---
title: "Technical SEO"
url: https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/technical-seo
type: Page
---

# Technical SEO

Technical SEO explained: Google's three minimum technical requirements, what crawling, indexing and rendering work covers, and how to audit a site.

SEO glossary

## Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to crawl, render, index and understand, through its server set-up, code, URLs and site structure. It covers robots.txt, status codes, redirects, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, page speed, structured data and how content loads.

## What are Google's minimum technical requirements?

Google's Search Essentials list three. Googlebot isn't blocked from the page. The page works, meaning Google receives an HTTP 200 status code. The page has indexable content, in a supported format that doesn't break Google's spam policies. Google adds that meeting these requirements does not guarantee a page will be indexed.

Technical SEO starts by making sure every page that matters passes all three, then makes the rest of the site efficient to crawl and easy to interpret.

## What does technical SEO cover?

The work falls into five broad areas.

- Crawling: robots.txt rules, links Google can follow and XML sitemaps
- Indexing: status codes, noindex tags, canonical tags and duplicate URLs
- Rendering: whether content and links appear in the page Google renders, including anything added by JavaScript
- Performance: Core Web Vitals and server response times
- Interpretation: structured data, hreflang for international sites and a clear URL structure

## How to audit it

Start in Google Search Console. The Page indexing report shows which known URLs are not indexed and why, and the URL Inspection tool shows how Google rendered a page and which canonical it selected. Then crawl the site with a tool such as Screaming Frog to find broken links, redirect chains, orphan pages and conflicting canonical tags.

Fix issues in order of impact. A robots.txt rule that blocks a whole folder matters more than a hundred minor warnings.

## Example

An online furniture shop moves to a new platform and a noindex tag from the staging site goes live on every page. Pages start dropping out of Google even though the content hasn't changed. A technical check before launch, or a scheduled crawl after it, would have caught the tag.

## Related terms

- [Crawl budget](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/crawl-budget)
- [Core Web Vitals (CWV)](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/core-web-vitals)
- [Canonical tag](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/canonical-tag)
- [hreflang](https://marketingsignals.com/glossary/hreflang)

## Further reading

- [A Visibility Playbook for E-commerce](https://marketingsignals.com/playbooks/the-e-commerce-visibility-playbook)
- [What Is an SEO Agency: Everything You Need to Know](https://marketingsignals.com/insights/what-is-an-seo-agency-everything-you-need-to-know)

Our [Organic Search](https://marketingsignals.com/service/organic-search) service puts this into practice for brands in the UK and US.

## Sources

- [Google Search technical requirements, Google Search Central](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/technical)
- [Page indexing report, Search Console Help](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7440203)
- [URL Inspection tool, Search Console Help](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289)

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