Technical SEO

Example

A packaging manufacturer launches a new site in Bulgarian and English. Three weeks later, visits from search have halved. A crawl finds the reasons, and none of them is in the writing:

• Forty old addresses have no redirect and return a 404.
• The English pages carry no hreflang, so Google often shows the Bulgarian version to an English-speaking visitor.
• The sitemap still lists the old addresses.
• Every page answers on http and https, with and without www — four addresses for one document.
• The mobile speed score is 28, because photographs are uploaded at full size.

The fixes fit into one sprint and change not a single sentence. After them, one page has one address, the crawler reaches every page, and each language version points at its counterpart.

Why it matters for a business

Technical work is the dull half of search, which is exactly why it gets postponed. Its effect is double, though. Everything else depends on it: a page a crawler cannot reach, or treats as a copy of another, cannot rank however well it is written. And most of it is done once. A redirect map is built in an afternoon; a missing redirect is paid for every month afterwards.

Most of these decisions are made by the CMS and by how the site was built, not by the person writing the pages. That is why technical SEO belongs in the build, not in the recovery after the first drop in traffic.

What to ask

• Is there a list of old addresses, with a redirect for each, before anything moves?
• Does every page have one address, and where does its canonical point?
• How does a search engine see pages that are rendered with JavaScript?
• When was the page indexing report last opened?
• What structured data does the site carry, and does it match what the page shows?

The technical work and the content travel together in the SEO work we run.