Technical SEO Tips: A Simple Guide to Fix Your Website's Hidden Problems

Mobile devices generate almost 60 percent of all web traffic today. Users quickly leave websites that load slower than three seconds – about 53% of them.

These numbers show why technical SEO tips play a significant role in your website’s performance. Search engines have trouble finding, crawling and indexing sites with poor technical SEO. Load time directly impacts visitor behavior – when pages take 1 to 5 seconds to load, bounce rates jump by 90%.

Your site needs a strong technical foundation to rank well in search results, regardless of your content quality. Technical SEO optimization helps search engines better understand and index your website by improving its infrastructure.

Let’s explore seven practical fixes that solve hidden technical SEO issues on your website. These trailblazing solutions, from better site structure to structured data markup, will boost your rankings, traffic and conversions.

Table of Contents

What is Technical SEO and Why It Matters

Your website’s search engine visibility depends on technical SEO. It helps search engines crawl, understand, and index your content by optimizing your website’s infrastructure. Technical SEO focuses on your site’s architecture, speed, mobile usability, and overall health, unlike content-focused strategies.

Picture technical SEO as building a house’s framework before decorating it. A beautiful house needs solid structure to be functional and safe. The same applies to your content – it won’t reach your audience without proper technical optimization.

Technical SEO covers several key elements that determine how search engines interact with your website:

Site structure and architecture: Creating clear hierarchy and navigation paths
Page speed optimization: Studies show users abandon approximately 53% of websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load
Mobile-friendliness: Essential since Google primarily uses mobile-first indexing
Security: Implementing HTTPS protocols
Crawlability: Ensuring search engines can access and understand your content
Indexability: Making sure your pages can be properly stored in search engine databases

On-page SEO prioritizes content quality and relevance. Yet technical SEO ensures search engines can access that content first. On top of that, it affects user experience, which search engines value highly in rankings.

Your SEO performance can succeed or fail based on technical SEO. Pages won’t show up in search results if search engines can’t find them – whatever the content quality. This means lost traffic and revenue for your business.

Site speed and mobile-friendliness are proven ranking signals. Visitors leave quickly when pages load slowly. Search engines see these behaviors as signs of poor experience and may lower your rankings.

Here’s the reality: you might spend a lot on great content, but neglecting your technical foundation is like “building luxury trains while neglecting the rails they run on”. The best train will derail without proper tracks.

Search engines have limited resources to crawl websites. A well-built technical foundation helps them use these resources better and index your important pages first.

A fast, mobile-friendly website with clear navigation reduces bounce rates and boosts conversions. Users trust websites that load quickly and work well on all devices. Your website’s technical quality signals its credibility and professionalism. Slow loading times, security warnings, or broken features quickly erode user trust.

Modern search engines want technically sound websites. Recent updates look at how well your technical setup supports content delivery and understanding. Your content won’t compete for top rankings without good technical optimization.

Technical SEO creates the framework that lets search engines find, understand, and trust your content. Time spent on technical SEO best practices builds a strong base for all your other SEO work.

Fix 1: Improve Your Site Structure

A well-laid-out website builds the groundwork for technical SEO that works. Your site’s structure guides how visitors and search engines move through your content. The way you arrange your site in a logical hierarchy helps search engines grasp the connections between pages and spread authority across your website.

Use a clear hierarchy

Your website structure should look like an upside-down pyramid or tree. Place your homepage at the top, add main category pages below, then subcategory pages, and content pages at the bottom. This setup creates a clear path that users and search engines can follow.

Group pages with similar topics in directories or folders. Search engines learn how often URLs in specific directories change and adjust their crawl frequency. To name just one example, a “/policies/” directory might not change much, while a “/promotions/” directory needs frequent updates.

Your structure should be flat—important pages should be no more than three clicks away from the homepage. This setup makes the site easier to crawl and use. A logical hierarchy lets users quickly grasp how your website is organized.

Add internal links

Internal links connect different pages of your website. They serve three vital functions:

Improving crawlability – Search engines use internal links to find and index new pages on your site
Distributing authority – Internal links pass “link juice” from pages with many backlinks to other key pages
Providing context – The anchor text in your links tells users and search engines what they’ll find on the linked page

Create a thoughtful internal linking strategy instead of random connections. Link related content using descriptive anchor text rather than generic phrases like “click here”. This method builds your site’s topical authority and boosts your content’s visibility in search results.

Search engines struggle to find orphaned pages (pages without internal links pointing to them). Regular checks for orphaned pages and adding relevant internal links help both users and search engines find these pages.

