What is technical SEO and why is it important

Your Guide To Understanding What Technical SEO Is

Search engine optimisation (SEO) and online digital marketing involves more than keyword research and content creation — it also requires backend tasks not visible to the end user. This is referred to as technical SEO and is the foundation upon which SEO strategies are built.

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into what technical search optimisation is, why it’s important, what to include in your technical SEO checklist and more.

Technical SEO is the backbone of a well-optimised website, ensuring that search engines can efficiently crawl your site, understand its structure, and rank it appropriately. This guide covers essential elements to improve your site’s crawling and indexing performance, helping Australian businesses maximise their search visibility.

Among other technical things we will be reviewing:

• Understanding Crawl Budget: Your website’s crawl budget refers to the number of pages Google is willing to crawl your site within a given timeframe. Optimising crawl budget is crucial for larger websites, as it ensures search engines prioritise the most important pages on your site.
  • You can improve crawl budget by:
    • Removing broken links that lead to dead pages.
    • Eliminating duplicate content to prevent wasted crawls and indexes your site.
    • Ensuring fast pages load speeds to help Google efficiently access your content.
• Google Search Console for Technical SEO: Google Search Console is a vital tool for diagnosing and improving your website and finding technical SEO issues. It helps identify indexing issues, monitor crawling and indexing activity, and track which pages on your site are appearing in search engine results.
  • Use Google Search Console to:
    • Detect and fix broken links.
    • Submit updated sitemaps for better coverage.
    • Monitor Core Web Vitals to improve how fast your pages load.
• Controlling Indexing with Robots Meta Tags & Noindex: To prevent search engines from indexing low-value or duplicate pages, use robots meta tags and the noindex tag. The noindex tag tells Google not to crawl your site or add certain pages to its search results. Robots meta tags can control how search engines process specific content, preventing unnecessary crawls and indexes your site.
• Enhancing International SEO for global rankings with Hreflang Tags: For businesses targeting multiple regions, hreflang tags help Google understand language and regional variations of your content. Properly implemented hreflang tags prevent duplicate content issues across different country versions of your site and improve user experience by serving the correct language version to visitors.
• Mobile Friendliness & Page Speed: Google prioritises mobile friendliness, making it essential to have a responsive design.
  • Mobile optimisation ensures:
    • Fast pages load speeds for a seamless user experience.
    • Easy navigation across all devices.
    • Improved ranking potential in mobile search results.

Implementing these technical SEO best practices, your Australian SEO efforts and website can enhance its visibility, improve crawling and indexing, and ensure that Google efficiently crawls and indexes your site for better search rankings.

What is technical SEO?

For those who know what SEO is, technical SEO is just one aspect. It involves maintaining and updating your site to allow search engines to crawl it more efficiently. Search engines send crawlers to your site to analyse HTML code, JavaScript, performance, structure and more, letting them know what your site is all about and whether or not it’s informative.

Technical Seo

It typically starts with a technical website optimisation audit, which includes improving your site speed, making it more discoverable, fixing the architecture and more. Simply put, technical SEO focuses more on what search engines see, rather than what your visitors see.

Why is technical SEO important?

Google does not see your website as a user does. Technical SEO is the foundation of your SEO strategy and ensures that search engines can properly index and navigate your site.

Some notable benefits of investing in your technical SEO strategy include:

• Increasing your website visibility
• Improving your SEO and getting better rankings
• Improving page speed
• Identifying site structure issues
• Eliminating duplicate content
• Enhancing user experience

What should your technical SEO audit include?

Being able to reap the benefits of technical SEO involves a lot of nitty-gritty work, such as conducting a full audit of your website. Some of the tasks you can cover in your technical site optimisation audit include:

• Checking your site speed — Search engines use your page speed as a ranking factor. This is because your site’s speed directly affects your end-user. The slower it is, the more likely they are to bounce.
• Ensuring your site is discoverable for search engines — Submitting an updated sitemap to search engines is a key way to ensure all your pages are discoverable by its crawlers.
• Ensuring your site is crawlable for search engines — Similar to being discoverable, your site needs to be crawlable. This means utilising XML sitemaps and robots.txt files currently, using internal links in relevant pages, setting up canonical tags and more.
• Seeing if your pages can be rendered — Search engines should be able to render or understand your content’s layout through your code. This applies to both web and mobile browsers.
• Removing dead landing pages — Landing pages with nothing on them can be detrimental to your site and can increase your bounce rate. You will need to deal with 404 pages quickly and correctly, and ensure you have no orphan pages.
• Eliminating duplicate content — Duplicate content is something search engines penalise. Ensure that most of your pages have unique content.
• Maintaining a consistent URL structure — A well-structured URL makes your site easier for users to use, navigate, and share.
• Securing your site — Keeping your site secure and has SSL implemented is a top priority, and search engines look at that too. Making sure your site adheres to the best security practices is imperative, even for your SEO strategy.

Advanced technical SEO opportunities

Once you’ve done a basic technical search engine optimisation audit and are ready to take it up a notch, here are a few advanced Search Engine Optimisation opportunities worth considering:

• Structured data: Using structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand your site. This involves implementing a markup on a webpage’s code, which gives search engines more detail about what’s on the page and how to understand it. As a result, a site may benefit from enhanced search results and relevancy signals.
• Faceted navigation: On sites that deal with many listings, faceted navigation (or faceted search) is used on category/archive pages. By utilising multiple filters based on listing attributes, it’s easier for users to find what they’re looking for. In simpler terms, faceted navigation involves making pages with product listings easier for users and bots alike to filter through.

