Hi,

What’s technical about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

A lot.

Keyword research, content optimization, using SEO plugins, writing meta titles & descriptions, friendly URLs, heading tag hierarchy and more…

You may not be an SEO expert, may not have hired one and may not even have a lot of time. So what can you do to improve your chances of getting found in search engines?

Let’s start…

Learn some basics

There are lots of great tutorials about SEO on the web. For now, I recommend you read this basic On-Page SEO practices guide.

Common technical SEO issues & warnings

Website structure, speed and URL influence most of the technical SEO. Here are some serious issues to avoid – and to fix quickly if you find them on your site.

• 404 error – broken links & images
• Slow loading pages
• Large sized pages – be careful with those stock images!
• Missing or duplicate canonical links
• Mobile-friendliness issues
• Site architectural problems – HTML & CSS
• Missing sitemap.xml
• Disallowed robots.txt file
• Duplicate content

How to perform a quick technical SEO audit

There are many tools to do an SEO audit on the whole site (recommendations ahead in this email), but an easy option is to perform a technical SEO audit on a single page.

Install Google’s Lighthouse browser extension and then invoke it on any page on your site. You will see lots of details about page performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO.

Do this for all important pages on your site.

Solutions for technical SEO issues

• First, find and fix internal & external broken links
• Optimize images and other content to reduce page load size – we’ve covered some tools for this in the past, but just Google for image optimization tools and you will find plenty.
• Review settings in your SEO plugin (we recommend RankMath) – ensure you have a working sitemap,
• Block bad crawlers and spam bots using robots.txt file
• Prepare your website for mobile-first indexing – you may need to consult your web developer / agency for this
• Remove scripts, plugins and elements you don’t really need
• Track uptime using tools like Netumo – so you know when your website goes offline
• If you have bad backlinks, disavow them to keep your website clean
• In general, follow the guidelines in the SEO audit.

BTW, you may see lots of jargon and words you’re not familiar with when you review these reports. Don’t give up because it seems too technical. SEO is really important, and while some terminology can feel alien, you will learn quickly.

Recommended audit tools

There are dozens of basic SEO checkup tools. But proper technical SEO audit reports are only in tools that actually crawl your entire website.

Premium tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz and Ubersuggest can perform these audits. You can also try Sitebulb.

Good tools are expensive. But here’s my advice: don’t buy annual or lifetime plans. Pay monthly, prepare all audits you need in the first month (or during the trial), and cancel the subscription. Resume when you want to do another audit.

Link salad

A mixture of resources for an inquisitive mind.

• Dareboost – Quick technical SEO auditing tool
• CodeMyUI – Web design & UI inspiration with code snippets
• BrandMark Color Wheel – Logo color & style selection guide
• Search Console Connector – View / Download Google Search Console data beyond the 1K row UI limit
• Import your YouTube videos into Shorts – repurpose your video content instantly
• Did you know? SEO can reduce the cost of customer acquisition by 87.41% on average compared to digital advertising (Terakeet)

A writing prompt ✍

Think about your hobby and write an article explaining its benefits to someone who doesn’t know about it.