Create and submit a sitemap

A sitemap works like a roadmap for search engines to find and process your content quickly. You should think over two main types of sitemaps:

XML sitemaps – These help search engines by listing all URLs in a crawler-friendly format
HTML sitemaps – These give users a clear overview of your website’s structure

XML sitemaps need to follow these rules:

Each sitemap should stay under 50MB or 50,000 URLs
Use UTF-8 encoding
Put your sitemap at the site root for best results
Use complete, absolute URLs (e.g., https://www.example.com/page.html instead of /page.html)

Submit your sitemap to Google through Search Console or list it in your robots.txt file. All the same, sitemaps should work as a backup, not replace good site architecture.

Use breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumbs are text-based navigation links that show users where they are in your site’s hierarchy. You’ll usually find them near the top of a webpage, showing the path from homepage to current page.

Breadcrumbs bring several benefits:

Users can see their location and move backward without the browser’s back button
They strengthen your internal linking structure
They make your site easier to crawl
They can improve how your site looks in search results with proper schema markup

Google suggests creating breadcrumbs that match typical user paths instead of just copying your URL structure. Use schema.org’s BreadcrumbList structured data markup to help search engines understand and show your breadcrumbs in search results.

A clear hierarchy, smart internal links, detailed sitemaps, and breadcrumb navigation create a strong foundation for technical SEO success.

Fix 2: Speed Up Your Website

Page speed is one of the most crucial technical SEO factors that boost search rankings and user experience. Studies show that 53% of visitors leave a site that loads slower than three seconds. Here are four of the quickest ways to speed up your website.

Compress images and files

Images with high resolution make up much of a webpage’s size and often cause slow-loading sites. Uncompressed images eat up bandwidth and make users frustrated, especially on mobile devices.

Here’s how you can optimize your images:

Use compression tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim to cut file sizes without losing quality
Pick the right file formats: JPEG for photographs with many colors, PNG for graphics that need clarity and transparency
Try next-gen formats like WebP and AVIF that give you smaller file sizes with better quality
Match image sizes to their display dimensions instead of scaling them with CSS

Note that image compression can cut file size by up to 80%. This change alone can speed up page load times by a lot, especially for sites with many images.

Enable browser caching

Browser caching keeps webpage elements stored locally in visitors’ browsers. Returning users’ browsers can load cached resources instead of downloading them again.

Here’s how to set up browser caching:

Set the right expiration times in your .htaccess file or through HTTP headers
Use Cache-Control and ETag headers to define caching policies
Set longer cache times for static content (like logos) and shorter ones for items that change often

Static assets that rarely change should be cached for at least a week, ideally up to a year. This cuts server requests, saves bandwidth, speeds up loading, and gives users a better experience.

Minify CSS and JavaScript

Minification strips unnecessary characters from your code—like white space, comments, and line breaks—while keeping functionality intact. This makes files smaller and pages load faster.

Minification gives you these benefits:

Smaller files that download faster
Less bandwidth use, helping both servers and users
Better search engine rankings thanks to faster loading

To name just one example, see this CSS transformation:

p {
  font-family: arial;
  color: green;
  background-color: white;
}

After minification, it becomes:

p{font-family:arial;color:green;background-color:white;}

Most content management systems come with minification plugins. You can also use tools like UglifyJS for JavaScript and CSSNano for stylesheets. Many developers combine minification with file bundling to cut down HTTP requests even more.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

A CDN uses servers spread across different locations to store cached versions of your website. Your visitors get content from the server closest to them.

CDNs bring several benefits:

Less delay by serving files from nearby locations
Lower server load through distributed delivery
Protection from traffic spikes and potential DDoS attacks
Better handling of rich media formats

Setting up a CDN is usually easy—many hosting providers include CDN integration or work with services like Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront. Once it’s running, your CDN can handle other optimization tasks like file compression and minification automatically.

Website speed optimization is the life-blood of effective technical SEO. These four optimization techniques—compressing images, enabling browser caching, minifying code, and using a CDN—will help you build a faster, more efficient site that users and search engines will love.

Fix 3: Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly

Mobile optimization has become the life-blood of technical SEO in our smartphone-dominated world. Mobile devices generate 63.38% of all website traffic as of September 2024. Your site must perform well on smaller screens. Google’s mobile-first indexing uses your site’s mobile version to rank and index pages. This makes mobile optimization crucial to any technical SEO strategy.

Use responsive design

Responsive design helps your website adjust its layout based on screen size. One version works on all devices, unlike having separate mobile and desktop versions. The design uses flexible grids, fluid images, and CSS media queries to adjust layouts. This creates a more dynamic and easy-to-use experience.

