Technical SEO Guide [2025]

Table of Contents

• What is Technical SEO?
• How do technical SEO factors contribute to search engine rankings?
• Understanding Crawling and Indexing
• Technical SEO Audit
• Step-by-Step Technical SEO Checklist
• Tools For Technical SEO Audit & Fixes
• Fix SEO Issues Fast with WP Creative
• Key Takeaways
• FAQs

Let’s be honest, technical SEO can be frustrating. But without it, even the best content won’t rank.

In fact, more than 90% of web pages get no organic traffic because search engines can’t properly crawl, index, or interpret them.

SEO is no longer just about keywords and backlinks. Google now focuses on site speed, mobile-friendliness, structured data, and user experience. If your site has technical problems, your rankings will suffer, no matter how strong your content is.

This guide will walk you through how to audit, fix, and improve your website’s technical SEO so it’s faster, cleaner, and optimised for search engines.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a part of SEO that focuses on improving the technical aspects of your website to ensure that it can be indexed & crawled by search engines. Once your website is indexed and crawled, it will then display your webpage when relevant intent keywords are searched for.

In addition, it also includes other factors that influence user experience like page speed and mobile optimisation. However, that is not all. Technical SEO also helps optimise the site structure and maintain WordPress redirects and canonical tags.

Now that you know the basics of technical SEO, let’s dive deeper into its components and why it should be an important part of your SEO strategy.

How do technical SEO factors contribute to search engine rankings?

Technical optimisations are done to improve search engines’ understanding of a website’s content and context, resulting in higher ranks. Without a solid technical foundation, even the best content and backlinks may not help a site rank well.

Let’s take an example of site speed as an important SEO ranking factor. If a site speed is faster, it generally improves user experience, resulting in reduced bounce rates and increased engagement. You can see this yourself by comparing the average session duration in Google Analytics.

To improve page loading speed, you might want to reduce the size of images, try and decrease the overall page size, delete or optimise existing CSS and JavaScript files, cache at different levels and do other optimisations that would contribute to a faster web page.

Here’s how technical SEO helps improve search engine rankings:

• Search engines rely on bots to scan and organise web pages. A website with a well-structured setup, including a properly configured robots.txt file and XML sitemaps, makes it easier for search engines to find and index its content.
• A fast-loading site improves user experience, which search engines prioritise. Google takes Core Web Vitals into account when determining rankings.
• Since Google primarily indexes mobile-friendly sites, those optimised for mobile devices tend to rank higher.
• Websites using HTTPS encryption provide a safer browsing experience, which is also a factor in search rankings.
• Adding structured data (Schema) helps search engines understand content better, making it possible to display rich snippets, knowledge graphs, and improved search results.

Understanding Crawling and Indexing

Before we begin with the technical SEO strategy, you should understand what crawling and indexing is.

What is Crawling?

Crawling is the process where search engines send out automated bots, often called crawlers or spiders, to explore web pages across the internet. These bots follow links from one page to another, collecting information about each page they visit.

If a page isn’t crawled, it won’t appear in search results. This is why a well-structured website is important as the structure helps search engine bots discover and understand its content efficiently.

Did You Know? Google doesn’t crawl every page of a website every time. Instead, it uses a crawl budget, which limits how many pages it will visit based on the site’s importance and health.

What is Indexing?

Indexing happens after a page is crawled. Once the crawlers find your website, the search engine processes and stores the information in its database (index). The information is then made available on search engine result pages for users for related topics.

Even if a page is crawled, it won’t appear in search results unless it’s properly indexed. Indexing allows Google to understand and rank the page based on its relevance and quality.

Technical SEO Audit

Performing Technical SEO audits and fixing website issues is my first step in starting an SEO project. It helps to set the foundations for Search Engine Optimisation before I jump onto any other optimisations such as on-page SEO optimisations or internal and external links. 

