What Is Technical SEO?

Basics and 10 Best Practices

semrush.com/blog/technical-seo/

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for search engines, but it can also
include activities meant to improve user experience.

Common tasks associated with technical SEO include the following:

Submitting your sitemap to Google

Creating an SEO-friendly site structure
Improving your website’s speed
Making your website mobile-friendly
Finding and fixing duplicate content issues
Much more

In this post, you’ll learn the fundamentals and best practices to optimize your website for
technical SEO.

Let’s dive in.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

Technical SEO can greatly impact a website’s performance on Google.

If pages on your site are not accessible to search engines, they won’t appear or rank in
search results—no matter how valuable your content is.

This results in a loss of traffic to your website and potential revenue to your business.

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Plus, the page speed and mobile-friendliness of a website are Google-confirmed ranking
factors.

If your pages load slowly, users may get annoyed and leave your site. User behaviors like
this may signal that your site doesn’t create a positive user experience. As a result,
Google may not rank your site well.

Understanding Crawling
The first step in optimizing your site for technical SEO is making sure search engines can
effectively crawl it.

Crawling is an essential component of how search engines work.

Crawling happens when search engines follow links on pages they already know about to
find pages they haven’t seen before.

For example, every time we publish new blog posts, we add them to our blog archive
page.

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So the next time a search engine like Google crawls our blog page, it sees the recently
added links to new blog posts.

And that’s one of the ways Google discovers our new blog posts.

If you want your pages to show up in search results, you first need to ensure that they are
accessible to search engines.

There are a few ways to do this:

Create SEO-Friendly Site Architecture

Site architecture, also called site structure, is the way pages are linked together within
your site.

An effective site structure organizes pages in a way that helps crawlers find your website
content quickly and easily.

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So when structuring your site, ensure all the pages are just a few clicks away from your
homepage.

Like so:

In the site structure above, all the pages are organized in a logical hierarchy.

The homepage links to category pages. And then, category pages link to individual
subpages on the site.

This structure also reduces the number of orphan pages.

Orphan pages are pages with no internal links pointing to them, making it difficult (or
sometimes impossible) for crawlers and users to find those pages.

Pro tip: If you are a Semrush user, you can easily find whether your site has any orphan
pages.

Set up a project in the Site Audit tool and crawl your website.

Once the crawl is complete, navigate to the “Issues” tab and search for “orphan.”

The tool shows whether your site has any orphan pages.

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To fix the issue, add internal links on non-orphan pages that point to the orphaned pages.

Submit Your Sitemap to Google

Using a sitemap can help Google find your webpages.

A sitemap is typically an XML file containing a list of important pages on your site. It lets
search engines know which pages you have and where to find them.

Which is especially important if your site contains a lot of pages. Or if they’re not well-
linked together.

Here’s what Semrush’s sitemap looks like:

Your sitemap is usually located at one of these two URLs:

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 yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

Once you locate your sitemap, submit it to Google via GSC (Google Search Console).

Quick note: If you don’t already have GSC set up, read this guide to activate it for your
site.

To submit your sitemap to Google, go to GSC and click “Indexing” > “Sitemaps” from the
sidebar.

Then, paste your sitemap URL in the blank and hit “Submit.”

After Google is done processing your sitemap, you should see a confirmation message
like this:

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Understanding Indexing
Once search engines crawl your pages, they then try to analyze and understand the
content of those pages.

And then the search engine stores those pieces of content in its search index—a huge
database containing billions of webpages.

The pages of your site must be indexed by search engines to appear in search results.

The simplest way to check if your pages are indexed is to perform a “site:” search.

For example, if you want to check the index status of semrush.com, you’ll type
site:www.semrush.com into Google’s search box.

This tells you how many pages from the site Google has indexed.

You can also check whether individual pages are indexed by searching the page URL
with “site:” search.

Like this:

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A few things can keep Google from indexing your webpages:

Noindex Tag

The “noindex” tag is an HTML snippet that keeps your pages out of Google’s index.

It’s placed within the <head> section of your webpage and looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Ideally, you would want all your important pages to get indexed. So use the “noindex” tag
only when you want to exclude certain pages from indexing.