Responsive design brings several benefits to your technical SEO:

Simplified indexing: Google’s mobile-first indexing ensures content stays consistent across devices
Reduced bounce rates: People stay longer on mobile-friendly sites, and responsive sites see a 67% increase in purchase likelihood
Better crawling efficiency: Google crawls one version instead of separate mobile and desktop sites

Your responsive implementation needs these design standards:

A 4-point grid system helps with spacing and lineup
Standard 16px margins work best for mobile views
Fluid grids and flexible images should resize proportionally

Avoid intrusive pop-ups

Pop-ups that block content frustrate visitors and hurt your technical SEO performance. Google states that “intrusive interstitials and dialogs make it hard for search engines to understand your content, which may lead to poor search performance”.

Good user experience and effective SEO need these elements:

Small banner pop-ups instead of full-page interstitials
Pop-ups should appear after users reach the bottom of your page
Close buttons must be visible and easy to click on mobile screens
Your site should follow Google’s Better Ads Standard for mobile devices

Legal interstitials like age verification gates don’t fall under these rules. You should still try to overlay content with the interstitial. This lets Google index some of your content.

Test with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool

Your site’s performance needs testing on devices of all types before finalizing mobile optimization. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool helps you learn about your site’s mobile performance. The tool provides:

A clear pass/fail result that shows if Google sees your page as mobile-friendly
Details about issues affecting mobile performance if your site fails
A preview of your site’s mobile appearance

The tool often flags these common mobile issues:

Text too small to read: Text should be at least 16px
Clickable elements too close: Buttons and links need more space between them
Content wider than screen: Your viewport settings need proper setup

Test your site again after fixing these issues. Submit updated pages to Google Search Console for recrawling. This ensures search results reflect your changes.

Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report helps spot problems early. This prevents ranking drops and keeps your mobile performance strong.

Mobile optimization goes beyond screen size adaptation. It creates a natural and easy-to-use experience on smartphones and tablets. Your technical SEO foundation grows stronger with responsive design, smart pop-up usage, and regular testing. These elements boost your chances of ranking higher in mobile search results.

Fix 4: Secure Your Website with HTTPS

Security is a fundamental pillar of technical SEO, and websites today must implement HTTPS. Search engines give higher rankings to secure sites, which makes HTTPS a vital part of building user trust and search visibility. Here’s how you can secure your website with HTTPS.

Install an SSL certificate

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates create encrypted connections between web browsers and servers. These protect sensitive information from eavesdroppers and hackers. Your organization’s details are bound to a cryptographic key through these digital certificates, which lets your web server connect securely to visitors’ browsers.

Here’s how to install an SSL certificate:

Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your server
Submit the CSR to a Certificate Authority (CA) to purchase your certificate
Verify domain ownership through email verification or alternative methods
Install the certificate and any intermediate certificates on your server

You can choose from several SSL certificate types:

Single-domain certificates: Cover one domain name
Multi-domain certificates: Protect multiple domains
Wildcard certificates: Secure a domain and all its subdomains

Most hosting providers now include built-in SSL solutions that make installation easier. Once installed, your website should work through HTTPS, and visitors will see the padlock icon in their browsers’ address bars.

Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

Your SSL certificate installation should be followed by redirecting all traffic from HTTP to HTTPS. Without this step, users might land on unsecured versions of your pages, which creates duplicate content issues and security risks.

The way you set up a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS depends on your server:

For Apache servers, add this code to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

For Nginx servers, add to your configuration file:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
  return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

For IIS servers, use URL Rewrite Module with this configuration:

<rule name="HTTPS Redirect" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="(.*)" />
  <conditions>
    <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="^OFF$" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}{REQUEST_URI}" />
</rule>

You should also update all internal links to use HTTPS directly. This prevents unnecessary redirects that slow down your pages.

Fix mixed content issues

Mixed content happens when HTTPS pages load resources (scripts, images, stylesheets) through unsecure HTTP connections. This weakens security benefits and triggers browser warnings that reduce user trust.

You can find mixed content by:

Opening your HTTPS site in Chrome
Pressing F12 to open DevTools
Looking for warnings in the Console tab
Checking the Security tab for “non-secure origins”

Watch out for these mixed content warnings:

Passive mixed content: Images, video, or audio loaded over HTTP
Active mixed content: Scripts, iframes, or other resources that browsers might block

Here’s how to fix these issues:

Replace absolute HTTP URLs with HTTPS versions
Use protocol-relative URLs (starting with // instead of http://)
Add Content Security Policy (CSP) headers to detect and prevent mixed content

WordPress users can use plugins like SSL Insecure Content Fixer to find and fix mixed content problems automatically.