Investing in technical SEO can be challenging for business owners who have no firsthand experience. A solid technical optimisation audit and strategy can be the key to online success for your business. That’s why we’re Australia’s leading SEO services agency, get in touch today!

Technical SEO Guide for Australian Websites

Technical SEO is the backbone of a well-optimised website, ensuring that search engines can efficiently crawl your site, understand its structure, and rank it appropriately. This guide covers essential elements to improve your site’s crawling and indexing performance, helping Australian businesses maximise their search visibility.

Understanding Crawl Budget: Your website’s crawl budget refers to the number of pages Google is willing to crawl your site within a given timeframe. Optimising crawl budget is crucial for larger enterprise level websites, as it ensures search engines prioritise the most important pages on your site.

You can improve crawl budget by:

• Removing broken links that lead to dead pages.
• Eliminating duplicate content to prevent wasted crawls and indexes your site.
• Ensuring fast pages load speeds to help Google efficiently access your content.

Google Search Console for Technical SEO: Google Search Console is a vital tool for diagnosing and improving technical SEO. It helps identify indexing issues, monitor crawling and indexing activity, and track which pages on your site are appearing in the SERPs / Search Engine Results Pages.

Use Google Search Console to:

• Detect and fix broken links.
• Submit updated sitemaps for better coverage.
• Monitor Core Web Vitals to improve how fast your pages load.

Controlling Indexing with Robots Meta Tags & Noindex: To prevent search engines from indexing low-value or duplicate pages, use robots meta tags and the noindex tag.

• The noindex tag tells Google not to crawl your site or add certain pages to its search results.
• Robots meta tags can control how search engines process specific content, preventing unnecessary crawls and indexes your site.

Enhancing International SEO with Hreflang Tags: For businesses targeting multiple regions, hreflang tags help Google understand language and regional variations of your content. Properly implemented hreflang tags prevent duplicate content issues across different country versions of your site and improve user experience by serving the correct language version to visitors.

Mobile Friendliness & Page Speed: Google prioritises mobile friendliness, making it essential to have a responsive design.

Mobile optimisation ensures:

• Fast pages load speeds for a seamless user experience.
• Easy navigation across all devices.
• Improved ranking potential in mobile search results.

By implementing these technical SEO best practices, your Australian website can enhance its visibility, improve crawling and indexing, and ensure that Google efficiently crawls and indexes your site for better search rankings.

Technical SEO: Optimizing Performance for Better Search Rankings

Technical SEO plays a crucial role in improving website performance and user experience, directly impacting search rankings. Two key metrics that Google uses to assess page experience are Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how much elements on a page unexpectedly move while loading, which can frustrate users and negatively affect engagement. A low CLS score ensures a stable visual experience, reducing sudden shifts in content.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) tracks how long it takes for the largest visible content element—such as an image or heading—to load. Faster LCP scores indicate a quicker loading website, improving user satisfaction and boosting SEO performance.

By optimizing for CLS and LCP, businesses can enhance their website’s technical health, leading to better rankings and a more seamless user experience.

Want to learn more? Read our technical SEO blog series:

• Migration
• Pagination
• Core Web Vitals
• Structured Data
• Site Speed
• Orphan Pages
• Faceted Navigation
• Internal Linking

What is the full technical SEO audit checklist?

Technical SEO Checklist for an Australian Tech Website

1. Website Crawling & Indexing

• Ensure robots.txt is correctly configured and not blocking important pages.
• Use Google Search Console to check for crawl errors and fix any issues.
• Generate and submit an XML sitemap to Google & Bing.
• Use canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues.
• Check and fix orphan pages (pages with no internal links).
• Implement structured data (schema markup) for better search visibility.

2. Site Speed & Performance

• Enable Gzip compression to reduce file sizes.
• Use WebP image format and enable lazy loading.
• Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
• Reduce server response time with a high-performance hosting provider.
• Implement browser caching for returning visitors.
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), especially for international visitors.

3. Mobile Optimisation

• Ensure your website is fully responsive on all screen sizes.
• Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to check for issues.
• Avoid intrusive pop-ups or interstitials that harm user experience.
• Optimise for Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) to enhance mobile usability.

4. Security & HTTPS

• Install a SSL certificate and ensure all pages use HTTPS.
• Regularly update plugins, themes, and CMS to prevent security vulnerabilities.
• Monitor for broken links and fix them to prevent 404 errors.

5. URL Structure & Navigation

• Use short, keyword-friendly URLs (avoid long or dynamic URLs).
• Ensure breadcrumb navigation is enabled for better user experience.
• Implement 301 redirects for outdated or removed pages.
• Avoid using duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.

6. Internal Linking & Site Architecture

• Maintain a clear, logical site structure (no more than 3 clicks to any page).
• Use descriptive anchor text for internal links.
• Ensure important pages receive internal link equity from high-traffic pages.

7. Technical Considerations for Australian Sites

• Use .com.au domain if targeting an Australian audience.
• Host your website on an Australian server for better local SEO performance.
• Set Google Search Console to target Australia.
• Optimise for Google Discover if publishing news or tech articles.
• Implement hreflang tags if serving multiple languages or regions.

About the Author

Andrew Raso

Andrew Raso, Co-founder and Global CEO of Online Marketing Gurus, has been instrumental in transforming the agency from a start-up into a $15 million global powerhouse. Since co-founding OMG in 2012 with colleague Mehrdad Hedayati, Andrew has leveraged his deep expertise in SEO and digital marketing to drive OMG’s expansion across Australia, the US, and Singapore.