Want your website to truly perform? Technical SEO is the foundation. It’s about making sure your site is easily crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines. But with so many moving parts, where do you even begin? I’m going to show you, step by step, how to get started with technical SEO so you can boost your rankings and drive more organic traffic. Don’t let technical issues hold your site back from its full potential.
1. Crawl Your Website
The first step is to understand what search engines see when they visit your site. You need to crawl it. A great tool for this is Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Download the free version (it allows you to crawl up to 500 URLs) and enter your website’s URL. Let it run. This will give you a wealth of information about your website’s structure, links, and any errors.
Once the crawl is complete, review the following tabs:
- Status Codes: Look for 404 (Not Found) errors, 301 (Permanent Redirects), and 500 (Server Errors). 404s are dead ends for both users and search engines, and should be fixed promptly.
- Page Titles: Are your page titles descriptive and unique? Do they include relevant keywords?
- Meta Descriptions: Are your meta descriptions compelling and accurate summaries of your page content?
- H1 Headings: Does each page have a clear and concise H1 heading that accurately reflects the page’s topic?
Pro Tip: Export the crawl data to a spreadsheet for easier analysis. You can then filter and sort the data to identify the most pressing issues.
2. Analyze Your Website’s Speed
Website speed is a critical ranking factor. Users expect pages to load quickly, and search engines penalize slow-loading sites. Several tools can help you analyze your website’s speed. PageSpeed Insights is a free tool from Google that provides detailed insights and recommendations for improving your website’s performance.
Enter your website’s URL into PageSpeed Insights and analyze the results. Pay attention to the following metrics:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): Measures the time it takes for the first text or image to be painted on the screen.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures the time it takes for the largest content element to be painted on the screen.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the visual stability of your page.
- Time to Interactive (TTI): Measures the time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
PageSpeed Insights will also provide recommendations for improving your website’s speed. These may include:
- Optimizing images: Compress images to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality.
- Minifying CSS and JavaScript: Remove unnecessary characters from your code to reduce its size.
- Enabling browser caching: Allow browsers to store static assets locally to reduce the need to download them repeatedly.
- Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Distribute your website’s content across multiple servers to improve loading times for users around the world.
Common Mistake: Ignoring mobile speed. Make sure to analyze and optimize your website’s speed on mobile devices as well.
3. Check Your Mobile-Friendliness
With the majority of web traffic now coming from mobile devices, it’s essential to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. Google offers a Mobile-Friendly Test tool that you can use to check your website’s mobile-friendliness. For more on this, check out our article on tech visibility and mobile mistakes.
Enter your website’s URL into the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and analyze the results. The tool will tell you if your page is mobile-friendly and provide recommendations for fixing any issues. Common mobile-friendliness issues include:
- Text too small to read: Ensure that your text is large enough to be easily read on mobile devices.
- Clickable elements too close together: Ensure that your buttons and links are spaced far enough apart to be easily clicked on mobile devices.
- Content wider than screen: Ensure that your content fits within the screen width on mobile devices.
Make sure to use a responsive design for your website. This means that your website will automatically adjust its layout to fit the screen size of the device being used to view it.
4. Implement Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup helps search engines understand the content on your pages. By adding structured data to your website, you can provide search engines with more information about your products, services, events, and other types of content. This can help your website rank higher in search results and attract more clicks. I’ve seen structured data directly impact click-through rates by 15-20% for some clients.
Google supports several types of structured data markup, including Schema.org vocabulary. You can use Google’s Rich Results Test tool to validate your structured data markup. To unlock even more organic traffic in 2026, consider implementing structured data effectively.
To implement structured data markup, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO (if you’re using WordPress) or manually add the markup to your website’s HTML. Here’s what nobody tells you: start small. Focus on marking up your most important content first, like product pages or blog posts.
Pro Tip: Use the Rich Results Test tool to preview how your website will appear in search results with structured data markup.
5. Create and Submit a Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that lists all of the pages on your website. It helps search engines discover and crawl your website more efficiently. Creating and submitting a sitemap to search engines is an important step in technical SEO.
You can create a sitemap using a tool like XML-Sitemaps.com. Simply enter your website’s URL and the tool will generate a sitemap for you. Once you have created a sitemap, you can submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
To submit your sitemap to Google Search Console:
- Log in to Google Search Console.
- Select your website.
- Click on “Sitemaps” in the left-hand navigation menu.
- Enter the URL of your sitemap in the “Add a new sitemap” field.
- Click “Submit.”
The process for Bing Webmaster Tools is similar. We ran into this exact issue at my previous firm where the client forgot to submit their sitemap, and it took months for Google to fully index their site. Don’t make the same mistake!
6. Optimize Your Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file is a text file that tells search engine crawlers which pages on your website they are allowed to crawl and which pages they are not. It’s crucial for controlling how search engines interact with your site.
You can use the robots.txt file to prevent search engines from crawling duplicate content, private areas of your website, or other pages that you don’t want to be indexed. A common use case is to disallow crawling of your website’s admin area (e.g., `/wp-admin/` for WordPress sites).
To create a robots.txt file, create a text file named “robots.txt” and place it in the root directory of your website. The file should contain a list of directives that tell search engine crawlers which pages to allow or disallow. For example:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /private/This robots.txt file tells all search engine crawlers (User-agent: *) to disallow crawling of the `/wp-admin/` and `/private/` directories.
Common Mistake: Accidentally disallowing crawling of important pages, such as your homepage or product pages. Always test your robots.txt file to make sure it’s working as intended. You can use Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester tool.
7. Implement HTTPS
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of HTTP that encrypts communication between your website and your visitors’ browsers. It’s a ranking signal, and it’s crucial for protecting your visitors’ privacy and security. All websites should use HTTPS.
To implement HTTPS, you need to obtain an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) and install it on your web server. Many web hosting providers offer free SSL certificates through Let’s Encrypt. Once you have installed the SSL certificate, you need to configure your website to use HTTPS. This typically involves updating your website’s settings and redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS.
I had a client last year who was still running their e-commerce site on HTTP. After switching to HTTPS, we saw a noticeable increase in their organic traffic and conversion rates. It’s a simple change that can have a big impact. Speaking of impacts, don’t forget the importance of technical SEO in a mobile world.
What is the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO?
Technical SEO focuses on the technical aspects of your website that affect its ability to be crawled, indexed, and understood by search engines. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing the content and HTML of individual pages to improve their ranking for specific keywords.
How often should I perform a technical SEO audit?
You should perform a technical SEO audit at least once a year, or more frequently if you make significant changes to your website.
What are some common technical SEO mistakes?
Some common technical SEO mistakes include having broken links, slow page speed, not being mobile-friendly, not using structured data markup, and having a poorly configured robots.txt file.
Can I do technical SEO myself, or do I need to hire a professional?
Many aspects of technical SEO can be done yourself, especially with the help of online tools and resources. However, if you lack the technical expertise or time, it may be beneficial to hire a professional SEO consultant.
How long does it take to see results from technical SEO?
The time it takes to see results from technical SEO can vary depending on the complexity of your website and the extent of the issues that need to be addressed. However, you should typically start to see improvements in your website’s ranking and traffic within a few months.
Getting started with technical SEO doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By following these steps, you can lay a solid foundation for your website’s success in search. Begin with the crawl, address the most critical errors, and continuously monitor your site’s performance. Don’t wait — implement these technical SEO strategies today to unlock your website’s full potential. For tech companies specifically, getting started with SEO is crucial.