Technical SEO audit is essential to find out areas of improvement to your website. There are plenty of SEO tools that can perform the site audit to find out the issues. Tools like AHREFS are actually good at figuring out the issues, it’ll give you a list of SEO errors and suggestions to improve along with the priorities for each error.

But you can not expect a tool to figure out all of the technical issues and factors involved. So, you need to know the basics of technical SEO before you jump into finding technical areas of improvement for SEO, which we’ll discuss below:

1. Website Structure, Navigation and URLs

Google and other search engines need to crawl and index your website while also determining its relevancy. So, the structure and navigation of a website are significant factors for SEO.

A structured website also improves user experience, making it easier for visitors to find what they need, reducing bounce rates, and increasing engagement.

Arranging the content into categories or product pages further improves site structure by grouping similar content together. This helps search engines understand relationships between other relevant pages and rank them more accurately. For example:

• example.com/shoes (Category)
• example.com/shoes/running (Subcategory)
• example.com/shoes/running/nike-air-max (Product Page)

URL structure also plays a crucial role in SEO. A well-optimised URL should be simple, descriptive, and easy to read for both users and search engines. URLs that follow a logical hierarchy help organise content and improve discoverability.

2. Website Speed and Performance

Website speed is now more crucial than ever as no one likes to visit a website that loads slowly. Search engines want their users to visit a website that provides a seamless user experience and thus, site speed is also an important factor for your site’s SEO success.

You can analyse the website’s speed and performance with measures such as poor loading times, big image sizes, or render-blocking JavaScript. Tools like Page Speed Insights and GTMetrix are some tools that will give you an insight into your site speed and overall performance.

3. Mobile Optimisation

With the maximum number of users coming from mobile, it only makes sense to see if your website performs well in mobile formats and devices. You can see your percentage of mobile users by navigating into Google Analytics.

It is important to assess if the website is responsive as well as mobile-friendly. You should check that your site is responsive and easy to use on portable devices.

Check if your website is optimised for mobile by using Lighthouse by Google.

4. HTTPS & Security

Google considers HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) a ranking factor, meaning sites with HTTPS are more likely to rank higher than those still using HTTP.

HTTPS encrypts data between the website and the user’s browser, protecting sensitive information from hackers. Websites without HTTPS may display a “Not Secure” warning in browsers, discouraging visitors and reducing trust.

Migrating to HTTPS involves obtaining an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate, installing it on the server, and ensuring that all website links and resources (such as images and scripts) load over HTTPS.

It’s also important to set up 301 redirects from HTTP to HTTPS to prevent duplicate content issues and maintain SEO value.

5. Duplicate Content

Duplicate content occurs when the same or very similar content appears on multiple pages on your site or across different websites. Search engines struggle to determine which version should be ranked, leading to potential SEO issues.

While duplicate content isn’t always a penalty, it can dilute ranking power and confuse search engines, affecting a site’s visibility.

By addressing duplicate content issues, websites can improve their ranking potential, maintain link equity, and ensure a cleaner site structure.

Now that we know the whereabouts of Technical optimisations, let’s get started with step by step Technical SEO checklist.

Step-by-Step Technical SEO Checklist

Technical SEO Audit is only about half of the job here. While the audit helps you find out the issues and figure out SEO strategies, there still remains the task of fixing those issues.

Below I’ll discuss more on the actual steps and processes to guide to technical SEO issues and fixes.

I have assumed that you already have set up your Google Search Console, Google Analytics and some other SEO audit tools you might need, actually to get to work on these technical fixes. 

1. Website Indexing

If your website is crawled by Google, has been analysed for content and is stored on Google index, it is said to be indexed. 

And, how do you check if it’s indexed? Simply perform a site search on Google. 

• Go to Google Search, type “site:yourwebsite.com” and search.
• Replace ‘yourwebsite.com’ with your actual website name. This will display all of your Google-indexed web pages on your website.

