Technical SEO focuses on making your website as easy to crawl as possible, so your pages get indexed and can be found by your customers. 

In many ways, it’s the unsung hero of search engine optimization. Good technical SEO usually doesn’t skyrocket your traffic like a good blog can or back links from high-authority websites.

But if your technical SEO isn’t locked in, it’s inevitable that your site is falling short of its traffic potential.

What Technical SEO? The Simple Definition

As I mentioned above, technical SEO is the process of optimizing the backend structure and setup of your website to help search engines like Google crawl, index, and understand it better. Think of it as laying down the foundation for your site so that search engines can easily “read” your content and determine its value for search results.

That’s the simple definition.

Some key areas of technical SEO include:

1. Site Speed: Ensuring pages load quickly, which improves user experience and helps with ranking, as Google favors fast sites.
2. Mobile-Friendliness: Making sure your site looks and works well on mobile devices since more people use phones to browse.
3. Secure Connection (HTTPS): Using a secure protocol (HTTPS) to protect user data, which Google rewards as a ranking factor.
4. Structured Data: Adding special code (structured data or schema markup) to help search engines understand specific content, like products, reviews, or events, which can lead to rich results in search.
5. Clean URLs and Internal Links: Creating user- and search-friendly URLs and linking between pages to help users and search engines easily navigate your site.

In short, technical SEO is all about making sure your website is set up correctly behind the scenes, so search engines can access, interpret, and rank your content as efficiently as possible.

While optimizing the technical aspects of your website is important for every business, it’s especially so if you have an e-commerce site. Sound technical architecture is foundational to effective e-commerce SEO.

The 3 Main Types of SEO

Another good way to think about technical SEO is to distinguish it from the other types of search engine optimization, so let’s do a quick breakdown of all three:

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the obvious stuff. It refers to the things that your users actually see: everything from your Title Tags to your product descriptions to your blog posts.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page mainly refers to backlinks. This includes everything from mentions on industry directories to guest posts you might do that include links back to your site.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO entails the elements of your site that users don’t necessarily see but that do affect their experience. 

Someone may not see the actual code that produces the page they visit, but they will notice if that page takes too long to load. They won’t notice canonical tags, but if Google can’t figure out which pages to present them in the search results, the user may never have a chance to click on it.

Why Technical SEO Matters

It probably goes without saying at this point, but technical SEO is extremely important because it’s foundational to the rest of your website. 

Your company’s e-commerce website can have product pages with immaculate SEO, category pages that are perfectly optimized, and blogs that brim with helpful information.

If Google has any trouble crawling these pages or concludes that they’d be difficult for your customers to use, all of that hard work – and the money you spent – will be for nothing. Google won’t show your site to customers because it’ll be convinced that your users won’t have a good experience.

The good news is that technical search engine optimization usually isn’t an ongoing investment like on-page SEO is. Usually, improving your website’s technical aspects is something you can do once and then you simply do maintenance going forward.

5 Tools to Quickly Check Your Technical SEO Health

In a moment, I’ll cover some important best practices for ensuring the technical health of your site from an SEO perspective.

1. Indexing Report

One of the most important reasons to take technical SEO seriously is so that Google and other search engines have an easy time crawling your website and, thus, indexing your pages. If your pages don’t make it into their indexes, your customers will have no chance of ever finding them when they turn to search engines to look for your products.

And that’s the entire point of SEO.

You can find your Indexing Report in Google Search Console:

When you open it up, you’ll which of your pages are being indexed and which aren’t:

Under that, you’ll see why Google is or isn’t indexing these pages:

Seeing so many pages not getting indexed may raise some alarms, but as you can see from the above screenshot, many of these are for perfectly valid reasons. We wouldn’t want pages with “noindex” tags getting indexed. That’s why we added those tags. The same for any pages we’ve added redirects, too.

Of course, just because a page has a “noindex” tag doesn’t necessarily mean it’s supposed to. Maybe it was added by accident.

