Technical SEO
TL;DR
Optimisations to a website's technical infrastructure — crawlability, indexability, speed, and structure — that help search engines access and rank content.
Technical SEO encompasses all optimisations to a website's underlying infrastructure that make it easier (and more rewarding) for search engine crawlers to access, index, understand, and rank its content. Unlike on-page SEO (content) or off-page SEO (backlinks), technical SEO operates at the server, code, and architecture level.
Core technical SEO areas include: crawl budget management (robots.txt, crawl directives), XML sitemap configuration and submission, site architecture and URL structure, canonical tags and duplicate content resolution, mobile-first optimisation, Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP), HTTPS implementation, structured data and schema markup, International SEO (hreflang), and JavaScript rendering (ensuring JS-heavy sites are crawlable).
Technical SEO is typically the first priority for any SEO engagement — not because it generates traffic directly, but because technical issues act as ceilings on everything else. A site with excellent content and strong backlinks can still underperform if it has crawl blocks, slow load times, or duplicate content issues undermining its technical foundation.
Examples in Practice
Fixing a misconfigured robots.txt that was blocking Googlebot from indexing key pages. Implementing hreflang tags for a UK/US content split. Resolving LCP caused by an unoptimised hero image.