• If you want to check for a specific URL, replace ‘yourwebsite.com’ with the URL of the web page or blog posts you want to check to index. For example, site:yourwebsite.com/blog/technical-SEO/.

You can also use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console to check the indexing status. Simply copy and paste the URL you want to check the index status of.

2. Sitemap

A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on a website, helping search engines understand its structure and crawl it more efficiently. There are two main types of sitemaps:

• XML Sitemaps: Created for search engines to index pages properly.
• HTML Sitemaps: Designed for users to navigate a website easily.

You can check the sitemap for your website either manually or with the Google Search Console (GSC).

To check the sitemap manually:

• Open a web browser and type: https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml
• If an XML file appears with page URLs, the sitemap exists.

To check with GSC:

• Go to Google Search Console > Indexing > Sitemaps.
• If a sitemap is already submitted, check its status to ensure it is error-free.

If your website is missing a sitemap, you can generate one with tools like Yoast SEO (WordPress), Google XML Sitemaps, or Screaming Frog. Then, upload it to your website’s root directory (yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml) and submit it to Google Search Console.

3. Crawl Errors

Look for any crawl errors or broken links that could prevent search engines from accessing your site’s pages. You can use tools like Google Search Console, AHREFS or Screaming Frog to check for these errors.

I use ScreamingFrog to check any crawl errors and URL issues. It does the work for most technical URL issues and fixes. 

4. URL Structure And Site Architecture

The URL structure of your website should be clear and descriptive, using standard naming conventions to help search engines understand the content of each page. You should check for issues such as lengthy, dynamic URLs or those containing parameters that can confuse crawlers. 

Example of a good URL structure:

• https://example.com/shoes/running/nike-air-max

Bad URL Example:

• https://example.com/p=12345

One of the best ways to figure out complex URLs is by downloading an Excel version of your website URLs with Search Console or Google Analytics and using filters. However, you can also perform a site crawl with Screaming Frog, Ahrefs or SEMrush.

To check if your website’s URL structure is SEO-friendly:

• Check for URLs with too many tracking parameters (?sessionid=123, &ref=abc). These can create duplicate content issues.
• Ensure consistency in URL formatting. It’s best if the URLs are kept in lowercase to avoid duplicate versions. Also, avoid numbers, symbols, and unnecessary words.
• Find orphaned pages and deep URLs as orphaned pages (pages without internal links) may not be indexed.

You need to exclude or delete the pages you don’t need anymore or are outdated which also helps you to manage Google’s crawl budget. Add internal links to orphaned pages to ensure they are indexed and add keyword-rich anchor text for these internal links.

Clean up your site by using Google Analytics to find the pages with no sessions & visits in the past 3 months, and deleting and/or redirecting them as necessary.

5. Page speed and performance

Page speed is an important ranking factor, so make sure your site’s pages load quickly. You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to check your site’s page speed. 

Core Web Vitals are performance indicators and page experience signals introduced by Google in May 2021, that assess a website’s user experience. Site speed and visual stability are among these measures.

The core web vitals are the ranking factors for Google’s search algorithm to offer a better user experience. So, you must optimise your website for Core Web Vitals.

You can do this in several ways.

• To start with, go to Google Page Speed Insights Tool and enter your website’s URL.
• Then, the tool will score your website based on different factors and also let you know the areas of improvement, including core web vitals optimisations for a better score.
• You can improve the loading speed of their website by using a content distribution network (CDN), optimising images, compressing files, and minimising HTTP requests.
• Improve interactivity by reducing the time it takes for users to interact with the website by using plugins for cache, minifying code and optimising images. 
• Finally, you can improve visual stability by reducing layout shifts, which occur when elements on the page move unexpectedly by setting sizes for images and videos, avoiding dynamic content, and using CSS for layout.

These should help improve Google’s page experience signals or your website’s Core Web Vitals score.