Or maybe those pages with 301 redirects are in our sitemap, which means we’re wasting Google’s time by submitting them to be crawled.

This is why you need to become familiar with this report and how to audit it. Start with Google’s article on their indexing report.

But let’s cover some basics real quick:

Sitemap

Indexing begins with your sitemap. Google can still find and index your pages without, but an optimized sitemap is still

Add the URL to your sitemap here:

Give it about a week and you should see your Indexing Report showing you how Google is handling your pages.

Robots.txt File

Another crucial component of technical SEO is your robots.txt file.

In short, your robots.txt file is a simple text file that tells search engines how to crawl and index your website’s pages. 

Placed in the root directory of a site, it contains specific rules that either allow or disallow bots from accessing certain parts of the site. 

By specifying which URLs are off-limits, the robots.txt file helps control crawler activity, prevent overloading the server, and keep private or irrelevant pages (like admin pages or internal resources) out of search results.

So, while your sitemap tells Google, “These are important pages we’d like you to crawl”, the robots.txt file tells Google, “Please leave these alone.” 

For large e-commerce websites, this file is crucial for ensuring that Google doesn’t waste its “crawl budget” crawling pages that were never meant for the results page anyway. I’ll talk more about crawl budget in a moment.

2. Core Web Vitals

Alright. Let’s have the talk.

Yes, Core Web Vitals are important.

No, they’re not remotely as important as Google once tried to convince everyone and as many SEOs still insist.

For those who don’t know, Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics that Google uses to evaluate the user experience of each of your site’s pages. It focuses mainly on page load speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

The main “vitals” are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures page load time, specifically how long it takes for the main content to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Assesses interactivity by tracking the delay before a user can interact with the page (like clicking buttons or entering text).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates visual stability by measuring how much content shifts as it loads.

These metrics matter (somewhat) to technical SEO because they can impact the user’s experience – something Google cares about a lot.

However, how much Google cares about its own Core Web Vitals is up to debate, but Google has definitely backed off stressing their importance as much as they used to. As this Search Engine Journal article on CWVs points out:

The way I recommend our clients look at Core Web Vitals is to worry about them only if you’ve lost traffic first. If your bounce rate has gone up, then yes, it might be because your Core Web Vitals are suffering. That high bounce rate could impact your rankings, traffic, and conversions, so improving your LCP could definitely be worth it.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t worry about Core Web Vitals too much. Before you ever decide to spend time and money on yours, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Report to see how your competitors are doing. 

Countless times, I’ve talked clients out of focusing on their Core Web Vitals by using this report to show them that the competitors who are beating them are actually doing worse where these factors are concerned, meaning they clearly weren’t a factor in the traffic disparity. 

3. Crawl Stats Report

Your site’s Crawl Stats Report, which you can also find in Google Search Console, will show you how Google is crawling your website.

You can find it in “Settings”:

And then click here:

And you’ll see something that looks like this:

Here’s a description of the three main metrics you can see in the graph above:

• Crawl requests: The total number of requests Googlebot makes, which shows you how often Google visits your site.
• Download size: The amount of data downloaded during crawls, which is an indicator of how much load Googlebot is putting on your server.
• Response time: The time it takes for your server to respond to Googlebot, which is a strong indicator of server performance.

The report also shows data per page type, crawl response, and file type, helping site owners optimize their sites for efficient crawling and avoid issues that could limit their visibility in search results.

Check out Google’s article on the Crawl Stats Report for more information, but the big  takeaway should be that you want a consistent crawl rate from Google. If your technical SEO isn’t what it should be, Google will return less and less as it struggles to crawl your site. The “crawl budget” I mentioned earlier is the idea that Google isn’t going to crawl your entire site if you make it too difficult. It has limited resources – a “budget” – to dedicate to crawling, so you need to do everything you can to convince Google your site is worth it.

4. Structured Data and Rich Results

Finally, let’s talk about a really simple way you can enhance your page’s content, so Google understands exactly what you’re talking about. 

