Getting into the nitty-gritty of technical SEO may not feel glamorous. But knowing where to start can make it easier to manage. Get the foundations right and it’ll give your website a better chance at steadily building traffic instead of remaining unseen. Here’s where to begin, and most importantly, in what order.
You’ve probably heard us repeat several times: online visibility is a long-term effort. You can’t achieve it with a couple of blog posts; you earn it by being consistently discoverable, month to month, by people and now by machines too. The technical side of SEO is the plumbing that makes this happen and if that plumbing is faulty, your other efforts are wasted.
1. Start by fixing the indexing on your most important pages
First, make sure the pages that generate income can be found. If Google can’t index your homepage, service pages or key landing pages, they can’t rank – simple as that. One of the most frequent issues we see is a misplaced “noindex” tag, a blocked directory, or a page orphaned with no links pointing to it. This must be sorted first: there’s no point in optimising a blog post from 2023 when your service page that needs traffic sits invisible. Prioritise the money pages, then move on to the rest.
2. Repair the broken internal links and correct the 404 errors
Once your key pages are indexable, make sure nothing strands them. Broken internal links and 404 errors create dead ends for both visitors and search crawlers, and they make it harder for search engines to understand and navigate your site. Run a crawl, find the dead links pointing to and from your priority pages, and fix or redirect them first. It can be unglamorous housekeeping, but it protects everything you fixed in step one.
3. Ensure that AI is able to access and understand your pages
A website can be completely crawlable by Google and still block AI. As a recent article in Marketing Mag pointed out, AI can’t recommend what it can’t reach. So, if a chatbot researching suppliers can’t get to your current pages, it doesn’t stop. It falls back on cached data, review sites, or a competitor’s version of your business.
Depending on a site’s settings, services like Cloudflare can now block AI “agent” traffic by default, so it’s worth getting this checked today. Access is only half of it though as schema markup (structured data) is also worth addressing to help search engines better understand your content. That gives you a stronger chance of being described accurately rather than guessed about.
Bonus tip: speed up your pages
We thought to throw in an extra one since you made it this far. Once you’re found, followed and understood, it’s time to ensure your site loads quickly for your visitors. One important factor is your server response time (TTFB), that is, how long your server takes to start responding. Slow hosting drags down everything after it. Page speed involves a few moving parts though – rendering, JavaScript, fonts and images all play a role. A simple win is optimising your images by compressing them for speed and giving them descriptive filenames and alt text for context.
The order is the strategy
Technical SEO isn’t a single-time clean-up. It’s the foundation that maintains your discoverability in the long term, both with search engines and with AI.
So, make yourself be found, have each path remain clear, and ensure search and AI engines understand and can easily crawl your website. We recommend also reading our blog on how to Optimise your Content for Inclusion in LLM Public Datasets.
If your important pages aren’t pulling the organic traffic they should, that’s exactly the kind of thing we fix. Let’s talk.