These could be:

“Thank you” pages

PPC landing pages

To learn more about using “noindex” tags and how to avoid common implementation
mistakes, read our guide to robots meta tags.

Canonicalization

When Google finds similar content on multiple pages on your site, it sometimes doesn’t
know which of the pages to index and show in search results.

That’s when canonical tags come in handy.

The canonical tag (rel="canonical") identifies a link as the original version, which tells
Google which page it should index and rank.

The tag is nested within the <head> of a duplicate page and looks like this:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-page/" />

To learn more about canonical tags and how to implement them correctly, read our guide
to canonical URLs.

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Technical SEO Best Practices
Creating an SEO-friendly site structure and submitting your sitemap to Google should get
your pages crawled and indexed.

But if you want your website to be fully optimized for technical SEO, consider these
additional best practices.

1. Use HTTPS

HTTPS is a secure version of HTTP.

It helps protect sensitive user information like passwords and credit card details from
being compromised.

And it’s been a ranking signal since 2014.

You can check whether your site uses HTTPS by simply visiting it.

Just look for the “lock” icon in the address bar to confirm.

If you see the “Not secure” warning, you’re not using HTTPS.

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In this case, you need to install an SSL certificate.

An SSL certificate authenticates the identity of the website. And establishes a secure
connection when users are accessing it.

You can get an SSL certificate for free from Let’s Encrypt.

Important: Once your website moves over to HTTPS, ensure you add redirects from
HTTP to the HTTPS version of your website. This will redirect all the users visiting your
HTTP version to the secure, HTTPS version of your site.

2. Make Sure Only One Version of Your Website Is Accessible to Users

and Crawlers

Users and crawlers should only be able to access one of these two versions of your site:

https://yourwebsite.com
https://www.yourwebsite.com

Having both versions accessible creates duplicate content issues.

And reduces the effectiveness of your backlink profile—some websites may link to the
“www” version, while others link to the “non-www” version.

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This can negatively affect your performance in Google.

So only use one version of your website. And redirect the other version to your main
website.

3. Improve Your Page Speed

Page speed is a ranking factor both on mobile and desktop.

So make sure your site loads as fast as possible.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your website’s current speed.

It gives you a performance score from 0 to 100. The higher the number, the better.

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Here’re few ideas for improving your website speed:

Compress your images – Images are usually the biggest files on a webpage.
Compressing them with image optimization tools like Shortpixel will reduce their file
size so they take as little time to load as possible.
Use CDN (content distribution network) – CDN stores copies of your webpages
on servers around the globe. It then connects visitors to the nearest server, so
there’s less distance for the requested files to travel.
Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files – Minification removes unnecessary
characters and whitespace from code to reduce file sizes. Which improves page
load time.

4. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means that it looks at mobile versions of
webpages to index and rank content.

So make sure your website is compatible on mobile devices.

To check if that’s the case for your site, head over to the “Mobile Usability” report in
Google Search Console.

The report shows you the number of pages that affect mobile usability.

Along with specific issues.

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If you don’t have Google Search Console, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
tool.

5. Implement Structured Data

Structured data helps Google better understand the content of a page.

And by adding the right structured data markup code, your pages can win rich snippets.

Rich snippets are more appealing search results with additional information appearing
under the title and description.

Example:

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The benefit of rich snippets is that they make your pages stand out from others. Which
can improve your CTR (click-through rate).

Google supports dozens of structured data markups, so choose one that best fits the
nature of the pages you want to add structured data to.

For example, if you run an ecommerce store, adding product structured data to your
product pages makes sense.

Here’s what the sample code might look like for a page selling the iPhone 14 Pro:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Product",
"name": "iPhone 14 Pro",
"image": "",
"brand": {
"@type": "Brand",
"name": "Apple"
},
"offers": {
"@type": "Offer",
"url": "",
"priceCurrency": "USD",
"price": "1099",
"availability": "https://schema.org/InStock",
"itemCondition": "https://schema.org/NewCondition"
},
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.8"
}
}
</script>

There are plenty of free structured data generator tools like this one, so you don’t have to
write the code by hand.

And if you’re using WordPress, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to implement
structured data.

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6. Find & Fix Duplicate Content Issues
Duplicate content is when you have exact- or near-duplicate content on multiple pages on
your site.

