Technical SEO is a core part of SEO, which is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines like Google and Bing.
Technical SEO is less about the content and links to other channels and more about the structure of the site.
It can seem a bit complex or ‘under the hood’, but technical SEO plays an important part in boosting your overall SEO and getting you to those all-important top spots in the search engine rankings.
Here we’ll provide a clear, practical guide on technical SEO and how you can use it to improve your SEO performance.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO deals with the more technical aspects of how a site works with respect to search engines, crawlers and SEO. It involves optimising things like site structure, crawlability, indexing, and elements of performance such as page loading times.
Technical SEO is just as important as any other side of SEO services as it ensures that your website structure is easy to navigate (by bots and people alike) and free from errors.
Why Technical SEO Is Important?
Technical SEO makes a site easier for web crawlers to access and navigate your site. Also known as spiders or bots, crawlers are digital bots that crawl across the World Wide Web to find and index pages for search engines.
Technical SEO elements that are related to performance issues, such as page loading speeds, also improve the user experience. Taken together, measures to improve technical SEO can give a substantial boost to overall SEO and make visitors more likely to convert or return.
Technical SEO vs On-Page vs Off-Page SEO
You might be unsure of the differences among the elements of SEO, such as technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO.
- Technical SEO: Focuses on the backend infrastructure or ‘under the hood’ elements to do with structure and performance.
- On-page SEO: Relates to the content and structure of individual pages. This can include navigation elements such as title tags, meta descriptions and headings, as well as keywords and quality content.
- Off-page SEO: Involves SEO elements outside the website, such as high-quality backlinks and social media marketing.
Key Elements of Technical SEO
There are a number of different elements included under the banner of technical SEO. Technical SEO basics include factors such as your website and URL structure, how easy your site is to crawl, indexing, website speed, and how mobile-friendly your site is.
Website Structure
Site architecture is a foundational principle of technical SEO. It involves using a logical website hierarchy, which essentially means that each element of the website is linked to the next in a logical and predictable manner.
You might, for example, use topic clusters to link certain pieces of content together or make sure you have hub pages providing a high-level route to more detailed information. This makes the site easier to navigate for human visitors and web crawlers alike.
Crawlability
Imagine search engine bots as little explorers that go around the internet, discovering and collecting information from websites. Crawlability simply refers to how easily these bots can explore and navigate your website.
Good website structure and URLs will help bots to navigate your site, but there are also some extra things you can do, such as creating a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file that you can submit to Google Search Console.
Internal links also improve crawlability, as well as improving user experience by offering related content for visitors to explore.
Indexing
Indexing simply refers to the process search engines (like Google) use to find and store information from websites. So, when you create a new website or add new content to your site – you want search engines to know about it so that they can show your web pages in their search results.
You can use the Google Search Console (GSC) to request indexing. This can be important if you are setting up a new website, while an XML sitemap can be used to list all the URLs you want Google to index.
Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Page load speed and other speed metrics are crucial for improving user experience and boosting SEO. You can improve individual pages and overall site speed in a number of ways, including file compression, optimising code and leveraging browser caching.
Google has developed a set of three metrics known as Core Web Vitals to measure a web page’s real-world loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. These metrics are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) to measure loading performance, Interaction To Next Paint (INP) for responsiveness, and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which measures visual stability.
Mobile-friendliness
More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the internet, search for information, and make online purchases. So, it’s important to ensure that your website provides a smooth and enjoyable experience for mobile users.
In fact, Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a website’s content for indexing and ranking.
So, search engines and customers alike are now expecting your website to be optimised for mobile. It used to be common to design a separate mobile site, but these days, responsive design that adapts to the device tends to be a better solution.
URL Structure
Again, URLs can be important for both human visitors and bots. People tend to be put off by messy-looking URLs with lots of symbols. Using clean, clear URLs that incorporate keywords is also best practice when it comes to crawlers and SEO.
Structured Data
Structured data or schema markup is added to a page’s code to help search engines understand the context of content and provide ‘rich results’. This could involve identifying and displaying details relating to products, news stories, recipes, local businesses and more directly in the search results.
HTTPS & Site Security
The encryption protocol HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) increases security, provides trust for users and is a critical ranking factor in SEO terms.
