Resources
Technical SEO Resources
Technical SEO is the part nobody notices until it breaks something expensive
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Technical resources cover the parts of a site search engines read before they judge your writing. Topics include crawling and indexing, sitemaps and robots files, redirects, duplicate content, structured data, and Core Web Vitals. They also cover the mobile problems that quietly hold back sites that look fine to a visitor.
Technical SEO is the part nobody notices until it breaks something expensive. These resources cover the mechanics. You will learn how crawlers find pages, and why a page can be indexed and invisible at the same time. You will learn what a canonical tag does and does not do, and how a redirect chain loses a little value on every hop. Site migrations get extended treatment, because a rushed redesign is the most common way a business loses rankings it spent two years earning. The Core Web Vitals material explains the three measurements in plain terms. Then it focuses on fixes that really move them on small sites: image sizing, font loading, third party scripts, and the chat widget nobody asked for. Structured data is treated as a practical exercise, not a tour of the specification. LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ, and Review markup are written out and validated. There is also a diagnostic track for the situation every owner recognizes, where a page looks perfectly fine to a human and does not appear in search at all. Some of this material needs somebody comfortable in a code editor. Each guide says so at the top, rather than halfway through. Developers, technically minded owners, and marketers who need to write an accurate ticket for a developer are the readers this section is built for.
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How to tell if technical work is your bottleneck
Technical SEO gets sold to businesses that do not need it. Before you buy any of it, open Search Console and look at two reports. If your pages are indexed and picking up impressions, technical work is not your problem. Content and reviews are.
If pages are missing from the index, or a large group shows as excluded for a reason you do not understand, then technical work is the bottleneck and nothing else will help until it is fixed. A page that cannot be crawled cannot rank no matter how well it is written.
The middle case is speed. If the Core Web Vitals report shows most of your mobile URLs failing, you are losing visitors before they read anything. That is worth fixing for the calls alone, and any ranking benefit is a bonus on top.
Run those checks first. On a normal 20 page service site, this usually takes 20 minutes and points at a fix that costs a few hundred dollars rather than a monthly program.
The Search Console reports that matter, in order
Search Console has a lot of screens and a small business needs five of them. Here is what each one answers and what to do with it.
| Report | What it answers | What to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Pages, under indexing | Which pages Google kept and why it dropped the rest | Fix the largest excluded group first. One cause usually explains dozens of pages |
| Performance | What you already show up for, and how often | Find pages with impressions and almost no clicks, then rewrite their titles |
| Core Web Vitals | Which groups of URLs are slow on phones | Fix by template, since one template change repairs every page using it |
| Sitemaps | Whether Google read the list you submitted | Remove dead URLs, then resubmit and check the read date |
| Links | Which of your pages other sites point at | Link from those pages to the technical SEO service pages that make money |
The rest of the tool is built for large sites. Ignoring it is not laziness, it is the right call for a site under a few hundred pages.
The redirect checklist for a redesign
Rushed launches are the most common way a business loses rankings it spent two years earning. Work through this before launch day, not after.
Export every live URL before launch
Crawl the old site and save the list as a file you can check against.
Map each old URL to one new URL
One to one wherever a real equivalent exists.
Send retired pages to the closest match
Not all of them to the home page, which wastes the value.
Use permanent redirects, not temporary ones
A 302 tells Google to keep the old address, which is not what you meant.
Keep every redirect to a single hop
Chains lose value and slow the page for real visitors.
Test every phone link and form
They break more often than pages do and nobody notices for weeks.
Reinstall analytics and conversion tags
Then submit a real test form and confirm it lands.
Resubmit the sitemap on launch day
Then check indexing and rankings weekly for the first month.
The four weeks after a launch
Some wobble after a migration is normal. Knowing the normal shape keeps you from ripping out a good site in week two.
A dip in week one is normal. The same dip still there in week six is a redirect problem, and it is fixable if you kept the old URL list.
Structured data without the policy trouble
Schema is easy to add and easy to abuse. The abuse gets flagged, and a manual action costs far more than the markup ever gained.
Do this
- Mark up only what a visitor can actually see on the page.
- Use one business block per location, each with its own address and phone.
- Keep the name, address, and phone identical to your Google profile.
- Test every page in Google's Rich Results Test before you call it done.
- Add question markup only where the questions and answers appear on the page.
Not this
- Present review stars from another site as your own site rating.
- Copy a competitor's markup and forget to change the address.
- Mark up prices that appear nowhere on the page.
- Add every schema type you can find just because you can.
- Leave staging markup live after launch.