Technical SEO in plain English

Technical SEO boils down to one simple question: can Google easily find, load and understand your website? If not, it doesn't matter how good your content is.

Below are the issues that most commonly go wrong on SME websites in practice, free of jargon.

Most visitors arrive on their phones. If it takes longer than three seconds for anything to appear, a large portion will leave — and Google notices that too.

The biggest quick wins almost always involve oversized images, too many third-party scripts (chat widgets, tracking pixels, sliders) and slow hosting.

Pages accidentally excluded from indexation, a misconfigured robots.txt file, or an incorrect sitemap: it happens more often than you'd think, especially after a site redesign.

Check Search Console to see which pages are actually indexed by Google. If half of them are missing, that's your first priority.

Two pages covering the same topic compete against each other and dilute their ranking power. This often happens when old blog posts sit alongside new service pages.

Consolidating them and setting up a redirect is far better than keeping both live.

Every page should have its own title tag of around 60 characters and a meta description of up to 155 characters. This is what people see in Google; it dictates whether they click.

Duplicate titles across multiple pages signal to search engines that your site structure is flawed.

Schema lets you tell machines explicitly what is on the page: a business, a service, a price, a review, a frequently asked question. This helps in Google search and forms a crucial building block for AI visibility.

When launching a new website, URLs often change. If every old URL properly redirects to its new equivalent, you preserve your rankings. If not, you lose traffic built up over years.

This is the costliest mistake in web design, yet the easiest to avoid.