What technical SEO covers
Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes work that helps search engines crawl, index and understand your website — site speed, mobile usability, secure connections, sitemaps, redirects and structured data. Great content will struggle to rank if these foundations are broken, so it is worth checking them first.
Crawling and indexing
- Verify the site in Google Search Console and review the Pages (indexing) report
- Submit an XML sitemap that lists only real, indexable pages
- Check robots.txt is not blocking important pages or files
- Remove accidental noindex tags from pages that should rank
- Fix broken links and 404 errors; redirect removed pages with 301 redirects
- Use canonical tags to avoid duplicate versions of the same page
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure real-user experience. Aim for these “good” thresholds:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — main content visible within 2.5 seconds
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — page responds to taps and clicks within 200 milliseconds
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — layout stays stable, with a score of 0.1 or less
How to improve speed
- Compress and resize images; use modern formats like WebP
- Set width and height on images to prevent layout shifts
- Remove unused plugins, scripts and heavy sliders
- Enable caching and compression on the server
- Use good hosting and a CDN for visitors across regions
Security and structure
- Serve every page over HTTPS with a valid SSL certificate
- Use one preferred domain (with or without www) and redirect the other
- Keep URLs short, readable and lowercase
- Use a logical heading structure and internal links between related pages
Structured data
Structured data (schema markup) tells search engines exactly what a page represents — your organisation, services, articles, FAQs, products or breadcrumbs. It can make your listings richer and helps search engines and AI tools understand your business accurately. Validate it with Google’s Rich Results Test.