6. Mobile-Friendliness

As more people use mobile devices to browse the web, it’s essential to ensure your site is optimised for mobile and tablets. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check if your site is mobile-friendly.

How to Check Mobile-Friendliness:

• Lighthouse: A free tool that analyses whether a page is optimised for mobile users.
• Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability Report: Identifies mobile usability issues across your site.
• Manual Testing: Navigate your site on various mobile devices to assess performance, readability, and ease of use.

To fix the issue, you should use a responsive web design. In addition, optimising page speed and touchscreen usability are other ways to mix mobile-friendliness issues.

7. Internal Linking

Internal links are links on your website that go to other pages on the same site. The purpose of these links is to make your website user-friendly, ensure page accessibility and link relevant web content.

You can use tools like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to find out details of your internal links.

Common internal linking issues are:

• Broken Internal Links: You could use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs to find broken links that return a 404 error.
• Orphan Pages: These are pages that aren’t linked to other pages within the site. These pages can go unnoticed by search engines, which is why it is important to use a site audit tool to identify them.
• Excessive or Insufficient Internal Links: Some pages might have too many internal links, diluting link equity, while others might lack links, making them hard to navigate.
• Redirect Chains and Loops: Redirect chains are links that pass through multiple redirects, which can slow down loading times and waste crawl budget.

If the links are broken or not balanced, fix the links or use redirects. Check if the anchor texts are relevant and are used as necessary. Add links to every relevant page, unless you do not want Google & users to see the page.

Apart from these, you can also review if any links are buried in the menus and are difficult for users to find. Linking the pages in your website properly helps to pass the link juice and ultimately improve SEO.

Another thing you might want to look at is the link profile audit and the ratio of external links to internal links. Try to use more high-value links (high DA, search traffic and relevancy) as much as possible.

The number of links coming to the page should not be super imbalanced. For example, if the number of internal links pointing to a page is 100, you might want to keep external links pointing to the page to around 100, not 1 or 1000.

8. Schema Markup & Rich Results For Search Engines

Adding schema markup to your site’s pages can help web search engines, as well as the users, understand the content of your pages and what your page is really about.

By implementing schema markup, you can enable rich results (also known as rich snippets), which enhance your search listings with additional information like ratings, reviews, product prices, event details, FAQs, and more.

These visually enriched results improve click-through rates (CTR), increase visibility, and make your website more attractive in search engine results pages.

Check if your page supports rich results with Google Rich Results Test Tool.

The rich data assists Google and users in better understanding your website content. This includes the type of page content, the author, the date of release, reviews, price and much more.

Similarly, you can also implement Schema markup in different ways.

• Begin by choosing the most relevant schema for your content, such as Product, FAQPage, Article, Event, LocalBusiness, or Breadcrumb.
• Since Google recommends JSON-LD over Microdata or RDF, use JSON-LD to prepare your schema.
• Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Results Test to identify and correct syntax issues or missing fields in your schema.
• Once your schema is good and running, simply add them to your site with an SEO plugin like Yoast or RankMath.

Search engines penalise websites that use misleading structured data, so it is important that the schema accurately reflects the content on the page.

It is also important to periodically check and update your schema as search engine guidelines continue to evolve over time.

9. Robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells search engines which pages or sections of a website should or shouldn’t be crawled. However, a poorly configured robots.txt file can block essential pages from being indexed, which then negatively impacts search rankings.

For instance, you might use robots.txt to exclude sites with duplicate pages or low-quality content or to prohibit Google from crawling pages with sensitive or private information.

To check if your robots.txt file is correctly used:

• Visit yourwebsite.com/robots.txt
• You could also use the “Robots.txt Tester” in Google Search Console to help identify errors

If your website lacks a robots.txt file or has incorrect configurations, you can fix the issues with simple steps described below:

• Use a plain text editor like Notepad or an online robots.txt generator to create the file.
• In the file, use proper directives based on whether you want the pages to be crawled or blocked.

