What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the practice of making improvements to your website to help search engines crawl, render and index your site more easily and efficiently, and can refer to any technical changes you make to your site to help it appear among the top search engine results.

Note: Because Google is the largest and most relevant search engine, we will be focusing on Google optimization, but this information generally applies to other search engines as well.

A Brief History of Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the practice of making improvements to your website to help search engines crawl, render and index your site more easily and efficiently, and can refer to any technical changes you make to your site to help it appear among the top results in Google Search Results.

As the internet has evolved, Google has updated its search algorithms to deliver the highest quality content and the highest performing websites (with quality page experience) to search engine users on various devices.

Historically, much of search engine optimization (SEO) has focused on off-page and on-page SEO tactics that deal with optimizing content and links and less on technical SEO strategies. This means a lot of SEO is intended to signal to search engines — like Google — that the content of their website is relevant to a user's search query, and that their website is an authoritative and trusted source.

Technical SEO is intended to make it easy for Google to technically process a site (ie crawl, render, and index a site), and to signal the quality of a website's performance. Technically optimizing your website is becoming increasingly important as websites become more technically complex — meaning they're harder for Google to process — and as user expectations continually rise.