-vitals 

5. Use Structured Data

Structured data helps Google recognize certain types of pages for search results by organizing their data into a standardized and clearly defined format. Structured data is managed by Structured Query Language, or SQL. 

Here’s an example: Say you are writing and publishing a party coffee cake recipe. Including information about the recipe, such as ingredients, baking time, etc., and putting that in one of the supported structured data formats (JSON-LD, Microdata, or RDFa) could help that page get seen by generating a “featured snippet” or other “rich result”.  

Implementing structured data may also increase the click-through rates of your pages. 

 
Below is an example of structured data formatted in JSON-LD. 

Source: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data 

6. Build A Technical SEO Audit Schedule

If you’ve ever been to a financial advisor, they’ve probably told you to “put your savings on autopilot” by making routine, automatic deposits into a savings account, 401K, or Roth IRA. 

Any good technical SEO will say something similar about site maintenance.  

To ensure that you’re routinely checking your website for all relevant technical SEO issues and maintaining optimization, , you’ll want to build a technical SEO audit schedule, which, rather than being a “set it and forget it” task, requires ongoing scheduled audits. 

To create an audit schedule: 

• Set Audit Frequency: Decide how often you will perform technical SEO audits, whether it’s weekly, monthly, or quarterly, to keep your site in top shape. Experts recommend performing an audit at least every 1-3 months. 

• Create a Checklist of Audit Action Items: Develop a comprehensive task workflow to perform during each audit to ensure nothing is overlooked. 

• Analyze and Report Findings: After each audit, carefully analyze the data collected and create a report detailing any issues and potential improvements. 

• Implement Fixes: Take immediate action to correct any problems identified during the audit to maintain optimal site performance and SEO rankings. 

Learn more about how to perform each individual scheduled audit once you’ve created your audit schedule now.  

Here’s a high-level overview to help you hit the ground running. 

FAQs

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves optimizing the infrastructure of your website to ensure it can be crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines. It includes tasks like improving site speed and mobile friendliness, ensuring secure connections, and fixing crawl errors. 

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is crucial because it enhances your site’s visibility to search engines, which in turn can improve your visibility, rankings and user experience. A well-optimized site helps ensure your content is found and appreciated by the right audience. 

What are some common technical SEO issues?

Common issues include slow page speed, duplicate content, broken links, and missing HTTPS. 

How can I check for any technical SEO problems on my site

Use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Semrush to identify and analyze technical SEO issues. 

How often should I do technical SEO audits?

Conclusion

 
Your website’s content only gets the chance to make an impact and serve its intended purpose if it’s getting seen by search engines and users. 

Technical SEO is the branch of SEO that enables your site to be understood and indexed by Google on a structural and foundational level. This makes it vital. 

The takeaway? Make sure to structure your site in a way that is friendly to search engines and helpful to users by taking the technical steps outlined in this blog. 

Need help implementing these technical SEO tips? Want to learn more about how technical, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO can be combined for a killer overall SEO strategy? Check out my “Complete SEO Checklist” now.  

I also offer SEO consulting services if you want an added layer of assistance.