Structured data is used to mark up content on a webpage so that search engines can better understand its context. For example, you can use structured data to tell search engines that content on your page is:

• Product Information
• Events
• Reviews
• Recipes
• FAQs

This markup helps search engines interpret details more accurately, improving the chances that your content will appear in enhanced search results.

And the way that happens is with Rich Results (formerly called “Rich Snippets”).

These are special search features that go beyond the standard blue link and summary snippet you normally see on the search results pages. 

These might include elements like ratings, images, prices, or return policies, based on structured data. 

For example, these are all Rich Results that are there because Foot Locker used Structured Data to make it easy for Google to understand the rating of this price, how much it costs, and the store’s return policy:

If you want to check if a webpage of yours supports Rich Results, use Google’s validator tool. Otherwise, here’s a lengthy resource on the topic if you want to learn more about this technical element

5. Screaming Frog

You can’t talk about technical SEO without talking about Screaming Frog. It’s the only paid tool on my list, but it’s also 100% worth it.

While here at Crimson Agility, we also like to use Semrush for automatic site audits and Ahrefs to easily check internal links, neither compare to the power of Screaming Frog when it comes to analyzing the technical aspects of a site.

With Screaming Frog, you can mimic the way a search engine crawls your website to see what issues it would encounter along the way. Here’s a snapshot of what Screaming Frog can show:

As someone who uses Screaming Frog for every technical SEO audit I do, I’ll say that I don’t always agree with all of these findings being actual “issues.” Screaming Frog will also readily admit that not all of these are real problems. For example, the “Canonicals: Canonicalised” finding is just SF saying, “Hey, you should check these in case you’re using canonical tags wrong.”

You can also use Screaming Frog to measure all kinds of other factors like the “crawl depth” of your site, how diverse your anchor text is, etc. It’s EXTREMELY powerful and an absolute must-have if you intend to take technical SEO seriously. 

12 Simple Ways to Nail Technical SEO in 2025

Alright, without further ado, let’s talk about some super simple ways you can optimize your website for technical SEO in 2025.

1. Regularly Submit Your Sitemap

I already covered this one in detail above, so I’ll just quickly touch on this one. Your CMS should be automatically submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console every single day. However, you should still check once a week (more on that next) to make sure this is happening and that Google isn’t having any errors.

But again, checking in on this is easy enough to do when you…

2. Check Your Indexing Report Once a Week

Regularly checking your Indexing Report in Google Search Console  is essential for business owners who want to maximize their site’s search visibility. 

As I covered extensively above, the indexing report highlights which pages are successfully indexed, meaning they’re eligible to appear in Google search results. If a page isn’t indexed, it can’t drive organic traffic, so ensuring key content is discoverable is critical for reaching customers.

By reviewing the report weekly, you’ll be able to catch indexing issues before they become costly problems. 

Things like server errors, blocked pages, or “noindex” directives can prevent essential pages from being crawled and indexed by Google. A weekly checkup enables owners to address these issues quickly, keeping their site accessible to search engines and customers.

On top of that, the indexing report reveals patterns or spikes in errors that could signal deeper technical issues. Left unchecked, these can hurt the site’s SEO health and user experience. By staying proactive with GSC indexing reports, you’ll protect your search engine rankings from unforced errors, ensuring consistent visibility, and ultimately drive more qualified traffic to their website.

3. Do a Screaming Frog Audit Once a Month

Obviously, I’m a big fan of Screaming Frog, which is why I highly recommend you do a full Screaming Frog audit of your site once a month. 

By running this audit regularly, you’ll spot and resolve technical problems early – including ones that won’t show up in your indexing report – protecting your site’s visibility in search results.

A monthly Screaming Frog audit helps identify issues such as broken links, missing metadata, duplicate content, and slow-loading pages, amongst many, many other things. 

Regularly conducting these kinds of audits also makes it easy to track progress on previous fixes and gives business owners a comprehensive view of site performance over time. By catching and correcting technical issues with Screaming Frog audit, you’ll avoid the kinds of technical issues that turn into SEO disasters.

