What Makes a Website 'Technically' SEO-Friendly?

Technical SEO sounds intimidating, but don’t worry, you don’t need to be a developer to get this.

In a nutshell, Technical SEO is just about making sure your website works. Both for Google and for the people using it.

It’s the same concept as building a house. The foundations are the most important,  so that everything else on top is easier to build, and lasts longer. In this case, technical SEO is what makes sure your content gets seen, crawled, and understood, without any weird roadblocks.

The Core Elements That Matter

There are three core elements that matter, The first is Mobile usability,  Your site has to work well on a phone. And I’m not talking about just scraping the surface, instead it has to look seamless. If you’ve ever gone on a naff website that required you to tap in and have to zoom or swipe like mad just to read a line of text, you probably just clicked straight back off it. The problem, is that Google notices this and marks down your website as a result

The second is Site speed, this is a big one. If your site takes more than a couple of seconds to load, people won’t stick around. Google watches for that too, and it can hurt your rankings.

The third is Structure. Make it easy to navigate. Clear menus, sensible page links, and a layout that actually helps people find stuff. If a person visiting your site can’t find a page, a Googlebot definitely won’t.

Common Technical Problems

Broken links create dead ends that frustrate users - and waste Google's crawling resources. Nobody likes clicking on a link and landing on an error page. It’s frustrating for users and tells Google your site might be neglected - never a good look.

Another technical problem is crawl blocks, this happens when you accidentally tell Google not to access important pages through robots.txt files or other technical restrictions, so double-check that you're not hiding pages you do want ranked.