Josh Willett · November 2025

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the invisible engine of your website. Ever wondered why your competitors appear above you on Google, even when your content is better? Nine times out of ten, it is technical SEO.

What Technical SEO Actually Means

Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes optimisations that help search engines find, crawl, and index your website efficiently. While on-page SEO deals with what your content says, and off-page SEO deals with your authority across the web, technical SEO deals with how your website is built and whether it functions the way Google expects.

A technically weak website can undermine every other SEO effort you make. You can have excellent content, strong backlinks, and a well-optimised Google Business Profile, and still struggle to rank if Google cannot properly access and evaluate your site. Our on-page and technical SEO service addresses all of these foundations.

The Core Areas of Technical SEO

Site speed and Core Web Vitals

Google uses page experience as a ranking signal, and Core Web Vitals are central to that. These metrics measure how quickly your page loads, how stable the layout is as it loads, and how quickly it responds to user input. Sites that perform poorly on these measures rank lower than those that meet the thresholds, regardless of content quality.

Mobile usability

Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means it primarily uses the mobile version of your website when deciding how to rank your pages. If your site is difficult to use on a smartphone, loads slowly on mobile connections, or has elements that are too small to tap, your rankings will suffer.

Crawlability and indexation

For your pages to rank, Google needs to be able to find them and add them to its index. Technical SEO ensures your robots.txt file is not accidentally blocking important pages, your sitemap is correctly structured and submitted, and no crawl errors are preventing Google from accessing your content.

HTTPS and security

HTTPS is a baseline ranking signal and a trust indicator for visitors. Any website without a valid SSL certificate is marked as "Not Secure" in Chrome, which damages both rankings and conversion rates.

Structured data and schema markup

Schema markup is code added to your pages that helps Google understand what your content means, not just what it says. For local businesses, this includes LocalBusiness schema, which helps Google surface your address, opening hours, and service area in search results. For local SEO, schema is a valuable signal.

Why Technical SEO Matters for B2B Industrial Businesses

Many industrial and commercial websites have been built over time without a technical SEO foundation. Pages accumulate, old content sits uncrawled, redirect chains build up from website redesigns, and duplicate content issues emerge from product catalogue structures.

These problems do not stop a website from functioning. But they do cap its potential in search. A site with these issues will almost always underperform a structurally clean competitor, even if the content is stronger.

The starting point is a proper SEO audit. This identifies the specific technical issues affecting your site, prioritises them by impact, and gives you a clear action plan. Technical fixes often deliver some of the fastest ranking improvements in any SEO campaign because they remove the barriers that were suppressing performance across multiple pages simultaneously.

We also connect your Google Business Profile to a technically strong website, ensuring the full local SEO picture is working together rather than each element operating in isolation.

Frequently Asked Questions

A full technical audit should be done at least once a year, or any time you make significant changes to your website such as a redesign, migration, or major content overhaul. We also recommend monthly crawl checks to catch issues like broken links, crawl errors, and page speed regressions before they affect your rankings.
Yes. Page speed, mobile usability, and crawlability all influence how Google ranks your site in local search results. A technically sound website gives your on-page and local SEO efforts a stronger foundation to build on.
Core Web Vitals are a set of page experience metrics Google uses as ranking signals. They measure how quickly your page loads (Largest Contentful Paint), how stable the layout is as it loads (Cumulative Layout Shift), and how quickly it responds to user interaction (Interaction to Next Paint). Pages that pass Core Web Vitals thresholds tend to rank better than those that do not.

Josh Willett

Founder, SEO YOLO

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