4. Keep an Eye on Your Bounce Rate

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this task get mentioned on other posts outlining “technical SEO checklists”, but I think this is probably one of the most important steps you can take to monitoring whether or not Core Web Vitals is helping or hurting your rankings.

Earlier, I outlined how I don’t really obsess over Core Web Vitals like other SEOs do. And I’d take it a step further to say that I don’t really care much about Google’s reporting on these factors, either. Instead, I keep my eye on other metrics that would signal if users aren’t having a good experience on my site.

Namely, I monitor bounce rate.

By keeping an eye on bounce rate trends, I have an actual real-world indicator of CWV performance. 

A decreasing bounce rate probably means that shoppers are having a good experience on my site, even if some CWV scores aren’t great. Google could say that my CWVs are failing and I still won’t care if I don’t see that my bounce rate is suffering because of it.

On the other hand, a rising bounce rate could mean that there are performance issues related to CWVs. This could be anything from slow loading images to delayed content rendering to elements shifting unexpectedly or even a combination of the three. 

These types of issues would probably deter users from staying on my site leading to a worrying bounce rate. 

Of course, those things could be happening without it bothering my customers for some reason. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t want to spend a bunch of time and money fixing a problem that isn’t actually hurting my bottom line.

5. Utilize Breadcrumbs

I could’ve brought this up with Structured Data, but a similar aspect of technical search engine optimization is using breadcrumbs to improve internal linking and make navigation a breeze for customers.

Breadcrumbs are fantastic SEO because they improve both site structure and user experience, making it easier for search engines to understand your website and for users to navigate it. 

Plus, just about every e-commerce CMS on the planet makes it really easy to add breadcrumbs to every page on your site with a click or two.

Breadcrumbs create a clear, hierarchical path that shows search engines where a page sits within the broader structure of your website. This helps users orient themselves and find related content easily, reducing the likelihood of them bouncing away in frustration. 

For SEO, this hierarchical structure allows search engines to better understand your site’s content organization and relationships between pages, which can lead to improved crawl efficiency and indexing.

On top of that, Google often displays breadcrumbs in its search results pages instead of full URLs, making your results more readable and user-friendly. This breadcrumb-based display can make your listing stand out and improve your clickthrough rate.

My favorite aspect of adding breadcrumbs is that they are internal links, which create natural connections back to higher-level pages. 

This flow helps distribute link equity to top-level pages, especially for sites with many layers of content. 

And again, incorporating breadcrumbs is straightforward with most CMS platforms, and the benefits to both user experience and SEO make them a valuable addition to nearly any website.

6. Use Canonical Tags to Streamline Your Crawl

Like creating and submitting your sitemap, canonical tags are something that most CMSs do fairly well

But it’s still worth reviewing because there may be opportunities to improve how your site uses these important tags.

Using canonical tags is essential for guiding Google’s crawlers efficiently through your site, especially when dealing with similar or duplicate pages, which are practically unavoidable if you run a decent sized e-commerce website. 

If you’re unfamiliar, a canonical tag tells Google which version of a page should be considered the primary or “canonical” version. It’s added to the HTML of a webpage,

This helps prevent search engines from wasting crawl resources on duplicate or nearly identical content across different URLs (like the aforementioned examples, paginated product pages, session-based URLs, or filtered views).

For example, if you have a product that appears on several URLs based on filters or tracking parameters, each version could technically be indexed, creating a cluttered view of your site in search engines and spreading link equity across redundant pages. If nothing else, you might make Google force these identical pages to compete against each other for rankings and traffic.

That’s no good.

You have enough competition without having to compete against your own site.

By placing a canonical tag on each of these pages that points to the main URL, you signal to Google which version should be indexed and consolidated as the authoritative version.

And what about the pages these canonical tags point to? Or pages that don’t have any “duplicate” versions on the site?