Best Practices for Technical SEO
In general, when you improve the experience for your visitors, you are also improving your SEO.
Search engines have placed increasing importance on user experience, so you should ensure that your site is easily navigable with fast loading speeds and ideally able to be viewed and used on a range of devices.
It’s also important to remove errors such as broken links that can result in 404 Errors. Duplicate content can be counter-productive as it is viewed negatively by search engines, so make sure that every page is unique and adds value. Other things, such as creating a sitemap, optimising images and implementing schema markup, can all help you to improve your technical SEO.
Helpful Tools for Technical SEO
There are plenty of tools out there that can help with technical SEO tasks. Just a few of the more popular ones include:
Google Search Console
Google’s own Search Console can be used to make sure that resources like images and CSS files are accessible, prevent crawling of certain areas and encourage it on others. It’s also useful for more in-depth SEO tasks, such as preparing for a site move or managing a multi-lingual site.
SEMrush
SEMrush can be used to audit your site, analyse file logs and receive on-page SEO tips and suggestions.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs provides a technical SEO audit that can help you to identify issues and areas for improvement.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog can identify issues such as broken links and duplicate content, generate XML site maps and perform a host of other tasks to help you improve your technical SEO.
The Benefits of Technical SEO for Your Website
The technology behind the websites we use and the search engines that crawl, classify and rank them, is constantly changing. SEO professionals need to be able to constantly adjust their approach in response to new trends and techniques.
Artificial intelligence (AI), for example, is being tipped to have an increasingly important impact in all sorts of fields, and SEO is certainly no exception.
Google’s confirmed the use of its RankBrain machine learning algorithm a few years ago, and while they have been tight-lipped about the details, experience and observation show that indications gleaned from user experiences (such as click-through rate and time spent on the page) are important factors.
The future of technical SEO will continue to change and evolve with the technology, which is why our SEO experts are constantly learning and adapting, keeping firmly up to date with all new developments.
How Often Should You Audit Technical SEO?
A website technical SEO audit is a comprehensive analysis of technical SEO performance that checks that all those technical SEO factors are still working as they should.
An audit should be carried out regularly, but how often will depend on the size and complexity of your website. Large e-commerce sites with more than 500 pages should be audited monthly or quarterly. Small to medium websites (50-500 pages) should be audited every 3 months, at least.
Technical SEO FAQs
What does technical SEO include?
Technical SEO involves optimising the ‘under the hood’ elements of a website that help it to run efficiently and make it accessible to web crawlers. This includes things like improving the site architecture, addressing Core Web Vitals such as page loading speed, checking for broken links and making sure it is mobile-friendly.
Is technical SEO difficult?
Individual elements of SEO can be dealt with quite easily using the right tools, but there can be a lot of things to keep track of and the overall picture can be complex.
How do I fix technical SEO issues?
Conducting a technical SEO audit using tools like Google Search Console, SEMrush or Screaming Frog can help you identify and address various issues. The way to fix individual issues can vary, such as adding missing tags or optimising images that are affecting page load speeds.
What is the difference between technical and on-page SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on the back-end infrastructure and technical elements of a web page. On-page SEO focuses on optimising content and on-page elements such as header tags.
Technical SEO should be seen as a foundational part of a complete SEO strategy. It’s important to set up your website correctly, but ongoing maintenance is also essential to ensure that your site continues to perform as it should.
Do You Need a Technical SEO Expert?
It is possible to undertake your own technical SEO optimisation, but this can be a complex area, with lots of elements to keep track of.
At Maxweb, we understand that technology and search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, which is why our experts are always on the lookout for the latest trends and updates. We make it our mission to stay up to date with all the new developments in SEO so you don’t have to.
We are a full-service SEO agency with over 20+ years of experience working with businesses in Merseyside and across the UK. From local companies to nationwide organisations, we deliver exceptional results and personalised tech SEO solutions.
So, whether it’s adapting your website to the latest algorithm changes or implementing cutting-edge strategies, our technical SEO experts can do it all.
Reach out to our tech SEO experts today on 0151 652 4777 or fill out our contact form.
Posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2026 in SEO.
