Technical SEO Guide
Technical SEO is the plumbing of your site. Nobody sees it, but when it is broken, everyone suffers. I once worked on an ecommerce site in London that had every product page blocked by robots.txt. They wondered why traffic had vanished. It is like running a shop in Glasgow and locking the front door while shouting about sales. According to SEMrush, 84 percent of sites have at least one SEO error. Most of them are basic things that could be fixed in an afternoon if someone bothered to look. This article is a short guide to technical SEO but if you want to have a super deep dive into the details of what we look at you can check out this detailed technical SEO checklist.
Site Speed: Nobody Waits Anymore
If your site takes longer to load than it takes to order a Greggs sausage roll, you have a problem. Google’s research shows that if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, more than half of users leave. That is half your customers gone before they even see your page. Check your speed with PageSpeed Insights. Compress your images, remove pointless scripts, and for the love of broadband, stop using five different tracking codes from tools you never look at.
Mobile First: The Pocket Test
Since 2019, Google has used mobile-first indexing. That means it looks at the mobile version of your site before the desktop one. If your site is unreadable on a phone, you are invisible to Google. Simple rule: check your site on your own mobile. Can you read it without zooming? Can you click the buttons without fat fingers hitting the wrong link? If not, fix it.
HTTPS: Stop Scaring People
It is 2025. If your site still runs on HTTP, you are basically waving a red flag saying “do not trust me.” Chrome literally shows a warning for non-HTTPS sites. A free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt solves the problem in five minutes. Google confirmed HTTPS is a ranking signal. Customers also trust you more when they see the little padlock. If you are asking people to hand over money or details, this is non-negotiable.
Crawlability and Indexing: Let Google In
Google can only rank what it can find. If you block it accidentally, you vanish. Common mistakes include:
- Robots.txt disallowing important pages.
- Meta noindex tags in the wrong places.
- Orphan pages with no internal links pointing to them.
Use Google Search Console to check coverage. If Google says it cannot index half your site, that is not a suggestion, that is a problem.
XML Sitemaps: Your Cheat Sheet for Google
An XML sitemap is just a list of your important pages. Submit it to Search Console and you make life easier for the bots. It is not magic, but it is sensible. According to Yoast, a clean sitemap helps Google discover new pages faster. If you run a site with hundreds of posts, that can be the difference between waiting days and waiting weeks for updates to show in search.
Structured Data: Speak Google’s Language
Structured data is extra code that tells Google what your content actually is. Recipe, event, product, review — mark it up and you might get rich snippets in search results. Schema.org has the full library, but do not get lost. Start with the basics:
- Article schema for blogs.
- Product schema for ecommerce.
- FAQ schema if you actually have FAQs.
A study by Milestone Research showed pages with schema markup rank four positions higher on average. That is worth the effort of a few tags.
Final Word
Technical SEO is not glamorous. Nobody will clap when you fix a redirect chain or clean a sitemap, but without it, your site is like a castle with rotten foundations. It might look fine for now, but one storm and it collapses. At Hot Igloo, we have fixed technical messes for everything from Highland guesthouses to UK-wide retailers. The pattern is always the same: once the plumbing works, rankings rise. Check out this real world example of growth in serps that we achieved for a client
Want more SEO advice, then check out our complete UK SEO guide here.