What is technical SEO?

Quick Answer

Technical SEO covers the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that determines whether search engines can find, crawl, and index your website effectively. It includes site speed, mobile optimisation, crawlability, schema markup, and security.

Think of technical SEO as the foundation of a building. The content on your website is what visitors see – but if the foundation is weak, the entire structure underperforms regardless of how good the content is.

Site speed is a direct ranking factor. Pages that take more than 3 seconds to load lose visitors and rank lower. Technical SEO addresses image compression, code minification, caching, and server response times.

Crawlability determines whether Google can access and understand your pages. Issues like broken links, duplicate content, incorrect robots.txt configuration, or missing XML sitemaps prevent search engines from indexing your content properly.

Schema markup is structured data that helps search engines understand what your content means, not just what it says. For professional services, this includes business information, service descriptions, reviews, and FAQ content. Schema increases your chances of appearing in featured snippets and AI overviews.

Mobile optimisation is non-negotiable. Over 60% of searches happen on mobile devices. A website that doesn’t render properly on mobile is penalised in rankings and loses visitors immediately.

HTTPS (SSL certificates) signals to both Google and visitors that your site is secure – particularly important for professional services where trust is a primary buying factor.

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