What is Technical SEO?
The non-content side of SEO: crawlability, indexability, site speed, structured data, canonicalization, hreflang, mobile-friendliness, and security headers.
Technical SEO encompasses everything Google needs to crawl, render, and rank your site that isn't about content quality. The major pillars: (1) Crawlability — can Googlebot reach every page you want indexed? (robots.txt, internal linking, sitemap, response codes). (2) Indexability — once crawled, can Google add it to its index? (canonical tags, no-index meta, content uniqueness). (3) Page speed — Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), TTFB, render-blocking resources. (4) Structured data — JSON-LD schemas that enable rich results. (5) Mobile-friendliness — responsive design, tap target sizes, viewport meta. (6) Security — HTTPS everywhere, HSTS, secure headers. (7) International — hreflang for multi-language sites. Modern frameworks like Next.js handle most of this correctly by default; the bugs that remain are typically configuration mistakes (forgotten canonical, broken sitemap, slow third-party scripts).