Technical SEO

Technical SEO in plain English

Technical SEO is about making sure search engines can reach, read and store your pages, and that the site works well for visitors. It covers crawling and indexing, site speed, mobile usability, HTTPS, redirects, broken links, duplicate URLs, sitemaps and structured data. It's the foundation everything else sits on.

How to check technical SEO on your site

Start with Search Console. The page indexing report shows pages Google can't or won't index, and the Core Web Vitals report flags slow pages based on real visitors. Then click through your own site on a phone, test the contact form and look for broken links. Those simple checks catch a surprising number of problems.

A worked example

A family-run hotel moves to a new booking system. The developer forgets to redirect the old room pages, and Google is suddenly finding dozens of 404 errors where the best-ranked pages used to be. A technical check spots it within days, the redirects go in and the damage stays small.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Assuming a website platform handles everything automatically.
• Ignoring Search Console's indexing reports.
• Chasing perfect speed scores instead of fixing what affects real visitors.
• Only checking once. Technical problems appear quietly after updates.

AffordSEO runs a technical health pass every month for this reason.

Why a small site should care

Great content can't rank if Google can't find it or has been told to ignore it. Small sites rarely need advanced technical work, but they often have simple, costly problems: a page accidentally set to noindex after a redesign, a broken contact form, a slow theme or old URLs that lead nowhere.

Connected technical terms

• Crawl: When a search engine bot discovers URLs by following links and sitemaps.
• Index: The searchable database of pages a search engine may show in results.
• robots.txt: A file that suggests which parts of a site crawlers may fetch.
• Core Web Vitals: Google user-experience metrics: LCP, INP and CLS.