Test your site with tools like SSL Check or Qualys SSL Server Test after setting up HTTPS. A secure website builds trust, prevents data breaches, keeps information safe, looks professional, and strengthens your technical SEO foundation.

Fix 5: Eliminate Duplicate Content

Similar content creates confusion for search engines and can substantially hurt your technical SEO efforts. Search engines must choose which version to index and rank. This often leads to split link equity and weaker ranking potential. Many websites have similar content without realizing it through URL variations, pagination issues, or content syndication.

Use canonical tags

Canonical tags tell search engines which version of a page should be the “master copy” when similar content exists. These tags work like signposts that point search engines to your preferred version of content. These HTML elements sit in the <head> section of your webpage and look like this:

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

Canonical tags are a great way to get several benefits:

They unite link signals to one preferred URL and enhance its ranking potential
They stop search engines from wasting crawl budget on duplicate pages
They reduce confusion about which page to index and rank

These best practices will help canonical tags work:

Include self-referencing canonical tags on original pages
Place canonical tags in the <head> section only
Use absolute URLs rather than relative paths
Avoid circular or conflicting canonicalization
Regularly check dynamic canonical tags on e-commerce sites

Note that canonical tags serve as suggestions, not directives—though Google usually follows properly implemented canonicals.

Set preferred domain

Search engines treat www.example.com and example.com as two separate websites. This can split your SEO efforts between them. A preferred domain (with or without www) will give a consistent way for search engines to index your site.

Your preferred domain setup should:

Choose between www or non-www (HTTPS works best for both)
Use 301 redirects to point all URL variations to your preferred version
Keep your sitemap and internal linking consistent
Use the same URL format throughout your site

URLs with and without trailing slashes look like different pages to search engines. This can weaken link equity if both versions exist.

Audit with tools like Siteliner

Regular auditing helps find similar content. Siteliner provides a free service for sites under 250 pages and gives a complete duplicate content analysis.

Siteliner’s features include:

Display of matched words, match percentage, and pages with similar content
Specific content matches between pages
A “Page Power” score to help prioritize fixes

Other useful auditing methods include:

Copyscape checks for external duplication across the web
Google Search Console identifies indexing issues
Screaming Frog crawls find URL-based duplication

WordPress sites with lots of content can use dedicated plugins to detect and fix duplicate content issues automatically. Once you find duplicates, fix them through canonical tags, 301 redirects, or content revisions.

Proper duplicate content management forms the foundations of technical SEO best practices. The right combination of canonical tags, preferred domains, and regular audits helps search engines understand your content better. This leads to improved site visibility and ranking potential.

Fix 6: Optimize Crawlability and Indexing

Search visibility depends on good crawling and indexing. These are the foundations of getting your content ranked. Search engines can’t rank content they can’t find. Your pages need optimization so search engines can access and process them better. This helps discover hidden technical SEO problems that keep your site from reaching its full potential.

Check robots.txt and meta tags

The robots.txt file helps manage crawler traffic from your website’s root directory. It tells search engines which parts of your site they can access. A well-configured robots.txt file will:

Keep crawler requests from overwhelming your server
Stop unimportant pages from being crawled
Save crawl budget for important content

Many sites don’t set up robots.txt correctly. Common mistakes include blocking CSS and JavaScript resources, using wrong syntax, or trying to use “noindex” in robots.txt files (Google warns against this).

Meta robots tags give you better page-level control for indexing. These HTML elements in the head section tell search engines whether to index pages and follow links. Keep in mind that meta robots tags work only when pages are crawlable—they won’t work on pages blocked by robots.txt.

Fix broken links

Broken links hurt your website’s crawlability by a lot. They can reduce traffic and stop you from ranking higher by damaging user experience, conversion rates, and crawlability. Search engines might spend less time crawling your site if they find too many broken links.

Here’s how to fix broken links:

Use tools like Google Analytics or specialized link checkers to find broken links
Choose which links need fixing based on page importance and traffic
Fix incorrect URLs, set up 301 redirects to relevant pages, or remove the links

Set up 301 redirects for backlinks pointing to missing pages on your site. This saves link equity and keeps user experience smooth. Both visitors and crawlers will find useful content instead of dead ends.