For example,

If you want to block search engines from crawling the page ‘abc.com/user-info’ using robots.txt, you would add the following code to the file:

User-agent: *Disallow: /user-info

• Once your file is ready, place it in your website’s root footer and test with the “Robots.txt Tester” in Google Search Console.

While robots.txt may help to control how search engine bots scan and index your website, some search engine crawlers may disregard the instructions in the robots.txt file and some may misinterpret them.

For this, try to align robots.txt with other SEO aspects such as meta tags, canonical tags, and XML sitemap.

Looking to sharpen your SEO skills? Here’s our comprehensive guide on on-page SEO.

Tools For Technical SEO Audit & Fixes

1. Screaming Frog

ScreamingFrog is a great tool for scanning websites to find out technical issues. It is simple to use but powerful and can assist you in analysing a site structure and identifying technical faults that may be causing your website to fall behind in search engine results.

Price: Free version crawls 500 URLs, $259 per year per license, which performs unlimited crawls

Rating: 4.9/5

Key Features:

• Crawls websites like a search engine bot to identify SEO issues.
• Finds 404 errors, redirects, and broken internal and external links.
• Helps identify duplicate pages and improper canonicalisation.
• Reviews and audits robots.txt files and sitemap structures for SEO consistency.
• Checks if schema markup is implemented correctly.
• Connects with Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google PageSpeed Insights.

2. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool provided by Google that helps website owners and SEO professionals monitor, analyse, and optimise their websites for search engine visibility. It also gives you insights into how Google crawls and indexes your site.

Similar to Google Analytics, it is can be used to view organic search performance on Google. It can also sometimes serve as a bridge between Google Search Engine and your website.

Key Features:

• Tracks clicks, impressions, click-through rates (CTR), and average position in Google Search results.
• Identifies indexing issues, including pages that are not indexed, blocked, or returning errors.
• Detects mobile-friendliness issues and provides recommendations for improvement.
• Checks the indexing status of individual pages and requests reindexing for updated content.
• Allows users to submit XML sitemaps.
• Displays errors and enhancements for schema markup and structured data.

3. AHREFS

AHREFs is a great SEO tool for all-around optimisations (on-page, technical and off-page SEO) including monitoring & building your website’s backlink profile, tracking keyword ranks, and content marketing.

It also has a great SEO audit tool that specifically scans your entire website for technical errors, tracks tech issues and fixes them.

Price: Free, paid version starting at $99/month

Rating: 4.7/5

Key Features:

• The Site Audit Tool conducts an in-depth crawl of your website and provides a technical SEO health score.
• Detects weak internal linking structures and suggests optimisation.
• Flags slow-loading pages
• Identifies missing or incorrect schema markup that can prevent rich results from appearing in search.
• Detects unnecessary 301/302 redirects and redirect chains and loops that slow down crawling.

4. Google Page Speed Insights

PageSpeed Insights by Google assesses your website’s loading speed and makes recommendations for enhancing its performance. It will score your site speed and performance and help you identify technical issues that may be slowing down your website.

Price: Free

Rating: 4.8/5

Key Features:

• Provides Core web vitals assessment and page load speed data.
• Provides separate performance scores for mobile and desktop versions of a site.
• Detects slow server response times and suggests upgrading hosting solutions.
• Suggests speed optimisation techniques like image compression, minification of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript and enabling browser caching.

Related Read: How to Score Perfectly on Google Page Speed Insights Test Tool?

5. Lighthouse

Lighthouse tool assesses how well your website performs & the website UX on mobile devices and makes recommendations for mobile optimisation.

This free tool provides instant feedback on how a website performs on mobile screens and identifies issues affecting mobile usability.

6. Rich Results Test

The Rich Results Test is a free tool provided by Google that allows website owners and SEO professionals to check whether their structured data is correctly implemented and eligible for rich results.

The tool also identifies errors, warnings, and missing properties in structured data, helping to ensure compliance with Google’s guidelines.

