What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the work that lets a search engine reach, read and trust your pages: crawling, indexing, speed, mobile layout, structured data and site structure. It is not about the words on the page. It is about whether the page can be found and understood at all.

What is the difference between SEO and technical SEO?

SEO is the whole job of being found in search. Technical SEO is one part of it: the foundation.

Think of a shop. Technical SEO is the door being open, the lights being on and the aisles being labelled. Content is what is on the shelves. Links and reviews are the people who tell their friends to go. A shop with great stock and a locked door sells nothing, and a spotless empty shop sells nothing either. You need all of it, in that order.

What are the four types of SEO?

• On-page SEO. What a page says and how it is put together: the title, the headings, the answer, the internal links.
• Off-page SEO. What the rest of the web says about you: links, mentions and reviews.
• Technical SEO. Whether search engines can crawl, index and render the site, and how fast it is.
• Local SEO. The map results: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and a page for each place you serve.

What a technical audit checks

• Crawling. Is anything blocked in robots.txt? Is there a sitemap, and is it correct?
• Indexing. Which pages has Google indexed, which has it refused, and why? Stray noindex tags and wrong canonicals are common causes.
• Speed. The Core Web Vitals: how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds, and whether the layout jumps while loading.
• Mobile. Google ranks the phone version of your site. Text size, tap targets and layout on a small screen all count.
• Structured data. Markup that tells Google what the business is, where it is, and what a page contains.
• Structure. Internal links, redirect chains, broken links, duplicate pages.
• Security. HTTPS on every page, with no mixed content.

When you need it

• The site was rebuilt or moved and traffic dropped afterwards
• Pages you care about are not in Google at all
• The site is slow on a phone
• You publish good pages and nothing happens

In each of those, writing more content will not help until the cause is found. That is what an audit is for. Mine is $1,500, one time, and you get the list of what is wrong in the order I would fix it.