Technical SEO.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work of making sure search engines can crawl, render, understand and index a website efficiently. It covers site speed, mobile usability, site architecture, internal linking, redirects, canonical tags, structured data, sitemaps and robots.txt. It deals with how the site is built rather than what it says, and it sets the ceiling for every other search effort.

Why it matters

Great content cannot rank if Google cannot reach it. Technical problems are often invisible to the business: a redesign that drops old URLs without redirects, a setting that tells search engines to ignore the whole site, or a sluggish mobile experience. Any of these can quietly cut enquiries for months. A website migration is the riskiest moment, and the point where technical SEO most clearly pays for itself.

The parts that matter

• Crawling and indexing Search engines must be able to reach your pages and be allowed to add them to their index.
• Site structure A logical hierarchy and good internal links help search engines and visitors find important pages.
• Speed and stability Core Web Vitals measure how fast and stable pages feel to real visitors.
• Redirects and canonicals These tell search engines which URL is the real one, especially after a redesign.
• Structured data Schema markup describes your content in a form machines read reliably.

What to do about it

Open Search Console and check the Page indexing report for important pages that are excluded, and the Core Web Vitals report for failing groups of pages. Search Google for site:yourdomain.co.uk to sense-check what is indexed. If a redesign is planned, insist on a full redirect map from every old URL to its new one before launch. That single document prevents the most expensive technical SEO mistake an SME can make.