In today's internet an attractive website full of good content is no longer enough on its own to succeed online. As we wrote in our piece on search engine optimization, anyone who wants to climb the organic results needs solid technical foundations. That is exactly where technical SEO comes in. A technical SEO audit looks at whether the structure, the performance and the code of your site work in a search engine's favor.
In this article we will go through what technical SEO is, and walk you step by step through how a technical SEO audit is carried out.
Prefer to listen rather than read? The episode below is in Turkish.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the work of tuning the technical side of a website so it performs better in search results. A technical SEO audit covers things like optimizing site speed, making sure search engines can crawl the site easily, and helping them understand what the content actually says. Technical SEO is a critical part of search engine optimization as a whole, because it improves the elements on your own site that stand between you and a higher position. It used to be filed under on-page SEO; today it is a field of its own.
Why Technical SEO Matters
Technical SEO carries real weight because it feeds straight into how your site performs in Google's results. If search engines cannot reach your pages or cannot make sense of them, it does not matter how valuable your content is: those pages will not show up and they will not rank. For a business that means visitors it never reaches and revenue it never sees.
Google has also confirmed that factors such as page speed and mobile friendliness affect rankings. Slow pages irritate people and push them back to the results. That tells Google your site may not be a pleasant place to land, and lower positions can follow.
The Building Blocks of Technical SEO
The essentials of technical SEO fall into three groups, and your site needs all three to perform in search:
1. Crawlability
Crawlability is about keeping your site easy to walk through: JavaScript that search engines can handle, a site structure with a logical order, redirects that are managed properly and server errors that get dealt with at once. In short, it makes your site simple for a search engine to move around in.
2. Performance
Performance covers lifting the speed of your site, tidying the code so there is less weight to download, and making sure the site is responsive and comfortable on every device. For a while the shortcut to mobile speed was Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Google has since removed the search advantage that format carried and Core Web Vitals took its place, so optimizing mobile speed on ordinary HTML is the sounder route today.
3. Indexing
Everything about getting into Google's index comes down to helping search engines understand your site. That means building an internal link structure that holds together, publishing a sitemap so crawlers can move through the site efficiently, dealing with duplicate content and reading your log files regularly to see how search engines actually behave on your site.
Technical SEO and On-Page SEO: the Difference
Technical SEO and on-page SEO are not the same thing, but they sit very close together and the best organic results need both. Technical SEO is about your code being clean and efficient; on-page SEO is about the way your content is shaped and presented. Put simply, technical SEO deals with performance and on-page SEO deals with content.
How to Run a Technical SEO Audit
Here is a step by step route through a full technical SEO audit, so your site is ready to perform better in search:
1. Crawl the Website
Crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs, Semrush or SE Ranking Site Audit. Find and fix what it turns up: broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags. Our own recommendation at Türk SEM is Screaming Frog.
2. Check Crawling and Indexing
Use Google Search Console to see whether search engines are crawling and indexing your site properly. Crawl errors, sitemap problems and resources that are blocked from indexing all surface here.
3. Assess Site Speed
Test how fast your site loads with PageSpeed Insights or a similar tool. PageSpeed already names the areas that need work, so you can follow its own list rather than guessing.
4. Test Mobile Friendliness
To check whether your site behaves on mobile devices you can use Türk SEM's mobile friendly test. Make sure mobile users get a clean experience.
5. Review Duplicate Content
Look for duplicate content on your site with a tool such as Siteliner. Duplicate content can drag your rankings down.
6. Review Site Structure and Internal Links
Go through how your site is organized, how people move around it and how the pages link to one another. Users should find what they came for easily, and search engines should be able to read the shape of the site. Our link extractor lets you test yours.
7. Audit Structured Data and Rich Results
Check that your structured data is right with Google's Rich Results Test or the schema.org validator. How your site looks in the results is part of technical SEO too.
8. Check Website Security
Make sure your site runs on HTTPS and holds a valid SSL certificate. Follow current security practice: it protects user data and it keeps the trust search engines place in you.
9. Review Meta Tags
Confirm that every page has its own descriptive title and meta description. These help search engines understand your content and they are what persuades someone to click your result rather than the next one.
Once you know how to run the audit, put the problems you found in order of importance and start working through the fixes.
Technical SEO Best Practices
Follow the practices below to give your site a better footing in search:
1. Pick One Version of Your Site
Choose either “https://example.com” or “https://www.example.com” as your permanent address and stay with it. Having both live causes problems. Redirect one to the other to avoid them. With www or without it, you have to pick one.
2. Speed Your Website Up
To make your pages appear faster, bring image file sizes down, put a content delivery network (CDN) in front of the site and strip out code you do not need. If you are on WordPress, apply the WordPress speed settings we set out here.
3. Use Structured Data
Add markup for rich results to your site so Google can read your content more accurately. Done well, it makes your entry in the results say more about you.
4. Repair Broken Pages
Broken pages are bad for the people using your site. Use the tools mentioned above to find deleted pages and either bring them back or point the old addresses at the pages that replaced them.
5. Optimize for Core Web Vitals
Google measures how fast and how comfortable your site feels. Aim for quick loading (LCP, under 2.5 seconds), a fast reaction to what people do (INP, under 200 milliseconds) and layouts that stay where they are (CLS).
6. Multilingual Content
If your site exists in several languages, use hreflang tags to tell Google which version belongs to users in which country. Make sure those tags are readable inside your page code.
Conclusion
Getting the fundamentals of technical SEO right matters not only for higher positions in search, but for giving people an experience worth having. Stay with the practices set out here and you build something that works online. Bear in mind, though, that this field moves every day and keeping up with it is part of the job. If you want to master SEO from beginning to end, sign up today for our one to one SEO course, which is taught in Turkish.
FAQ
1. What is the difference between technical SEO and on-page SEO?
Technical SEO is about optimizing the code and structure of your site, while on-page SEO is about shaping and optimizing the content on your pages.
2. How often should I run a technical SEO audit?
At least once a quarter, ideally once a month, and always when you notice your positions in search slipping.
3. What are the most common technical SEO mistakes to avoid?
The usual suspects are a missing HTTPS setup, wrong indexing rules, absent XML sitemaps, problems in the robots.txt file and slow page loading.
4. How does technical SEO affect e-commerce websites?
Technical SEO lets search engines read and index an online shop without friction, which makes the products easier for a potential customer to discover.
5. Is technical SEO hard?
The basics are not especially complicated, but technical SEO can get intricate and it takes time to understand fully.
6. Does technical SEO require coding?
Technical SEO usually asks for some coding knowledge. That said, you can optimize a site for search effectively without going deep into code, and it is worth saying so plainly.
