Technical SEO

What technical SEO covers

Technical SEO is everything that decides whether Google can find, load, understand and trust your pages, independent of what the words say. It sits underneath content and links. When it's broken, the symptoms look like a content problem: pages that should rank don't, new pages take months to appear, traffic drops after a small change nobody remembers making.

The work splits into four layers:

• Crawling. Can Googlebot reach every page you care about, through links and a sitemap?
• Indexing. Does Google keep those pages in its index, or skip them as duplicates or low value?
• Rendering. Does the page show its content to Google on a mobile device, including content loaded by scripts?
• Understanding. Do headings, internal links and structured data make the topic and the business clear?

The usual suspects

When I run a technical check on a small business site, the same problems turn up again and again. A staging site that was copied live with a "noindex" tag still in place. Four versions of the home page, with and without "www" and a trailing slash. A sitemap generated by a plugin that lists tag archives and image pages, but not the service pages. Redirect chains left over from two redesigns. A cookie banner or chat widget that loads before anything else and pushes the real content down.

Each of these can quietly undo months of good content work. Most are cheap to fix once found. If you'd like to check a few yourself first, technical SEO basics lists what an owner can look at without a developer.

Speed and Core Web Vitals

Google measures how fast pages load and how stable they are on real users' devices. Many Canadian customers browse on phones with patchy signal, on the road or in rural areas, so heavy pages lose people before they see your offer. Typical fixes: resize and compress images, load below-the-fold images lazily, remove unused scripts and fonts, and stop third-party widgets from blocking the page. I don't promise a specific score, because scores move with hosting and test conditions. I do promise to remove what slows your pages down. When speed is the main bottleneck, see website speed optimization.

Structured data

Structured data, or schema, is code that tells search engines facts in a format they read reliably: your business name, address, hours, service area, product prices, FAQs. It doesn't rank you on its own, but it helps Google and AI tools understand the page and can enable richer results. The key is accuracy: markup must match what the page shows. My explainer on schema markup for local businesses shows what's worth adding.

Language versions and hreflang

When a site has more than one language version, hreflang tags tell Google which page is meant for which audience. Without them Google may show the wrong version or treat the two as duplicates. My technical SEO covers English-language sites; French versions and their SEO are outside my work, so on a site that has them, that part stays with your own team or translator.

Why it helps that I build websites

Most technical SEO problems are created when a site is built. Because I build sites myself, either hand-coded or on a custom CMS, I can read the templates, see why a page loads slowly and change the code directly, rather than sending a ticket to someone else. On sites built by others, I fix what the platform allows and write a precise spec for the rest, so your developer knows exactly what to change and why.

Technical SEO as part of ongoing work

Technical health isn't a one-time job. New pages, plugin updates, a new booking widget or a marketing script added by someone else can each break something. In ongoing SEO services, I recheck Search Console every month and catch problems before they cost traffic.