Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings.

At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render and index the pages on your website.

Even if Google DOES index all of your site’s content, that doesn’t mean your job is done.

your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO, your site’s pages need to be secure, mobile optimized, free of duplicate content, fast-loading… and a thousand other things that go into technical optimization.

the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better chance you have to rank.

Site Structure and Navigation

In my opinion, your site’s structure is “step #1” of any technical SEO campaign.

First off, many crawling and indexing issues happen because of poorly-designed site structure.

Second, your site structure influences everything else you do to optimize your site… from URLs to your sitemap to using robots.txt

Use a Flat, Organized Site Structure

Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organized.

A flat structure makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl 100% of your site’s pages.

This isn’t a big deal for a blog or local pizza shop website. But for an ecommerce site with 250k product pages? A flat architecture is a BIG deal.

You also want your structure to be super organized.

This messy structure usually creates “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links pointing to them).

To get a more visual look at how your pages are linked together, check out Visual Site Mapper.

Consistent URL Structure

you do want your URLs to follow a consistent, logical structure. This actually helps users understand “where” they are on your site.

And putting your pages under different categories gives Google extra context about each page in that category.

For example, the pages on our SEO Marketing Hub all include the “/hub/seo” subfolder to help Google know that all of these pages are under the “SEO Marketing Hub” category.

If you Google “SEO Marketing Hub”, you’ll notice that Google adds sitelinks to the results.

As you might expect, all of the pages linked to from these sitelinks are inside of the hub.

Breadcrumbs Navigation

It’s no secret that breadcrumbs navigation is super SEO-friendly.

That’s because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to category and subpages on your site.

helps solidify your site architecture.

Google has turned URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation in the SERPs.

Crawling, Rendering and Indexing

how to find and fix crawl errors… and how to send search engine spiders to deep pages on your website.

Spot Indexing Issues

Your first step is to find any pages on your site that search engine spiders have trouble crawling.

Your first stop should be the “Coverage Report” in the Google Search Console.

This report lets you know if Google is unable to fully index or render pages that you want indexed.

Screaming Frog is the world’s most famous crawler for a reason: it’s really, really good.

So once you’ve fixed any issues in the Coverage Report, I recommend running a full crawl with Screaming Frog.

Semrush Site Audit

Semrush has a sneaky good SEO site audit tool.

What I like most about this feature is that you get info on your site’s overall technical SEO health.

Each of these 3 tools have their pros and cons. So if you run a large site with 10k+ pages, I recommend using all three of these approaches. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.

Internal Link to “Deep” Pages

Most people don’t have any issues getting their homepage indexed.

It’s those deep pages (pages that are several links from the homepage) that tend to cause problems.

A flat architecture usually prevents this issue from happening in the first place. After all, your “deepest” page will only be 3-4 clicks from your homepage.

if there’s a specific deep page or set of pages that you want indexed, nothing beats a good old-fashioned internal link to that page.

Especially if the page you’re linking from has a lot of authority and gets crawled all the time.

Use an XML Sitemap

In this age of mobile-first indexing and AMP does Google still need an XML sitemap to find your site’s URLs?

a Google rep recently stated that XML sitemaps are the “second most important source” for finding URLs.

to double check that your sitemap is all good, head over to the “Sitemaps” feature in the Search Console.

GSC “Inspect”

the GSC’s Inspect feature can help you get to the bottom of things.

Thin and Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can technically crop up on any site… especially if your CMS created multiple versions of the same page on different URLs.

it’s the same story with thin content: it’s not an issue for most websites. But it can hurt your overall site’s rankings.

There are two tools that do a GREAT job at finding duplicate and thin content.

If you find a snippet of text that shows up on another site, search for that text in quotes.

If Google shows your page first in the results, they consider you the original author of that page.

Noindex Pages That Don’t Have Unique Content

Most sites are going to have pages with some duplicate content.

This becomes a problem when those duplicate content pages are indexed.

The solution? Add the "noindex" tag to those pages.

The noindex tag tells Google and other search engines to not index the page.

You can double check that your noindex tag is set up correctly using the “Inspect URL feature” in the GSC.

Pop in your URL and click “Test Live URL”.

But if you see an “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” message, then the noindex tag is doing its job.

So I recommend checking the “Excluded” tab in the Coverage report to make sure your noindexed pages are getting removed from the index.

For example, certain posts at Backlinko have paginated comments.

And every single comments page has the original blog post on it.

You can also block search engine spiders from crawling the page altogether by blocking their individual crawlers in your robots.txt file.

Use Canonical URLs

Most pages that have duplicate content on them should get the ol’ no index tag added to them. Or have the duplicate content replaced with unique content.

But there’s a third option: canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are perfect for pages that have very similar content on them… with minor differences between pages.

you can use the canonical tag to let Google know that the vanilla version of your product page is the “main” one. And all the others are variations.

you can use the canonical tag to let Google know that the vanilla version of your product page is the “main” one. And all the others are variations.

PageSpeed

Improving your pagespeed is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can directly impact your site’s rankings.

CDNs. Cache. Lazy loading. Minifying CSS.

I’m sure you’ve read about these approaches a thousand times before.

But I don’t see nearly as many people talk about a page speed factor that’s just as important:

Web page size.

when we ran our large-scale pagespeed study, we found that a page’s total size correlated with load times more than any other factor.

The takeaway here is this:

You can compress images and cache the heck out of your site.

But if your pages are huge, then they’re going to take a while to load.

if your site uses a CDN, I recommend testing your site’s speed on webpagetest.org with the CDN on or off.

Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts

Each 3rd party script that a page has adds an average of 34ms to its load time.

Some of these scripts (like Google Analytics), you probably need.

But it never hurts to look over your site’s scripts to see if there’s any that you can get rid of.

Extra Technical SEO Tips

Does your site have different versions of your page for different countries and languages?

If so, the hreflang tag can be a HUGE help.

The only issue with the hreflang tag?

It’s tough to set up. And Google’s documentation on how to use it isn’t super clear.

Check Your Site for Dead Links

Having a bunch of dead links on your site won’t make or break your SEO.

Google even said that broken links are “not an SEO problem”.

if you have broken internal links?

Broken internal links can make it harder for Googlebot to find and crawl your site’s pages.

I recommend doing a quarterly SEO audit that includes fixing broken links.

Set up Structured Data

Do I think that setting up Schema directly helps your site’s SEO?

our search engine ranking factors study found no correlation between Schema and first page rankings.

Using Schema CAN give some of your pages Rich Snippets.

And because Rich Snippets stand out in the SERPs, they can dramatically improve your organic click through rate.

Validate Your XML Sitemaps

I recommend running your sitemap through the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator.

Noindex Tag and Category Pages

If your site runs on WordPress, I highly recommend noindexing category and tag pages.

Unless, of course, those pages bring in lots of traffic).

These pages don’t usually add much value to users. And they can cause duplicate content issues.

Check for Mobile Usability Issues

Even sites that are super mobile-friendly can run into issues.

these issues can be hard to spot.

That is, unless you use the Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report.

If Google finds that a page on your site isn’t optimized for mobile users, they’ll let you know.

That way, you know exactly what to fix.