What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO covers the infrastructure of your website — how it is built, structured, and served — rather than its content. It ensures search engines can find, crawl, understand, and index your pages correctly. Without solid technical foundations even excellent content will underperform in search.
Crawlability and Indexation
Robots.txt — This file tells crawlers which parts of your site they should and should not access. Verify yours is not accidentally blocking important content. Access it at yourdomain.com/robots.txt.
XML Sitemap — A sitemap lists all the URLs you want Google to index and helps crawlers discover content efficiently. WordPress plugins (Rank Math, Yoast SEO) generate this automatically. Submit it in Google Search Console.
Crawl Budget — Large sites with thousands of pages need to ensure crawlers are spending time on important pages rather than infinite pagination, faceted navigation, or duplicate parameter URLs. Use Search Console's coverage report to identify crawl issues.
Site Architecture
A logical URL structure helps both users and search engines understand the hierarchy of your content. Categories and subcategories should reflect the topic structure of your site. Important pages should be reachable within three clicks from the homepage. Orphaned pages (no internal links pointing to them) are rarely crawled or ranked well.
Internal linking is one of the most underused SEO levers. Linking from high-authority pages on your site to pages you want to rank passes PageRank signals and helps crawlers discover content.
HTTPS and Security
HTTPS is a confirmed Google ranking factor. Every site should use SSL — free certificates are available via Let's Encrypt through most hosts. Ensure your site redirects HTTP to HTTPS consistently with no mixed content warnings (HTTP resources loading on HTTPS pages).
Page Speed and Core Web Vitals
Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. LCP, INP, and CLS scores in the "Good" range are the target. Use Google Search Console's Core Web Vitals report to identify pages failing thresholds and Google PageSpeed Insights to diagnose specific issues. See our dedicated Core Web Vitals guide for detailed fix guidance.
Mobile Optimisation
Google uses mobile-first indexing — it primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking. Your mobile experience must be equivalent to desktop. Test with Google's Mobile-Friendly Test and audit your mobile Core Web Vitals specifically, as they typically differ from desktop scores.
Structured Data and Schema Markup
Schema markup provides explicit signals to search engines about what your content is and what it means. It can enable rich results in SERPs — star ratings, FAQs, breadcrumbs, prices. Common schema types for tool review sites: Product, Review, FAQPage, HowTo, BreadcrumbList.
WordPress plugins (Rank Math, Schema Pro) add schema without coding. Validate your implementation using Google's Rich Results Test.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content dilutes ranking signals across multiple URLs. Common causes: HTTP vs HTTPS, www vs non-www, trailing slashes, pagination creating duplicate content, faceted navigation generating parameter-based URLs. Use canonical tags to indicate the preferred URL for each piece of content. Ensure 301 redirects consolidate all versions to a single canonical URL.
Redirects
Use 301 redirects for permanent URL changes — consolidating old blog posts, changing URL structures, or merging content. 302 redirects for temporary moves. Never leave 404s for URLs that previously had link equity — redirect them to the most relevant current page. Use a tool like Screaming Frog to audit redirect chains (A redirects to B redirects to C — these should be collapsed to A → C).
Tools for Technical SEO
Screaming Frog SEO Spider — Industry-standard desktop crawler. Free for up to 500 URLs, £149/year for unlimited. Audits broken links, redirects, duplicate content, missing meta, and much more.
Google Search Console — Free. Shows indexation status, crawl errors, Core Web Vitals, manual actions, and search performance. The single most important tool for monitoring technical health.
Ahrefs Site Audit — Cloud-based crawler included in Ahrefs subscriptions. Good for ongoing monitoring and identifying SEO opportunities alongside technical issues.