What Is Technical SEO?

What technical SEO covers

• Crawlability and indexing: whether search engines can reach and store your pages.
• Site speed and Core Web Vitals: how quickly pages load and respond.
• Mobile usability: whether the site works well on phones.
• Structured data: markup that describes your content to machines.
• URLs and redirects: clean structure, with old pages pointing to the right new ones.
• Security: HTTPS and a site free from known vulnerabilities.

Technical vs on-page vs off-page SEO

Technical SEO is about the site itself. On-page SEO is about the content on each page: headings, copy and internal links. Off-page SEO is about signals from elsewhere, such as links and mentions. All three work together, and technical problems can cap the results of the other two.

How to check your own site

• Google Search Console: the Indexing report shows which pages are indexed and why others are not.
• PageSpeed Insights: shows speed and Core Web Vitals for a page.
• A crawl tool: finds broken links, redirect chains and duplicate titles.
• View the page source: confirms key content and structured data are in the HTML and not only added by JavaScript.

Technical SEO and AI search

AI answer engines also need to reach and read your pages. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so important content and structured data should be in the page itself. Clean structure and clear markup help both search engines and AI systems understand who you are and what you offer.

When to fix technical SEO first

Before content work, after a redesign or platform migration, and whenever Search Console shows large numbers of excluded or erroring pages. Strong content cannot perform if search engines cannot properly crawl or index it.