Use “self-referencing” canonical tags that point right back to themselves. This will make it crystal clear to Google that there is no other version of the page elsewhere on the site no matter what it thinks it finds.

This strategy ensures that Google focuses its attention on your core, valuable pages instead of spreading its crawl budget thin across duplicates. By using canonical tags effectively, you help streamline Google’s crawl and reinforce the ranking authority of your primary pages, making it easier for them to rank well.

7. Let Search Engines Crawl Your Paginated Pages, But…

Paginated pages are those pages that come after the first one in your category pages. Their URLs usually end with =2, =3, etc.

And a lot of SEOs will recommend that you use canonical tags on the second, third, etc. pages to point back to the first one. The idea is that these other pages don’t really offer anything new. Their Title Tags are the same. Their H1s are the same. If these pages include content on them, those remain the same.

However, I recommend you use those self-referencing canonical tags for these.

With self-referencing canonical tags, each page in the series, like page 2 or page 3, points to itself as the canonical version. This tells Google that each paginated page is unique and relevant in its own right, while still being part of a logical sequence. This approach avoids those “competing” signals I mentioned above where all paginated pages suggest the first page as canonical.

Taking this approach ensures that Google can still crawl each paginated page individually, giving it a fuller view of the range of products in your inventory. And because Google understands pagination, it won’t treat these pages as duplicates.

This also means Google will better recognize the breadth of offerings on your site, rather than seeing only a portion of them on the first page and that’s it. You could have 10,000 products compared to your competitor’s 10, but Google won’t be able to see this on your site. It will still find them in your sitemap, but that’s not ideal. We want Google to see where they live on your site just like your shoppers would.

And as self-referencing canonical tags improve the chances of specific products or items on later pages being indexed, it may potentially help them surface in the search results. 

8. Probably Use Canonical Tags for Filtered Category Pages

Another really important way to use canonical tags is with your e-commerce website’s category page filters.

This is a smart way to guide Google’s understanding of your e-commerce site structure. 

When users apply filters to refine product results – such as selecting “XL” on your site’s “Dress Shirts” category page – the resulting URL often includes specific query parameters or filter-based extensions. 

Without proper canonical tags, search engines may treat each filtered URL as a separate page, which can lead to indexing unnecessary variations of the same content and dilute the main category page’s authority. This is also how you run into the crawl budget problems I mentioned above. Most e-commerce sites would 10x in size – maybe more – if they told Google they wanted every filtered version of their category pages to get crawled and indexed.

To prevent this, filtered URLs should use a canonical tag that points back to the main, unfiltered category page. 

For example, if the unfiltered category page URL is:

yourstore.com/dress-shirts

…a filtered page URL like 

yourstore.com/dress-shirts?size=XL 

…should include a canonical tag pointing back to yourstore.com/dress-shirts. 

This signals to Google that the main category page is the primary version to be indexed, and that filtered versions are simply variations intended for user convenience.

Taking approach ensures that Google doesn’t waste crawl budget on indexing countless filtered pages, which are essentially duplications of the main category. It also helps focus SEO authority on the main category page, improving its visibility in search results. Plus, by reducing duplicate content in Google’s eyes, you enhance the overall structure and crawl efficiency of your site, making it easier for users and search engines alike to find and navigate your core product offerings.

The One Exception to the Rule

There’s one time I recommend clients deviate from this rule and that’s when the filtered page would actually attract traffic unique from the unfiltered page.

So, in the example above, if “XL Dress Shirts” get enough searches, I’d suggest you add a self-referencing canonical tag to that filtered result page. Tell Google you want it considered for traffic because there’s enough interest in it compared to just “Dress Shirts.”

9. Don’t Link to Duplicate Pages or Redirects

This is another technical issue I see all the time and yet I never see this addressed in other posts about optimizing your website’s technical element.

Don’t link to “duplicate” pages with canonical tags pointing elsewhere or to pages that redirect to others. Doing so gives Google mixed signals.

On the one hand, the link tells Google, “This page is important.”

