What technical SEO actually covers, and what to fix first
A plain-English guide to technical SEO for business owners, with the five checks that make the biggest difference.
Technical SEO sounds intimidating, but the idea behind it is simple: make it easy for search engines to find, understand and trust your pages. Here are the five checks we run first on almost every website.
1. Can search engines index your important pages?
Open Google Search Console and look at the Pages report. If key service pages are listed as “Excluded” or “Crawled – currently not indexed”, nothing else you do to those pages will help until that’s fixed.
Common causes include a stray noindex tag left over from development, a page blocked in robots.txt, or a canonical tag pointing somewhere else.
2. Does the site load quickly on a phone?
Most searches happen on mobile. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score. Oversized images are the most common culprit, followed by heavy themes and too many plugins.
3. Are there broken links and redirect chains?
Every broken link wastes a visitor’s time and a search engine’s crawl. Redirect chains, where one URL redirects to another that redirects again, slow things down and dilute ranking signals. A crawling tool will list both.
4. Is there one version of each page?
http://, https://, www and non-www versions of your site should all redirect to a single version. If they don’t, search engines may split your ranking signals between duplicates.
5. Is there an up-to-date XML sitemap?
A sitemap tells search engines which pages exist and when they changed. Submit it in Search Console and check it only lists pages you actually want indexed.
Where to go from here
If these checks turn up problems, fix them before investing in new content or links. Technical issues cap how well everything else can perform. If you’d like a hand, get in touch and we’ll take a look.