How to improve technical SEO

Technical SEO improvements start with fixing the foundation issues that prevent search engines from properly crawling and indexing your client's website. Run your site through Google Search Console and Screaming Frog to identify crawl errors, redirect chains, and pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be. Check your XML sitemaps to ensure they're valid, updated, and actually submitted in Search Console. Look for soft 404s (pages returning 200 status codes when they should return 404s) and fix any broken internal links or images. These foundational problems often account for 20-30% of ranking improvements you can make without touching content or backlinks.

Core Web Vitals are no longer optional—they're a ranking factor. Use PageSpeed Insights to identify specific issues affecting Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. Common fixes include optimizing images (most sites are still serving uncompressed files), lazy loading below-the-fold content, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and reducing server response times. Have conversations with your hosting provider about server infrastructure if page load times are consistently slow. For web designers building new sites, implement Next.js or another framework with built-in performance optimization from the start rather than adding it retroactively.

Address site architecture next. Ensure your client's important pages are within two to three clicks from the homepage, use descriptive URL structures that reflect content hierarchy, and implement proper internal linking. Thin content pages (those with minimal value) should either be consolidated or removed entirely rather than left as orphans. Set up HTTPS if you haven't already, configure proper canonical tags to handle duplicate content, and implement structured markup for schema.org data relevant to the industry—this is especially important for local services, ecommerce, and articles. Make sure mobile responsiveness is genuine responsive design, not just a mobile subdomain with different content. Finally, regularly monitor Core Web Vitals, crawl errors, and indexation status in Search Console. Technical SEO isn't a one-time fix; these metrics change as sites grow and technology evolves.