Technical SEO is the nuts and bolts of SEO but it is often seen as dark art. It can also be a bit of a Cinderella, not much invited to pitches or new business meetings. That’s generally because clients naturally expect agencies to be good at this type of work and as it’s a bit geeky and nerdy, it’s not a great conversation starter. Agencies say they do it, clients nod along, and then the conversation moves on to more compelling creative matters.
There’s nothing wrong with that in itself but the problem is, when we come to work on technical aspects of SEO, clients don’t always know what we mean. So this blog post is aimed at redressing that balance so that any client who is told that their agency is focussing on technical SEO, will have a better understanding of how their agency’s time was spent.
Why is technical SEO so important?
Technical SEO is best described as a website health check. It involves improving under-the-bonnet aspects of a website to enhance search engine rankings, ensuring search engines can easily crawl, index and understand the site’s content.
These adjustments – some of which might simply be small tweaks and others, more substantial changes – can and sometimes do have an almost immediate impact on a website. Therefore, it can be an extremely gratifying area of work.
Understanding crawl budget
To understand technical SEO, it’s first helpful to understand how search engines work.
Search engines use web crawlers (also known as bots or spiders) to discover new content. That said, they don’t hang out on dark corners of the web simply waiting for updates to be made. Each website has what is known as a ‘crawl budget’, which is the amount of time that a search engine allocates to crawling and indexing a particular site. A national newspaper website will have a much larger crawl budget for example than a small furniture retailer.
Contrary to popular belief, search engines do not trawl the entire web every single time someone undertakes a new search. When new content is found (crawled), a search engine indexes that information for future reference. Search engines then refer to their indexed content and then rank that content in what they perceive as the order of importance based on a specific user search.
There are various features and tools (such as robots.txt files, sitemaps and structured data) that should be integrated into a website and regularly checked to help improve a search engine’s ability to crawl, index and understand what has been created.
Is site speed considered technical SEO?
Site speed is a critical factor for both user experience and search engine rankings. A site that is slow to load will not win any favours with search engines or searchers and will struggle to rank or convert well.
Amongst other factors, large, uncompressed images, too many requests for different files, poor hosting, and excessive or badly written code can all impact site speed.
Site speed also needs to be considered alongside something known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This is when a page judders, jumps around or has an erratic layout as it downloads. Not only is this frustrating for users but as Google prioritises pages that load smoothly and provide a stable experience, poor CLS can negatively impact SEO.
Site architecture is another important aspect of technical SEO
Site architecture refers to how a website’s pages are structured and linked together.
A clear, logical hierarchy ensures users can easily navigate a website, while also helping search engines crawl and index pages efficiently. Key components include a shallow click depth (ideally under three clicks to important pages), intuitive navigation menus, and internal linking.
While most decent developers will build a site with this in mind, over time, new pages could be added by different people, even entire sections or areas of content created and what started as a well-structured site, can end up being rather higgledy-piggledy.
Technical SEO will assess what needs to be addressed in terms of site architecture and also seek to put a plan in place to stop any hindrances occurring in the future.
Crawl error identification
Technical SEO also involves identifying crawl errors that could prevent search engines from accessing web content. This includes finding missing pages and fixing broken links.
For example, broken links, also known as dead links, lead to non-existent pages and typically return 404 errors. They can result from deleted pages, incorrect URLs, or changes in website structure. Search engines view broken links as a sign of poor maintenance, which can reduce a site’s authority and crawlability and for users, encountering broken links disrupts navigation and can diminish trust in the site.
Mobile-first considerations
Mobile-first design is a critical element in website optimisation. With Google’s mobile-first indexing, it will consider the mobile version of a website for crawling and indexing, so if a website works well on a laptop or desktop but not on a mobile, it is unlikely to rank well on any device.
Therefore technical SEO agencies will have a mobile-first mindset, making changes to a website that ensures it is accessible and functional across screens of all sizes.
Hiding pages from search engines
Hiding unnecessary pages from web crawlers is a helpful tactic to improve the crawl budget and overall technical SEO. If low-value or duplicate pages consume a crawl budget, important content might get ignored or crawled less frequently.
By managing what search engines can crawl, websites become more efficient in guiding bots toward meaningful content. This improves indexing consistency, helps rank-worthy pages get noticed, and ultimately enhances SEO performance.
Summary of technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that a site is accessible and understandable to search engines. It lays the foundation for improving rankings by removing technical barriers and enhancing user experience. Without solid technical SEO, even the best creative off-page SEO, content or link-building activity may not have any meaningful impact, making it a critical component of any successful SEO strategy.
So there you have it. If your agency says they’ve been doing technical SEO, hopefully, you’re a little bit wiser about how they’ve been using their time and directing their energy.
