What is Technical SEO? A Complete Guide

What do technical SEO and weeding a garden have in common?

SEO strategies can be broadly categorized into two types: those that actively boost your site’s rankings and those that remove obstacles to your site’s performance.

Technical SEO primarily falls into the latter category. Just as weeding a garden eliminates factors that hinder a plant’s growth, technical SEO helps you unleash your site’s potential by creating an environment where your SEO efforts can thrive. Removing weeds allows search engines to crawl, index, and rank your site better.

This post is a no-code guide to improving your rankings with technical SEO.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves optimizing a website’s architecture and its technical aspects to address issues that might hinder its ranking on search engines. This typically leads to a higher ranking because the site:

• Has fewer issues that prevent it from ranking
• May have fewer technical issues than its competitors
• Provides a better user experience

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical optimization is crucial because it directly impacts how search engines access, interpret, and rank your content. If search engines can’t properly index your site or access your content, it won’t rank – directly affecting your online visibility and earning potential.

Also, technical aspects of your site significantly influence user experience. The Google leak of 2024 revealed that user metrics can indeed affect rankings, further emphasizing the importance of technical SEO.

 

There are three aspects to technical SEO:

1. Improving linking structure

A well-structured site is essential for both users and web crawlers. For users, an intuitive site structure makes it easy to find information. It also facilitates efficient indexing for web crawlers. Pages that crawlers can’t find won’t be included in search indexes, rendering them invisible in the search results.

2. Increasing user experience

User experience is critical from both user and search engine perspectives. According to webfx.com:

• 83% of users expect websites to load in three seconds or less
• 40% will abandon a site if it takes longer than three seconds to load
• Pages loading in 1-2 seconds have an extremely low average bounce rate of 9%, while those taking 5 seconds have a 38% bounce rate

From a search engine perspective, in 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals became a part of its ranking algorithm, measuring:

• Page load speed
• Responsiveness
• Stability

3. Reducing errors

A site with technical errors provides a bad user experience. In our current digital landscape, with competitors lurking around every corner, having a bad user experience is likely to result in diminishing users and lost revenue.

Furthermore, since Google is always looking for ways to improve its user experience, reducing errors makes simple sense from a business perspective. By reducing errors, you are aligning your content with Google’s business goals, and the more you do that, the more likely your content will rank in search results. User experience is evident in many of its updates, including:

• The helpful content update
• Numerous spam updates
• Core Web Vitals

Technical SEO best practices

As technical SEO strategy is a broad topic, let’s break it down into small steps. Here are eight technical optimization best practices:

1. Make sure your site is crawlable

In order for your content to appear in search results, you must ensure that search engines can find it. Search engines do this by systematically crawling the web by following hyperlinks in order to discover new or updated content. If your site is not crawlable, it is not accessible, and an inaccessible site will not be indexed.

The next step after crawling is for the search engine to render your content. This means it takes the page built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and turns it into a visual representation of that page. The search engine looks at things like JavaScript to see what the final version of the page looks like. This rendering process allows the search engine to evaluate the content and structure of the page accurately.

The best way to improve your site’s crawlability is to ensure you have completed these 8 steps:

• Optimize robots.txt files: Ensure that your website’s robots.txt file is properly configured to allow search engine bots to crawl the necessary pages while blocking access to sensitive or unnecessary content.
• Implement an XML sitemap: Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines, and ensure that your CMS updates it automatically.
• Minimize redirects: Reduce the number of redirects on your website, as excessive redirects can slow down the crawling process.
• Improve page speed: Ensure that your website’s pages load quickly, as slow-loading pages may be deprioritized or even excluded from the crawling process.
• Eliminate broken links: Regularly audit your website for broken internal and external links, and fix any issues.
• Leverage internal linking: Well-structured internal links help search engine bots discover and navigate your website’s content more efficiently.
• Monitor crawl errors: Regularly review your website’s crawl error reports and address any issues that could be preventing search engine bots from effectively crawling your site.

By following these best practices, you can help ensure that search engines are able to easily crawl and index your site, making your content more visible in search results.

Auditing your site’s crawlability with Similarweb

The easiest way to audit your site’s crawlability is to use the Similarweb Discoverability report in the Site Audit tool. This tool will help you analyze:

• Crawl budget
• Internal links
• Redirects
• Sitemaps

Use the Discoverability Errors tab to see a detailed breakdown of all of your crawlability errors.

Simply click on the errors tab to see all of the individual errors affecting your site’s indexability. This report will give you a detailed breakdown of all of your indexability errors as well as an explanation of how to fix them.