8. Redirect Path Plugin

The redirect path plugin is for anyone who would like to quickly identify and analyse HTTP status codes and redirection chains on a website.

It helps detect 301 (permanent), 302 (temporary), 404 (not found), and 500 (server errors), among others. Since it is available in the extension form, it is available on Chrome and Firefox, allowing quick analysis without additional software.

There are other tools like Yoast, RankMath, Google Analytics and SEMRush that directly or indirectly contribute to technical SEO.

Read More: Top Link Building Methods For Your WordPress Website

Fix SEO Issues Fast with WP Creative

At WP Creative, we do more than just build and design websites. We make sure your site is technically set up for SEO success. As a top WordPress development agency in Australia, we focus on technical SEO audits, improving site speed, ensuring mobile compatibility, and building secure, search-friendly websites.

Our team finds and fixes crawling problems, indexing issues, broken links, and performance slowdowns to help your pages rank better and run smoothly. Ready to optimise your site? Get in touch with us today!

Key Takeaways

Technical SEO is essential for boosting website visibility and performance. Regular audits help identify and fix important issues like site speed, mobile optimisation, and crawlability, which improve both search engine rankings and user experience.

Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog make it easier to spot and resolve problems. Keeping up with technical SEO ensures your website stays optimised and meets current SEO standards.

FAQs

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO helps you set up the foundations of your website in the right way to ensure that search engines crawl your website. Not working on technical issues may result in difficulties for search engines to find and crawl your website to rank it in SERP. All in all, it helps search engines better understand & index pages and improve the overall website experience.

Is an SEO audit worth it?

Yes, an SEO audit is definitely worth it if you want to improve your SEO performance. An audit is a great way to discover technical, content, and off-site SEO issues that are preventing a website from ranking better in SERPs.

What does technical SEO include?

Technical SEO includes your overall SEO site audit, but its scope can vary with website sizes and current SEO status. Some of the optimisation areas that technical SEO include is Site architecture, sitemap, indexing, URL issues (404/301/200), internal linking, hreflang setup, duplicate pages, SSL certificates, site speed improvements, structured data and more.

How long does a technical SEO audit take?

Technical SEO audit might take anywhere between 2-6 weeks depending on the size of your website. During the process, SEO professionals assess the existing situation of the technical website optimisations to create a site audit report, which then helps to create SEO plans and strategies. The time also depends on how often you have been assessing your website’s SEO factors. SEO takes time.

What should you fix first while working on technical SEO?

You should start by fixing crawlability and indexing issues to ensure that your important pages aren’t blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags. This is then followed by fixing broken links, site structure, and internal linking to improve navigation.

How do you perform technical SEO?

To start with, conduct a website technical SEO audit to find out the issues and potential areas of improvement, which are affecting SEO. The audit will then help you figure out the SEO plan of action to improve your website’s SEO.

This plan generally includes fixing and reviewing every technical aspect of your website as per your needs, including URL management, website architecture, site speed, sitemaps, link errors, implementing schema, mobile friendliness check, optimising metadata and more. We can use tools like Search Console, Google Analytics, AHREFS, Screaming Frog and others to implement these fixes and validate optimisations.

What is the difference between technical and on-page SEO?

Technical SEO involves site audit and optimising the technical factors of your website like XML sitemaps, site structure, fixing broken links and indexing issues that affect your website’s SEO performance. While on-page SEO focuses rather on optimising the content of your website, like text content, images, titles & meta descriptions and keyword usage. Most of the on-page optimisations do not require expert website development knowledge,e which technical optimisations may require.

Is there a limit to how many web pages Google bots can crawl or index?

Google doesn’t have a fixed limit, but it allocates a crawl budget based on a site’s authority, health, and server capacity. Large sites may have limits on how frequently and deeply Google crawls their pages. Optimising site structure, internal linking, and page speed helps maximise the crawl efficiency.