Technical pillar guide
Technical SEO guide
Technical SEO sounds specialist and mostly is not. It is a small number of questions about whether Google can reach, render and index your pages, asked in the right order.
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The three questions
Can Google reach the page? That is crawling, and it is decided by internal links, robots rules and server responses.
Can Google see the content once it arrives? That is rendering, and it is where JavaScript-heavy sites fail quietly.
Did Google decide to keep it? That is indexing, and it depends on canonical tags, duplication and whether the page is worth having.
A page has to pass all three before a single word of content strategy matters. Most technical SEO work is finding which of the three is failing.
How to tell you have a problem
Compare the number of pages you published with the number Google has indexed. If they differ materially and you cannot explain the gap, something structural is wrong.
Search Console's page indexing report gives you the categories: excluded by robots, crawled but not indexed, discovered but not crawled. Each points at a different cause and each has a different fix.
Rendering is where modern sites break
If your content only appears after JavaScript executes, Google has to render the page before it can see anything. It does render, but rendering is queued and delayed, and anything that fails during it is simply absent.
The test is straightforward: view the page source rather than the inspector. If your headline and body copy are not in the raw HTML, you are relying on rendering, and that is a risk you are taking rather than a decision you made.
Duplication and canonicals
One page should have one address. Protocol variants, www and non-www, trailing slashes, tracking parameters and print views all create copies that split a page's signals.
Self-referencing canonical tags on every indexable page plus consistent internal linking handles nearly all of it.
What matters less than you have been told
Core Web Vitals is real and small: a tiebreaker rather than a lever. Meta keywords do nothing. Keyword density is not a thing. XML sitemap priority values are ignored.
Spending a quarter on those while pages sit unindexed is the most common misallocation in technical SEO.
Common questions
Do I need a developer for technical SEO?
For diagnosis, no. For most fixes, yes, or a CMS that exposes the settings. The diagnosis is the specialist part; implementation is usually straightforward once somebody has said precisely what to change.
Is Core Web Vitals worth fixing?
Yes, but mostly for users rather than rankings. Slow pages lose people regardless of where they rank, and that is the better argument.
Where to next
If you would rather have someone do this than read about it, the commercial page for this work is Technical SEO services.
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