2. Make sure your site is indexable

In the previous step, you ensured that search engines can find your content. But finding the content isn’t enough. For your content to show up and rank in search results, it needs to be indexed. If your pages are not indexed properly, they will not appear in Google’s search results. When you type a query into your favorite search engine, you are not searching the web, you are actually looking through the search engine’s index of the web.

To index content, the search engine needs to process and analyze the content. This means:

• Looking at the HTML
• Determining if the page is a duplicate and if the page should be indexed
• Analyzing the quality of the page

How to check if your pages are indexed

It’s important to audit your pages to see if they are indexed correctly. One of the best ways to do that is to use the Google Search Console Indexing report (Google Seach Console > Indexing > Pages). The report will help you quickly see how many pages are indexed and how many are excluded from Google’s index.

Indexation best practices

To ensure that your content is indexed correctly, follow these 6 best practices:

1. Ensure clean and accessible HTML: Well-structured HTML allows search engines to easily read and interpret your content. Avoid excessive use of JavaScript, Flash, or other technologies that may hinder search engines from indexing your pages.
2. Prevent duplicate content: Identify and resolve any duplicate content issues, as they can confuse search engines and negatively impact indexation.
3. Use canonical URLs: Implement canonical tags correctly to indicate the preferred URL for a piece of content.
4. Regularly update content: Frequently refresh your website with new, high-quality content to signal to search engines that your site is active and relevant.
5. Avoid thin or duplicate content: Ensure that each page on your website provides unique value.
6. Monitor and troubleshoot indexing: Regularly review your website’s indexation status to address any issues that arise, such as pages being excluded from indexing.

Auditing your indexing issues with Similarweb

You can easily diagnose and fix any indexing issues with the Similarweb Indexibility report in our all-in-one Site Audit tool. The Indexability dashboard will give you a general overview of your site indexability, including:

• An indexability health score
• Canonicalization score
• Mobile configuration
• Indexable pages by depth

Click on the errors tab to see all of the individual errors affecting your site’s indexability. This report will give you a detailed breakdown of all of your indexability errors as well as an explanation of how to fix them.

3. Make sure your site has SSL

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) creates an encrypted connection between a web server and a browser when visiting a website. This encryption:

• Ensures your site is secure
• Protects personal user data from potential hackers

Having SSL is crucial if your site collects any data, including email addresses. This is something easy to do. You can purchase an SSL certificate from your domain provider. In fact, most web hosting services now offer free SSL certificates through services like Let’s Encrypt.

To check if your site has an SSL certificate, look at its address. If it starts with ‘https://’ it’s secure, or ‘http://’ it’s not secure.

4. Optimize site speed

During 2021, Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor. These metrics are part of a group of user experience metrics that Google measures.

The Core Web Vitals consist of three key measurements:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance by timing how long it takes for the largest content element on the page to become visible within the viewport.
• First Input Delay (FID): Quantifies interactivity by measuring the time from when a user first interacts with your site to when the browser is able to respond to that interaction.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates visual stability by measuring the sum total of all unexpected layout shifts that occur during the entire lifespan of the page.

Given that Core Web Vitals are now incorporated into Google’s ranking systems, optimizing your website based on these metrics has become important for improving your SEO performance.

Auditing your site speed with Similarweb

You can quickly identify your site’s speed issues using Similarweb’s Page Speed report. This report provides a comprehensive breakdown of your Core Web Vitals metrics, highlights important issues, and offers guidance on how to address any performance problems.

5. Ensure your site has one version

Having multiple versions of your site is a form of duplicate content that you must avoid, as it can negatively impact your site.

This includes:

• Diluting link equity
• Confusing search engines about which version to index
• Wasting crawl budget

Multiple site versions happen more often than you would imagine. For instance:

• www.example.com/page
• http://example.com/page
• https://example.com/page
• example.com/page
• example.com/page/

The best way (but not the only way) to solve this is by establishing the primary pages as canonical and then setting a 301 redirect from the multiple URL versions to the main URL. You can establish pages as primary by adding the rel=canonical tag to the HTML head section of your page. Your canonical tag should look like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.example.com/preferred-page/” />

Pro tip: While canonicalization and redirects are essential for managing existing duplicate content, it’s even better to prevent multiple versions from occurring in the first place. You can achieve this by setting up proper rules in your server configuration to redirect users:

• From HTTP to HTTPS
• From non-www to www
• To add (or remove) a trailing /.

This will resolve most of your technical duplication issues and prevent them in the future.