Improve crawl budget

Search engines limit how many pages they crawl on your website in a given time—that’s your crawl budget. Large websites need to optimize this resource so important pages get discovered and indexed quickly.

You can maximize your crawl budget by:

Using robots.txt to block parameter-based URLs that create duplicate content
Getting rid of soft 404 errors that waste crawl resources
Keeping XML sitemaps current with accurate, important URLs
Fixing redirect chains that make crawlers send multiple requests

Google Search Console’s crawl stats help you spot problems affecting crawl efficiency. The Crawl Stats report shows when Google had availability issues that might have limited proper indexing.

These technical SEO improvements for crawlability and indexing help search engines find, process, and rank your valuable content. This will drive more organic traffic to your website.

Fix 7: Add Structured Data Markup

Structured data markup is a powerful technical SEO tool that helps search engines understand your content better. Adding this code to your website communicates specific information about your pages through schema.org vocabulary. This can lead to better visibility through rich results in search.

Use schema for products, articles, and FAQs

Schema markup gives search engines context about your content. Product schema shows important details like pricing, availability, and reviews that make your listings more informative in search results. Search engines can better interpret news content, blog posts, and editorial material through article schema, which affects how headlines and publication dates show up. FAQ schema changes your frequently asked questions’ appearance in search by creating expandable sections below your listing that take up more SERP space.

Google recommends JSON-LD as the preferred format. This approach keeps your HTML cleaner because it sits within script tags in your page’s head or body section. FAQ markup needs specific elements, such as questions and their answers, properly formatted in the JSON-LD structure.

Test with Google’s Rich Results tool

Testing your structured data is vital after implementation. Google’s Rich Results Test tool analyzes your markup to check if it qualifies for improved search features. You can get instant feedback about possible errors by entering your URL or pasting your code snippet.

The tool shows which rich result types it found and any errors that need fixing. You can also preview how your improved listing might look in search results. Note that qualifying for rich results doesn’t guarantee they’ll appear – Google decides based on relevance and quality.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is the backbone of your website’s search engine performance. Without these core elements, even exceptional content will struggle to rank well. This piece explores seven crucial fixes that address hidden problems that might undermine your site’s visibility and performance.

A well-laid-out website with clear hierarchy, effective internal links, detailed sitemaps, and intuitive breadcrumb navigation helps users and search engines find your content easily. Your website’s speed directly affects both rankings and user experience through image compression, browser caching, code minification, and CDN implementation.

Mobile optimization has become essential, especially with Google’s mobile-first indexing approach. A secure website with HTTPS not only protects users but also acts as a ranking signal that search engines value highly.

Beyond these basics, eliminating duplicate content through canonical tags and preferred domain settings helps unite your ranking potential. Optimizing crawlability lets search engines find and process your most valuable pages quickly. Structured data markup gives context that helps search engines understand your content better and might display enhanced results.

Note that technical SEO needs regular attention and maintenance. Search engines keep evolving, so your technical optimization strategies must adapt too. These seven fixes should be part of your ongoing SEO routine rather than one-time changes.

Your website needs a solid technical foundation to showcase content effectively. These technical SEO improvements will boost your rankings, increase organic traffic, and improve user participation. You’ll remove the hidden barriers that stop search engines from recognizing your content’s true value.

Get started with these fixes today and watch your website climb the search rankings while giving visitors a better experience.

FAQs

Q1. What is technical SEO and why is it important? Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website’s infrastructure to help search engines crawl, understand, and index it efficiently. It’s important because it forms the foundation of your site’s search visibility, impacting rankings, traffic, and user experience.

Q2. How can I improve my website’s loading speed? You can improve your website’s loading speed by compressing images and files, enabling browser caching, minifying CSS and JavaScript, and using a content delivery network (CDN). These techniques reduce file sizes and improve content delivery, resulting in faster page load times.

Q3. Why is mobile-friendliness crucial for SEO? Mobile-friendliness is crucial because most web traffic now comes from mobile devices, and Google uses mobile-first indexing. A mobile-friendly site improves user experience, reduces bounce rates, and can positively impact your search rankings.

Q4. How do I secure my website with HTTPS? To secure your website with HTTPS, install an SSL certificate, redirect all HTTP traffic to HTTPS, and fix any mixed content issues. This not only protects user data but also serves as a positive ranking signal for search engines.

Q5. What is structured data markup and how does it benefit SEO? Structured data markup is code added to your website that helps search engines better understand your content. It can lead to enhanced search results features like rich snippets, potentially improving click-through rates and visibility in search results.

Technical SEO Tips: A Simple Guide to Fix Your Website’s Hidden Problems