On the other hand, if you use a canonical tag, you’re telling Google, “But not really.”

If that URL redirects elsewhere, then you’re really telling Google, “This page isn’t important.”

As far as SEO goes, linking to duplicate or redirected pages is a waste because canonical tags and redirects tell Google not to prioritize these pages in its index. 

This is a HUGE missed opportunity because Internal links are powerful indicators of page importance within your site’s structure. When you link to pages that redirect or rely on canonical tags, you throw away this SEO value by sending it to pages that won’t contribute to your site’s visibility.

Instead, focus internal links on primary pages that you want indexed and ranked. This ensures that the link equity is directed to pages that are optimized for indexing, giving Google a clear hierarchy of your content and enhancing your site’s SEO performance.

Once again, Screaming Frog is great at finding these issues:

10. Use Noindex Tags to Keep Google Focused

When you add a `noindex` tag to a page, you’re instructing search engines not to include that page in their index, even though they may still crawl it. This helps you manage which pages are prioritized for ranking and prevents unnecessary or duplicate content from competing with your primary pages.

This is why using “noindex” tags is a smart strategy to ensure that search engines focus on the most important pages of your site, keeping irrelevant or low-value content out of Google’s index. 

For example, your CMS should be adding “noindex” tags to internal search result pages, thank-you pages, or duplicate content like print-friendly pages (although, I’d recommend you use a Disallow for this, which I’ll cover next). 

These types of pages don’t add value to search results, and indexing them could dilute the SEO focus of other pages.

Applying “noindex” tags allows you to sculpt the flow of your site’s SEO value, concentrating it on pages that are most relevant to your audience and likely to perform well in search results. By keeping search engines focused on high-quality, optimized pages, you enhance the overall SEO health and user experience of your site.

11. …and Use Your Robots.txt Disallows for Everything Else

Using Disallow directives in your robots.txt file is an effective way to prevent search engines from crawling specific areas of your website that don’t need to be indexed. 

Unlike the Noindex tags we just covered, which stop a page from being indexed but still allows it to be crawled, Disallow directives in your robots.txt file tell search engines not to crawl certain pages or directories at all. This keeps search engines focused on the high-value pages you want them to prioritize.

For example, e-commerce sites often use Disallow to block search engines from crawling the “staging” version of their sites. There’s no reason for search engines or anyone outside the company to see these pages.

Blocking these sections is another way to streamline your crawl budget, which is especially helpful for larger e-commerce sites where search engines may have a limited time to crawl pages. By excluding these low-value or repetitive areas, you ensure that Google and other search engines dedicate their resources to crawling and indexing the most important content on your site.

12. Only Use HTTPS

This probably seems like incredibly obvious advice, but this is another problem I find all the time when I do technical SEO audits (and another problem that Screaming Frog makes it easy to find).

Obviously, you should not be publishing “http” pages for your site. Those pages aren’t secure, which wouldn’t be ideal for your users.

And yet, if you ever had http versions of your site, it’s possible you’ve linked to them before by accident.

Unsurprisingly, Google and other search engines favor secure sites, which is why HTTPS is a ranking factor.

Although HTTP redirects to HTTPS, relying on redirects can slow down page loads and create unnecessary server overhead. Mixing HTTP and HTTPS links can confuse search engines about the canonical version, potentially harming SEO. AND browsers flagging HTTP pages as “Not Secure” can impact user experience and conversions.

Make Technical SEO a Monthly Priority

If you’ve never done a comprehensive technical SEO audit of your site, you should start there before doing any other search engine optimization work. You need these foundational aspects of your site optimized before you spend money on anything else – especially, if it’s an e-commerce site.

However, after that, you’ll usually be fine checking your Indexing Report once or twice a week and doing a monthly Screaming Frog crawl of your site to make sure nothing else bubbles up that could be causing problems. 

If you want help with any of these necessary tasks or just want to speak with an SEO expert about where your site currently stands, feel free to contact us.