For example, this page from Buffer appears at two different URLs:

1. https://buffer.com/resources/social-media-manager-checklist/
2. https://buffer.com/library/social-media-manager-checklist/

Google doesn’t penalize sites for having duplicate content.

But duplicate content can cause other issues, such as:

Undesirable URLs ranking in search results

Backlink dilution
Wasted crawl budget

With Semrush’s Site Audit tool, you can find out whether your site has duplicate content
issues.

Start by running a full crawl of your site in the Site Audit tool and then going to the
“Issues” tab.

Then, search for “duplicate content.” The tool will show the error if you have duplicate
content and offer advice on how to fix it.

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Learn more: Duplicate Content: SEO Best Practices to Avoid It

7. Find & Fix Broken Pages

Having broken pages on your website negatively affects user experience.

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And if those pages have backlinks, they go wasted because they point to dead resources.

To find broken pages on your site, crawl your site using Semrush’s Site Audit. Then go to
the “Issues” tab. And search for “4xx.”

It’ll show you if you have broken pages on your site. Click on the “# pages” link to get a
list of broken pages.

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To fix broken pages, you have two options:

1. Reinstate pages that were accidentally deleted

2. Redirect older posts with backlinks to other relevant pages on your site

After fixing your broken pages, you need to remove or update any internal links that point
to your newly deleted or redirected pages.

To do that, go back to the “Issues” tab. And search for “internal links.” The tool will show
you if you have broken internal links.

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If you do, click on the “# internal links” button to see a full list of broken pages with links
pointing to them. And click on a specific URL to learn more.

In the next page, hit the “X URLs” button, found under “Incoming Internal Links,” to get a
list of pages pointing to that broken page.

Replace internal links to broken pages with links to your newly fixed pages.

8. Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are speed metrics that Google uses to measure user experience.

These metrics include:

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 Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – Calculates the time a webpage takes to load its
largest element for a user
First Input Delay (FID) – Measures the time it takes to react to a user's first
interaction with a webpage.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – Measures the shifts in layouts of various
elements present on a webpage

To ensure your website is optimized for Core Web Vitals, you need to aim for the following
scores:

LCP –2.5 sec or lower

FID – 100 ms or lower
CLS – 0.1 or lower

You can check your website’s performance for Core Web Vitals metrics in Google Search
Console.

To do this, visit the Core Web Vitals report in your Search Console.

You can also use Semrush to see a report specifically created for Core Web Vitals
performance.

In the Site Audit tool, navigate to “Core Web Vitals” and click “View details.”

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This will open a report with a detailed record of your site's Core Web Vitals performance
and recommendations for fixing each issue.

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Learn more: Core Web Vitals: A Guide to Improving Page Speed

9. Use Hreflang for Content in Multiple Languages

If your site has content in multiple languages, you need to use hreflang tags.

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used for specifying a webpage's language and

geographical targeting.

It helps Google serve the language- and country-specific versions of your pages to users.

For example, we have multiple versions of our homepage in different languages. This is
our homepage in English:

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And here’s our homepage in Spanish:

Each of these versions uses hreflang tags to tell Google about the page’s language and
geographical targeting.

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This tag is reasonably simple to implement.

Just add the appropriate hreflang tags in the <head> section of all versions of the page.

For example, if you have your homepage in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, you’ll add
these hreflang tags to all of those pages:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://yourwebsite.com" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es” href="https://yourwebsite.com/es/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="pt” href="https://yourwebsite.com/pt/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en” href="https://yourwebsite.com" />

Learn more: Hreflang tags for SEO

10. Stay On Top of Technical SEO Issues

Technical SEO isn't a one-off thing. New problems will likely pop up over time.

That’s why regularly monitoring your technical SEO health and fixing issues as they arise
is important.

You can do this using Semrush’s Site Audit tool. It monitors over 140 technical SEO
issues for your site.

For example, if we audit Petco’s website in Semrush, we find three redirect chains and
loops.

Redirect chains and loops are bad for SEO because they contribute to negative user
experience.

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And you’re unlikely to spot them by chance.

So this issue would have likely gone unnoticed without a crawl-based audit.

Regularly running these technical SEO audits gives you action items to improve your
SEO.

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