Technical SEO without the jargon

A quote lands in your inbox with a line on it that reads "Core Web Vitals remediation and schema implementation," followed by a number with a comma in it. You have no way to judge whether that's necessary work or expensive air, because nobody has ever explained those words in language that assumes you run a business rather than a server.

That's an uncomfortable spot to negotiate from, and it's fixable in about fifteen minutes of reading. Most of it is simpler than the invoice makes it sound, and it has mostly been explained badly.

The one question underneath all of it

Technical SEO is not a way of tricking Google into liking you. It's the work of making sure a search engine, and a real person holding a phone, can get into your site, read it, and use it without hitting anything awkward on the way. Every single item below is that same question asked a different way.

If you ran a shop, you'd care whether the front door opens and whether someone with a stroller can get down the aisle. You'd just call that minding the store, and this is the same job for a building made out of code.

Speed, and the reason yours probably isn't

People leave slow sites before they have seen a single thing you sell. A blank white screen on a phone reads as broken, and there's always another result sitting right there on the back button.

For small business sites, the cause is almost always the same one.

Photos straight off a phone or a camera. Your phone takes a picture big enough to print on the side of a bus. When that file goes onto the site untouched, every visitor downloads a bus-sized poster so they can look at it at roughly the size of a playing card. Ten of those on a homepage and you've built something that works beautifully on your office Wi-Fi and takes eleven seconds on a phone in a parking lot. The fix is boring: resize each image to about the size it actually appears at, save it in a modern format (WebP is the common one), and turn on lazy loading, which just means the browser waits to fetch a photo until you scroll near it.

Too many small errands. Every plugin, tracking pixel, chat widget, and custom font is a separate thing the browser has to go and fetch before the page feels finished. Any one of them is harmless. Twenty-two of them is a page that takes four seconds to become useful. If you've got a live chat box nobody staffs and two analytics tools you don't read, that's free speed sitting there.

Hosting at the bottom of the market. Four dollars a month usually means your site shares a machine with several hundred others, and you're at the mercy of whichever neighbour is having a busy morning. Moving up a tier is often the cheapest speed improvement available.

"Core Web Vitals" is just Google's name for measuring how that felt to the visitor: how long until the main thing on the page shows up, how quickly the page reacts when you tap something, and whether the layout jumps around while it loads (the reason you sometimes tap the wrong link right as an ad slots in above it). You don't need to learn the thresholds. Google's PageSpeed Insights is free, you paste your address in, and it'll tell you which of the three is hurting.

Does your site actually work on a phone

Most sites now look fine on a phone. Looking fine and working are different tests, and the second one is where the money leaks out.

The things that pass a glance and fail in a thumb are usually small. Buttons the size of a shirt button, set close enough together that ordering the wrong thing is a coin flip, or body text small enough that everybody over forty has to pinch and zoom to read your prices. A page built a few pixels too wide, so it slides sideways under your thumb every time you try to scroll down, which feels to a customer like the site is fighting them. A phone number sitting there as plain text when it could be a link that dials. And the classic, a contact form where the fields all look fine and the Submit button is hiding off the right edge of the screen.

There's a test for this that costs nothing and takes four minutes. Pick up your own phone, get off your Wi-Fi so you're on mobile data like a customer would be, and try to do the main thing your site is for. Book the appointment, or find your Saturday hours. Pay attention to anywhere you have to concentrate, because a stranger with less patience than you won't.

Can Google find your pages at all

This is the failure that costs the most and gets noticed the least, because a site that has quietly dropped out of search looks completely normal when you visit it yourself.

Three things to check.

Broken links. Internal ones especially. A link to a page you deleted or renamed is a door in your hallway that opens onto a brick wall, and it wastes both a visitor's patience and Google's time. A free link checker, which is a tool that walks your site the way Google does, will list every one of them in a few minutes.

Pages accidentally shut out of search. There's a small file called robots.txt that tells search engines which parts of a site to stay out of, and a per-page setting called noindex that means "don't list this one." Both are legitimate tools. They're also the single most common way a site disappears: a developer blocks the whole thing while building it, the site launches, and the sign stays on the door. WordPress has a checkbox in its settings worded roughly as "discourage search engines from indexing this site," and I would not like to guess how many live sites still have it ticked from launch day.

A sitemap that exists and is current. A sitemap is a plain list of every page you want found, kept at a predictable address so search engines can check it instead of guessing. Most platforms generate one automatically. The part worth verifying is that it updates when you add a page, and that it isn't still listing forty pages you removed two years ago.

While you're in there, set up Google Search Console. It's free, it's the one place Google tells you directly which of your pages it has listed and which it couldn't, and it emails you when something breaks.

Schema, in one paragraph

Structured data, also called schema, is labelling. When you pack a moving box you can write "kitchen, glasses, fragile" on the side, or you can leave it blank and hope somebody opens it carefully. Schema is writing on the box. It's a bit of invisible code that says "this number is our phone number, these are our opening hours, this is a review score, this event starts at 7pm," so Google can display that information directly in the search results rather than inferring it from your page and possibly getting it wrong.

Two honest caveats. Adding it doesn't guarantee Google will show any of it, and it isn't a ranking boost on its own. What it buys you is a listing that takes up more room and answers more of the question before the click, which in practice is worth having. Most current website platforms produce a decent amount of this automatically, so the usual job is checking it's correct rather than building it from scratch.

Security you can see from the outside

Your address should start with https, and the padlock should be there. That's the site's certificate doing its job: proving the site is who it claims to be and encrypting what visitors type into it. Google has treated it as a ranking signal for years, but the bigger reason is plainer than that. A browser meets an uncertified site with a full-screen red warning, and nobody reads a red warning and decides to keep shopping.

Certificates expire, usually every ninety days now, and almost all of them renew automatically. Almost. When the renewal quietly fails, your site is fine on Monday and terrifying on Tuesday, and you generally find out from a customer. Put a calendar reminder in to load your own homepage in a browser you don't normally use, once a month. That's the whole maintenance routine.

The short version

Keep it fast and usable in one hand, make sure nothing is quietly blocking search engines from reading it, and label the box. Underneath all of it, the work is that ordinary.

Honestly, a lot of it is what a competent developer builds in by default. It's the same category as wiring a building to code.

If you want to know where you stand, PageSpeed Insights and Search Console will tell you most of it for free in an afternoon. Run through the list yourself before you pay anyone to run through it for you. It's the same one I use.