Auditing your site’s canonical tags with Similarweb

You can audit your canonical tags with the Similarweb Canonicalization report. This report gives you a list of canonical tag issues and errors, including:

• Pages without valid canonical tags
• Orphaned canonical pages
• Canonical to non-200
• And more

6. Avoid duplicate content

Duplicate content is when your site includes identical or very similar content that appears on multiple URLs, either within the same site or across different sites. This can negatively affect your rankings because search engines will struggle to figure out which version should be indexed.

Will the search engine pick the right one?

This might result in:

• A bad user experience
• Diluted ranking potential due to cannibalization
• Limited crawl budget (if you have a large site)
• Search engines ultimately ignoring all versions of your site

Auditing duplicate content with Similarweb

You can audit your content for duplicate content with the Similarweb Uniqueness report. This will help you find all kinds of duplicate content on your site, including:

• Duplicate titles
• Duplicate body
• Duplicate descriptions
• Duplicate pages

7. Oversee response codes

Looking at response codes will help you identify error pages that need to be corrected. Although there are many response codes, you don’t need to know what all of them mean. The main ones to focus on are response codes that represent errors, including 4xx and 5xx response codes.

The most popular response codes are:

• 301 Moved Permanently: The requested URL has moved to another address.
• 302 found:  The requested URL has been moved temporarily to a new location.
• 400 Bad Request: The server could not find the requested page.
• 400 Bad Request: The server could not understand the request due to invalid syntax.
• 401 Unauthorized: The client must authenticate itself to get the requested response.
• 402 Payment Required: Reserved for future use. It is intended for use as a means of digital payment systems.
• 500 Internal Server Error: The server has encountered a situation it does not know how to handle.
• 501 Not Implemented: The request method is not supported by the server and cannot be handled.
• 502 Bad Gateway: The server, while acting as a gateway or proxy, received an invalid response from the upstream server.

Auditing your response codes with Similarweb

The Similarweb Availability report will give you a list of availability issues. This includes two reports that analyze response codes, including:

• Broken pages (4xx pages)
• 5xx errors

By uncovering the pages with these response codes, you can quickly fix any issues to ensure everyone can navigate your website properly. This is a report you will want to use frequently to keep your site error-free.

8. Pro tip: Add schema markup and structured data

Search engines have sophisticated systems designed to understand content created by people. These systems interpret:

• The content on a page
• What a page is about

This is a heavy lift for search engines as they have to convert non-structured human language and convert it into machine-readable structured data.

Adding schema markup is a way to add a machine-readable, structured data layer to your web content. Implementing this will help search engines understand your page and content and will often lead to rich snippets in the search results.

Tools to detect technical SEO issues

Similarweb

With Similarweb’s Site Audit tool, you are able to comprehensively analyze all the key technical SEO aspects of your website – as well as any competitor website. That includes detailed insights into:

• Availability: Metrics measuring errors that affect page accessibility
• Indexability: Reports on factors influencing search engine indexing
• Uniqueness: Assessment of duplicate content issues
• Discoverability: Analysis of site structure and internal linking
• Rankability: Evaluation of on-page SEO elements
• Experience: Metrics related to user experience and Core Web Vitals

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that analyzes technical SEO aspects of your website, providing:

• Indexing status and reports
• Googlebot crawl stats
• Core Web Vitals and user experience insights
• Security issues and manual action notifications
• Internal and external link metrics

Google Page Speed Insights

Another excellent tool is Google PageSpeed Insights, which provides detailed Core Web Vitals metrics for your website. This tool offers both performance analytics and actionable recommendations to enhance your site’s speed and user experience. It highlights metrics that need improvement on both desktop and mobile.

Technical SEO: The bottom line

Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of search optimization and is often overlooked. It impacts almost every aspect of your SEO efforts and can make or break your ranking opportunities. The key to getting your technical SEO right is to regularly use the right analysis tools – and act on the insights you uncover.

FAQs

What is technical SEO vs on-page SEO?

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s infrastructure to improve search engine crawling and indexing. On-page SEO, on the other hand, involves optimizing individual webpage content and HTML source code to enhance relevance and user experience for both search engines and visitors.

Is technical SEO difficult?

Although technical SEO is not difficult, it is complex and takes time to master. It’s important to have the right tools to do it right.

How do you do technical SEO step-by-step?

Technical SEO can be broken down into 8 main steps:

• Ensure your site is indexable
• Check your site’s crawlability
• Make sure your site has SSL
• Analyze page speed
• Ensure your site has only one version
• Avoid duplicate content
• Check and fix response codes
• Add schema markup